Surprise! Fake Fans Don't Come To Shows

Great article at Hypebot about an artist who bit the forbidden fruit of promotion. Writer Clyde Smith investigates BAKER, who has 5+ million views on his videos but can't get more than 30 people out to a show.

Note that he's from New York:

What you will find if you go back and check the stats for videos posted one to two years ago on BAKER's YouTube channel , such as the above stats for "All I'm Gonna Say," that his primary audience has been from the Phillipines, Malaysia and India with one video, "No No [Audio]," adding Australia.
Age-related demographics indicated that top viewers were:

• Female, 13-17 years
• Male, 35-44 years
• Male, 45-54 years

One video, "Wonderall," has all female groups for top demographics.
While there are some plausible explanations for the odd dominance of certain age groups, the regional sources of viewers do raise the possibility of paid YouTube views. Otherwise the fact that his audience is dominated by an Asian audience would be newsworthy and would also help explain his lack of real world audience in New York. Though if he had a strong following among those nationalities on social media, he would also be likely to have a following among students and expats from those countries in the U.S. as well.

I suspect we won't hear much about this artist two years from now.

Practice, Record, Gig

Once again, Bob Lefsetz outlines the new music landscape.

Used to be you practiced in your parents’ garage, got gigs and eventually recorded. The recording was the icing on the cake.

Now it’s reversed.

Now you record first, and you may never ever play a gig. 

First and foremost because there’s nowhere to play.

Second, no one wants to pay.

Third, no one wants to hear you be lousy.

So today, if you want to make it, buy a Pro Tools rig and not only figure out how it works, spend endless hours perfecting your recordings (after taking endless hours to write your songs!)

This is the opposite of everything you’ve been told to do. Not only did you have to establish a live base, supposed professionals said they could hear through a demo, it didn’t need to be perfect. Now if the recording isn’t close to perfect, forget it.

Pomplamoose, "The Future of Music", Interview at Hypebot

This is the best interview I've read all year.

Jacke Conte of Pomplamoose, a band heralded as "The Future of Music" breaks down their entire business model with Hypebot.

I'm not going to give you all the highlights, this is too good an article to ignore.

Jack Conte: Yeah. The thing that I think you should learn from Pomplamoose is not about YouTube. It's not about social media. It's not about music. It's about iterations. It's about trying a million things until something works. That's all we did. We tried a million things and something finally worked, and we were sick and tired. I literally went on three tours where I played – I mean, there were shows where I played where the bartender left. There was literally nobody in the room that I was playing for, and I was not a successful thing. It was a total flop, failure, but we just kept trying and trying and trying, a million different things, and that's what I hope everybody takes away is.

...In fact Derek Sivers, who started the company CD Baby, wrote a book and he put little episodes of the book on YouTube, and one of the episodes is called "If It's Not a Hit, Switch, " and basically his idea is try something. Is it a hit? Are people flocking to it? Are people running to your idea? Do you have value? Are you adding value to the world? Do people really want it? No? Switch, something else. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate a thousand times until you have a hit, and then you've got something. So I love that idea – if it's not a hit, switch.

Jacke brings up one of my recent talking points:

We are not one of those bands that believes that you need to post on your Facebook page every day to engage your fans. I've gone to a lot of these social media conventions and I always just kind of throw up a little bit in my mouth when people are like, "You have to post on Facebook every day, and if you don't post on Facebook every day, then there's no point in posting on Facebook at all." And that's just a giant load of steaming bullshit because when we post on Facebook after not posting on Facebook for two weeks or three weeks, and we post a picture, it's awesome. People are into it. They're excited because we have a new, cool picture, and if we were posting every single day, we'd just dilute the effectiveness of our posts. I think at some point people are going to get really sick of all of the crap in their Facebook feed.

People want to be updated when you have new content. That's really what we've found is people want to know about something when there's something to freakin' know about. If there's not something to know about, don't force it, you know? People want new content. They want to hear a new song. They want to see an awesome picture of you guys backstage, you know, stuff, things that add joy to your life.

Another great point:

You have to think that you're not a genius. You have to think that, "Well, I just worked really hard and I kept working on this song until it sounded good, and I spent hours and hours and hours tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until I really liked it." If you think you're a genius, then you're just going to fucking barf onto a piece of paper and call it art and put it out on the Internet, and then it won't be very good any more.

Go read the rest.

America's Most Popular Music Scenes

Richard Florida at The Atlantic Cities put together research  using Myspace data (from 2007, when it was at peak popularity) and breaks down some research comparing the relatively popularity of the music scenes in the US.

Los Angeles tops the list with 175,083 acts. New York is second with 115,767, and Chicago is third with 69,963. The next several locations — San Diego, Philadelphia, Atlanta, D.C., Riverside, Seattle, and Orange County — averaged between 35,000 and 47,000 acts each. Several storied music capitals did not make the list: Detroit’s 22,445 acts put it in 23rd place, Nashville was 34th with 14,084 acts, New Orleans 35th with 13,965, and Memphis just 60th with 7,113. 

Not surprisingly, acts are highly concentrated around major population centers on the East and West Coasts — particularly the Bos-Wash Corridor and Southern California (each claim roughly 300,000 acts), as well as Northern California, Atlanta, southern Florida, and Cascadia (Seattle and Portland). Chicago, Phoenix, Dallas, and Las Vegas are the sole metros from the country’s interior that make the top 20.

The Complete Guide to Music Success

Bob Lefsetz gives you the entire process, from start to finish, in one of the most illuminating posts I've seen in years.

Read his post. It's worth your time.

My favorite part is the ending:

Nobody needs your music. They need air, food and water. And personal, physical comfort. If you want a career in music you must do your best to be necessary. And that’s got nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with the music itself, which is all based on the bedrock outlined above.

Link: Is Stealing Music Really the Problem?

Jay Frank lays down some serious knowledge:

Despite the economic number that David Lowery quoted of the number of professional musicians falling by 25%, if you took “album releases” as an indicator, it seems like the number of pros has increased. In a decade, we’ve gone from about 30,000 albums being released to over 77,000 last year. And that’s just albums going thru legit channels. The problem, as noted by Chris Muratore of Nielsen on the previously noted New Music Seminar panel, is that 94% of those releases sold less than 1,000 units. Indicators that I have examined showed those low sales aren’t because of people stealing them. They come from too many releases causing most people to not even realize they are out.

For example, 80s rocker Lita Ford has a new album that came out yesterday. As of this writing, it’s the 91st most popular new release on Rdio. How many of you have the patience or time to sift thru the other 90 releases to get to #91? Let alone decide to even put in the effort to steal it? Whether you were going to listen to it or not, I’d be willing to bet that almost everyone reading this found out that Lita Ford had new music from this paragraph. Stealing it is even further down their priority list.

....

So while all these independent artists argue thievery, do you know who’s winning? Major labels. This week, of the top 100 tracks on Spotify, only 6% are on independent labels. Major labels have figured out that the game is about exposure and awareness, two things that they are actually quite good at. It’s not about royalty rates, thievery, or even quality of music. It’s all about how I get people to know I exist. Major labels aren’t ignoring file traders, but they have moved past how much of their day they concern themselves with it. Instead, they focus on putting energy behind making music that the public wants and marketing the shit out of it so it rises above everyone else. While you’ve spent the last few years claiming the major labels are “dinosaurs” who are going to be “out of business”, they’ve actually become stronger behemoths who are more progressive than you realize.

Definitely worth the read.

Bob Lefsetz on Music vs. Social Networking

The excellent Bob Lefsetz once again drops some serious knowledge:

One thing Dick Clark had right, about the most people can say about music is it had a good beat and I could dance to it. We know when something impacts us, when we believe it’s great. And when we find something this good, we want to get closer, we want to tell everybody we know. Come on, do you want to screw movie stars because they called you at home or because they’re beautiful and in great flicks?

Social network if you must.

But it’s no substitute for incredible music. At all.

Bankruptcy Filing Shows Exact Numbers for Mid-Level Touring Numbers

Whoa, nice find by Hypebot:

After LA's Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance was denied permits and forced to cancel their event,  theyfiled for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. Included in the $900,000 of liabilities are the unpaid fees of 74 artists.  There are some surprises. $22,000 for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and $20,000 for KD Langseem fair, but $20,000 for Hanson?

Read more here: 

Link: Lefsetz' New Rules for the Music Industry

Lefsetz write a concise and illuminating list of the New Rules for the Music Industry. (Yes, I linked to him last week but this article was far too good to ignore)

My favorite point:

8. Social networking is for fans.
Twitter and Facebook are irrelevant until you get traction. They’re rallying points for those who already believe. Once you’ve got fans, feed them information about gigs and goings-on. Once you’ve got a plethora of true believers, tweet and post about your inner life. No one cares until you approach stardom.

Thoroughly worth the read.

Link: Quick Guide To Timing Twitter & Facebook Posts

Hypebot points out some of the highlights from a free webinar from Hubspot. The fact that Hubspot is willing to offer free research-tested advice for increasing fan engagement is fantastic.

(From the Hypebot article's summary of the webinar)
Twitter:

•Retweets are at their highest between 2 and 5 pm and late in the week.

•Clickthroughs are more even throughout the week with lots of weekend activity. Saturdays and Sundays are actually better than Mondays and Thursdays.

•Clickthroughs also occur more evenly throughout the day than retweets though there are spikes at around 11 am and 5 pm.

•People who tweet a lot, peaking at 22 tweets a day, have more followers. That includes tweeting the same message in different forms multiple times.
 •People who tweet no more than once an hour get higher clickthroughs.

Facebook:

•Pages that post every other day have the most likes! Zarella feels that it's much easier to overdo it on Facebook than on Twitter.

•While more stories are published during the week, more are shared on weekends so weekend posts are best for encouraging sharing.

•Morning posts are shared more than afternoon posts with posts around 1 am to 3 am doing the best.

Link: The Lefsetz' Letter

The Lefsetz Letter

Lefsetz is the best music analyst there is. Read his dissection of the music industry and you'll instantly feel smarter.

I'll be posting links to his stuff regularly in the near future simply because his articles bear re-reading.

Link: Who Can Make A Hit?

I know I link him a lot, but this article on Kingmakers by Seth Godin perfectly encapsulates the transition from major label dominance to today's fractured marketplace.

From the article:
---
Years ago, getting our products on the table next to the check out at Target and Lechmere was enough to make the year at the software company where I worked. Two big retailers picked our product and that was enough.


Retailers want to be kings and they want to annoint kings. They want the lever to decide what sells and what doesn't, because it earns them power of pricing and profit (if the retailer can make your product a hit, she can extract better terms. If all she does is sell what sells, then the manufacturer is in charge).


Thanks to the long tail, the digital world ignored this thinking. The iTunes store, and Netflix, for example, take the position that, "We're going to sell everything, and a lot of it. We don't care which thing, because it's all the same to us. Just put everything in the store and the market will sort it out."


As a result, they have far less promotional power. They didn't build a lever. The app store doesn't make a hit, it contains hits. Most long tail retailers are staffed around this idea and have a culture that reflects it. They'll sell everything/anything, because the longer the tail, the better.
---


As I keep reiterating, don't wait for your "big break" to be handed down from some benevolent entity. A solid music career is made through sustained fan engagement and hard work.

(Not that I would complain if one of our songs became world famous, mind you. But I'm not counting on it.)

Seth Godin is a Marketing Champ

Seth Godin is a master marketer. No matter what he's promoting, Seth feels so likable because he bases his life on trust and permission.

If you want to know more about marketing, there's no quicker way to learn than reading his blog.

Check out how he handled the recent release of his book Linchpin as a paperback.

How to Steal Like an Artist

You know when you read something so good you think "Damn, why didn't I write that?!?"

This is one of those articles.
http://www.austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-9-other-things-nobody-told-me/

My favorite point is "Don't wait until you know who you are to make things!"