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.

Nielson Research Confirms Radio Still Primary Source of Music Discovery

Media information giant Nielson released the results of their recent 3,000 person survey of music listening habits.

The full article is worth a read, but here are some tasty knowledge nuggets.

Radio is still the dominant way people discover music

• 48% discover music most often through the radio
• 10% discover music most often through friends/relatives
• 7% discover music most often through YouTube

More teens listen to music through YouTube than through any other source

• 64% of teens listen to music through YouTube
• 56% of teens listen to music on the radio
• 53% of teens listen to music through iTunes
• 50% of teens listen to music on CD

Positive recommendations from a friend are most likely to influence purchase decisions

• 54% are more likely to make a purchase based off a positive recommendation from a friend
• 25% are more likely to make a purchase based off a music blog/chat rooms
• 12% are more likely to make a purchase based off an endorsement from a brand
• 8% of all respondents share music on social networking sites, while 6% upload music.

I was surprised that YouTube was the primary music streaming source, but I suppose I've been spoiled by Spotify. Upon reflection though, whenever I want to hear music that isn't on Spotify I immediately load up YouTube to give the band a listen.

The big takeaway from this research is the primary driver for purchasing decisions: recommendations from friends.

We are over four times as likely to purchase something recommended from friends than we are from a brand endorsement.

This isn't surprising, but it's a good reminder to where we should spend our limited time and money on marketing. Word of mouth is cheap and effective, but requires a substantial time investment. With sponsorship and ad campaigns you could spend precisely infinity dollars trying to purchase opinion with meager results. Remember Rhianna spending a cool million on a flop single or some kids who blew through $100,000 without "making it"? The internet has severely crippled the effectiveness of "he he shouts loudest wins" marketing.

Save your money for higher quality recordings, shows, and merch. Focus your marketing efforts on people and, to a lesser extent, blogs.

The game is about quality and personal connection.

Like it's always been.

Dare You Bite the Forbidden Fruit of Promotion?

Desipite your relentless hustle, your last release was a flop. With no energy and limited funds left, you begin to accept that there may be nothing else you can do.

A siren song begins to pierce through the static hum of the internet.
Glaring, the offer dares you.

"For $75, This Guy Will Sell you 1,000 Facebook Likes"

Considering how hard we've worked for the Likes you have, this is a pretty fantastic deal. Previous ad campaigns have been measured in Likes and email list sign ups so this seems like a more direct method of getting the results you want.

"But wait, there's more!"

How about buying profiles in bulk?

BEN ZHAO: Right now on the black market, you can actually buy and sell bundles of Facebook account credentials, tens of dollars or hundreds of dollars for hundreds of thousands of Facebook accounts.

So you could buy a legitimate Facebook ad for $240 and get 240 Likes, as Pizza Delicious did. Or you could drop the same amount of cash and get 10,000 "Likes" from fake profiles. Seems simples, but there's much more to this than meets the eye.

CHACE: For example, one company that sells likes showed me this Nashville country singer who was a client. She had a lot of likes. But then I check what city the fans are from, and they were primarily from Cairo.

What would you do if you found your your favorite band was buying Likes? How would this change you opinion of the band? Would you still listen to them?

How would this change your opinion of a local band you've never heard of?

...

With Facebook's initial stock offering coming tomorrow, the $100 billion dollar value of Facebook rests on the value of Likes and the profiles.

But the value of Likes is shaky at best. Pizza Delilcious got a $10 return on 240 likes, so in this case each Like is worth $.04. Not worth it. But if we were to pay the same $240 for the 10,000 fake facebook credentials would we earn $400?

No.

This is a smokescreen. Fake profiles don't buy tickets to your show, nor do they force their friends to listen to your new EP. Only true fans do.

You can't buy loyalty in bulk.

When the cash runs out, the only people left are your true fans. Even with a couple million dollars, the mercenaries will only be as loyal to you as you pay them.

But fans will always be loyal to Motorhead as long as Motorhead is loyal to them.

"Likes" and followers are are only as valuable as the fans behind the numbers.

Integrity, attention and quality are the currency of artists.

Are you investing or spending?

Two Kids Spend $100,000, Disappointed They're Not Famous

Over at Time's "Entrepreneuerial Insights" section, the brothers that form the band Two Lights write an op-ed about how their music career has cost them $100,00 so far and it's really hard, man.

Quoth the band,

"What meets me backstage is nothing like what I pictured. No fountains of champagne, no elegant lounges. It's just as dingy as the venue itself, with a printed sign taped to the star's dressing room door. The band is hanging out on a couch that someone obviously found on the street, and there are some catered snacks that look like they could have come from the NYU dining hall I try to avoid.

It occurs to me that if any part of me is doing this for the good life, I should let that go."

They then go on to elaborate on their expenses, ending with:

In short, the School of Rock is expensive. Then again, class can be a lot of fun, and some of the homework is pretty cool. And of course, if we do graduate — if we make it in the music business — we'll soon be earning a lot more money than even doctors and lawyers. Or so we tell ourselves...

Surprise! It's almost as if we make music for the love of it, shocking!

Lefsetz does a much better job of dissecting the article than I would.

1. If you think backstage was lavish back in the pre-Internet heyday, you were never there. Maybe in New York and L.A., but rarely there either. Just a ton of cold cuts, potato chips and beer on ice. As for who was there? A ton of hangers-on, who believed if they could just be close to the icons, they’d be cool.

2. Training. Irrelevant of whether you need music and voice lessons, complaining about the price is like me bitching how much it cost to go to college and law school. At today’s price, my college is $200k for four years. Add three years of law school on top of that and this guy is bitching about fifteen years of piano and guitar lessons for 30k? (And oh yeah, I had those too!)

3. Rehearsal. We all need an office. And if you’ve got no money, make it in your home. And if that’s too noisy, move where it’s cheap and you’ve got some space, like back to Maine. You don’t have to live in the metropolis anymore to make it. The Internet is everywhere.

3. Gear. As everyone online is saying, you spent $500 to move a piano? How’s the gas mileage on that Lamborghini? Either get an electronic keyboard or buy something used or rent. Don’t put the lifestyle in front of the success.

4. E-mail blasts. You wasted a grand. I ignore that stuff, and so does everybody else. We get hipped to quality and success by our network, we hate self-promoters/hypesters.
I could go on and on but you not only get the point, you know the story as well or better than I do.

It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll.

And you don’t make it by complaining, you make it by knocking them dead. And you can do that on a Japanese guitar as well as a Les Paul. Talent is much more important than equipment. These guys are just being ripped off by an old system which is trying not to die. They’re being bitten by hucksters the same way you get ripped off on the street by the guys playing three card monte.

Laughable.

P.S. If you’re so damn great, why do you have only 98 Twitter followers?

Anti-Marketing

The Atlantic did a killer piece that highlighted the trend towards band's using Anti-Marketing.

Short Version: Some indie bands are purposely obscuring their names, hiding their faces, and refusing interviews as a means of image-management.

Love it.

As I mentioned previously, speed of adoption is inversely correlated with longevity.

Buzz magnifies people's expectations, which in small doses is beneficial for a band. But if too much buzz is laid on, the gap between fan's expectations and the actual music is too wide, and the fan is left with a foul taste in their mouth.

In the same way the US Federal Reserve will adjust inflation rates to either stimulate growth or limit inflation, smart bands need to adjust how much hype gets pushed on them. Too little and the band's fan growth stagnates but too much and the band's fan base deflates. It's all about managing expectations.

From the article:

From that point on, there has to be enough substance to the group to sustain them through the post-hype phase. Look at Die Antwoord. The South African rave-rap duo baited the media for months with a lewd web art, bizarre videos, scarce information, and exotic promise. Once people learned that they were a satirical act helmed by Johannesburg performance artist Watkin Tudor Jones, who had released music under other personas in the past, excitement for the group largely vanished, right on time for their Interscope debut, $O$, to debut at 109 on the Billboard 200—a flop by major-label standards.

Anti-marketing is a valuable tactic. It's a pressure-release valve for when you feel that the press is going a little too far in their promotion of you. How to make the call when you're getting extravagant praise is the real challenge here. Intuition is all you've got here, and that's easily clouded by the ego getting all warm-fuzzy from the attention. In all likelihood you won't need this tactic though, since most artists don't get explosive hype storms.

Anti-marketing, like all tactics, needs to fit within the strategy of your art. Using a tactic that doesn't fit your strategy is not a good idea. Self-aggrandizing rappers probably don't have much use for anti-marketing. Bedroom produced indie-electro-pop is a different story.

Keep an eye on how much hype you get. Anti-marketing may one day be just the tool you need to keep buzz under control.

Andy Warhol, You Brilliant Bastard

I have a hate/fascination relationship with Andy Warhol.
His pop-art is nothing special. (A soup can? A banana? Groundbreaking.) Warhol loved the "ready-made" asthetic espoused by Duchamp, an artist known for a piece where he simply bought a urinal and turned it on its side (It's called Fountain). THESE GUYS ARE WHY PEOPLE DESPISE MODERN ART.

On top of that, many of Warhol's pieces weren't made by Warhol. He had work-for-hire artists produce his art at The Factory. This started the awful trend towards art factories.

$38,400,000

But,

Warhol was a genius of marketing.

From The Economist:



The most expensive work of the week was a four-panel self-portrait from 1963-4, which hit the block at Christie's. Warhol himself had arranged the four crisply silkscreened canvases in various shades of blue. Moreover, the image had been made in a photo-booth; a ready-made format that affirms Warhol's place as the heir to Marcel Duchamp. Only three bidders went for the work, but two of them were fervent. After a 15-minute duel, an anonymous buyer on the phone with Brett Gorvy, Christie's Head of Contemporary Art, prevailed over a client of Philippe Ségalot, a French-born New York-based dealer, and secured the work for $38.4m, the highest price ever paid at auction for a portrait by the artist.

Let that sink in.

He made a self-portrait in a photo booth and silkscreened it blue.

It's worth $38.4 million dollars.

But the real nugget of wisdom in the story is this; The market for high-end art is small (most of us don't have a couple million to throw around), but dedicated. One of the collectors, Mr. Mugrabi, owns over 800 Warhol pieces. At a price range of millions of dollars per painting, this guy is both rich and a HUGE fan of Warhol.

There's nothing more important to your band than your super fans.

The average fan will only drive up the value of your art so far, but it's the super fans who stretch the high-end of what your work is worth. Deluxe edition of your album? They have it. Limited tour T shirt? They have it. Signed drumstick sold on ebay? They want it.

And these super fans signal to the rest of the world that yes, there is something very special about this artist/band. Remember the Fan Velocity concept I introduced?

Super fans are your disciples. Make them happy and they'll stretch the value of your work beyond anything a marketing campaign could ever do.

Music Sales Are Up!

:Cue record scratch:

Music sales are finally up again.

Yep, that's right. The "inevitiable music apocalypse" was another false alarm. Overall music sales are up 1.6%, digital album sales were up 16.8%, and digital track sales were up 9.6% but there's two real juicy bits of data within these numbers.

Point One: Vinyl album sales were up 37% from 2010.

Vinyl, as in the giant plastic discs that most teengers have never actually heard.

Do all these music lovers actually own a vinyl player? Probably less than you'd imagine.

It's all about the artifact, the actual collectable experience it offers the fan. Most vinyl editions of the album feature large-scale artwork and, more importantly, limited copies. It's this scarcity that transforms the music from a cheap commodity that can easily be distributed at no extra cost (mp3) to a much more profitable good. You can't pirate a limited edition copy of your favorite album any more than you can pirate a T shirt. This is econimics/business at its simplest.

I'm calling it now: expect vinyl albums to become a more prominent and important feature of bands' income streams in the future. Likely this will be more for collectable reasons than actually hearing the audio (most vinyl albums come with free digital download now).

Point Two: Record Store Day was a smashing success.

"2011 saw the most successful Record Store Day in the event’s four-year history. Album sales at independent record stores increased over 39% the week of Record Store Day (April 16) from the prior week – an increase of 180,000 units – and 12.7% compared to 2010."

I love the idea behind Record Store Day since it is a great solution to a parallel problem that charities face daily.

There's no shortage of people who want to help out the world whether it be helping cure cancer or as simple as supporting a local arts community. But it's difficult to mobilze and allocate this goodwill. Each step of the process of finding volunteers all the way to completing a task increases the complexity of the operation, and increases the chances of a volunteer giving up, essentially wasting the goodwill.

To put it more simply, assume you want to "Support Local Music". Where are the venues? Where do I hear about events? Do I have to actively watch a bunch of websites to find out when something might interest me? What kind of support do they want/need? Will the events I go to suck? <== Big one.

And so on.

Each "complexity" requires more effort from the people wishing to help, increasing the chance that she decides her time would be better spent watching Good Eats reruns. (I'm guity of this one forty times over)

What works so well for Record Store Day is how it simplifys the process for "Support Local Music". It's a national event that builds awareness of these record stores with the help of large local acts who release limited-edition vinyl/cds/merch. (This last year Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips hand-delivered copies of their new album to Good Records!) Cookouts, body-painting, and of course live music all centered around celebrating local record stores. How do you "Support Local Music?" This entire event tells you how to do it.

Rule #456138 of marketing: "The easier you make it for someone to buy, the more sales you'll get."

There's Nothing New In "The Business"

"The Business" of promoting art isn't remotely new. Artists have always had to hustle to market their art. So it's silly to keep talking about the current music business as if it's a radically new web 2.0, crowdsourced, fan engagement monster.

The goal of engaging people has always been the same. Only the tools have changed.

Check out this New York Times book review for The Sinner's Grand Tour, a book about how famous writers have promoted themselves through the years.
"Crowdsourcing" isn't new:

"Perhaps the most astonishing P.R. stunt — one that must inspire awe among authors today — was plotted in Paris in 1927 by Georges Simenon, the Belgian-born author of the Inspector Maigret novels. For 100,000 francs, the wildly prolific Simenon agreed to write an entire novel while suspended in a glass cage outside the Moulin Rouge nightclub for 72 hours. Members of the public would be invited to choose the novel’s characters, subject matter and title, while Simenon hammered out the pages on a typewriter. A newspaper advertisement promised the result would be “a record novel: record speed, record endurance and, dare we add, record talent!” It was a marketing coup. As Pierre Assouline notes in “Simenon: A Biography,” journalists in Paris “talked of nothing else.”


As it happens, Simenon never went through with the glass-cage stunt, because the newspaper financing it went bankrupt. Still, he achieved huge publicity (and got to pocket 25,000 francs of the advance), and the idea took on a life of its own. It was simply too good a story for Parisians to drop. For decades, French journalists would describe the Moulin Rouge event in elaborate detail, as if they had actually attended it. (The British essayist Alain de Botton matched Simenon’s chutzpah, if not quite his glamour, a few years ago when he set up shop in Heathrow for a week and became the airport’s first “writer in residence.” But then he actually got a book out of it, along with prime placement in Heathrow’s bookshops.) "
Now that's some groovy promotion.

You don't need to be a "Social Media Guru" to understand that No one cares more about your music than you.

There's nothing new in "The Business".

Don't Get in Car Wrecks With Your Fans

Guilty admission.

Yes, we've probably met before but I'm sorry, I don't remember you. It happens often, so don't take offense.

But I can rap every word of I Like Big Butts like a champ.
I've got my priorities.

And so does everyone else.

We've only got so much room in our brains. Things we consider relevant stick, everything else tends to float away. It's efficient and helps our mind stay organized. (In fact, perfect memory is a miserable, horrible existence. Check this Radiolab episode about the man who couldn't forget.)

So it's eaaaaaaaaaaaaasy to forget about Local Band #A2496BBQ21. If you wrestle bears for a living, you probably don't have a local band that high on your mental priority list. Even the rest of us with less dangerous careers have a lot on our minds.

It's all about Mind Share.

Whereas market share (another good term to be familiar with) is the % of total sales within a market that your product sells, mind share is the % of a customer's mind you occupy. To put it more simply, when a customer thinks about bands, how likely is the customer to think about your band? The more likely you are to be remembered, the more business you get.

For example: Your homie asks for a good restaurant in the area. The names you remember get 100% of the business. Simple.

If you've got a HUGE mind share, your brand essentially becomes the name of the product. In the US, people ask for a "Kleenex", not a "facial tissue". (How's that for some awesome marketing?) If you've got NO mindshare, your band essentially doesn't exist for this consumer. That's being a little too underground of a band.

Soooooooooooo how do we build mindshare?

Mindshare is all about building memory, so it's a matter of salience, repetition, and context.

Salience is how powerful an impression the memory makes. Remember when you got into that car wreck and you remember every single moment in slow motion? That's a salient memory become it was powerful and your brain told you hey, pay attention! DO NOT GET INTO CAR WRECKS WITH YOUR FANS. KILLING THEM IS NOT GOOD FOR YOUR BAND.

TRUST ME.

Getting your band into a fan's memory without mutilation is ideal and not too difficult. Simple things like responding to a fan's tweet says "Hey, I'm the band and I actually care about you."

We remember people that care about us, because obviously they have good taste in people.

Or if you know it's a fan's birthday, tell em happy birthday from the stage. Simple, but it adds the personal connection to the memory that builds salience. (Or you can take the brute-force method of physically connecting with your fans. GWAR)

Memories are also context-dependant. Back to the earlier example, when you're thinking of restaurants to suggest to your friend, not only does your memory call up a list of restaurant names, it also remembers what the food was like, how the service was, what kind of dress code the place has...

All things tangentially related to the experience reinforce the experience.

So to build mind share you can also interact with fans in different contexts. If the only way you connect with your fans is facebook (see next week's post), that's only one context they'll remember you through. Now say you happened to do a cooking show on youtube as well. Then when people mention cooking there's a possible "I know a band that cooks" connection as well as at a show they can think "I've seen those guys cook". Essentially you're creating more "things" that people encounter that will likely "trigger" memories of your band. There will be more on this topic in later posts.

Finally, repetition is the part of marketing that gets the most focus because it's the most obvious. The first time you hear a band name, it's new. Then when you see it in a magazine you go, "Hmm, I've heard of them." Then after you see their name on a poster on every street corner, you're more likely to think "Those guys are everywhere."

Putting up flyers and getting your name mentioned is good, but repetition alone doesn't mean squat if there's no salience or context. Then all you'd have is the "Oh yeah, I recognize that name." While mere recognition does improve liking of something (mere exposure effect), you want people to actually take action when they run into you. There's many bands you recognize the name but haven't even given a listen to because there's no real reason you're compelled to listen on just a name alone. Nevertheless, the more people hear your name, the more likely they are to remember you.

Phew, good post. Nap time.

Case Study: Doomtree

I love hip hop.

Although I've only recently discovered the genre, the wealth of talent and surprisingly, business savvy, has drawn me in. What struck me most was how many of the artists regularly performed as part of a collective, even the solo acts. Groups like the Wu-Tang Clan  allowed its members to create an unorthodox structure by releasing albums as both a group and as solo artists.

One of the best recent examples of a group embracing the harmony between art and business is the Minnesota collective Doomtree. Formed in the early 2000s by high school friends Cecil Otter, P.O.S., and producer MK Larada, Doomtree began as a loose collective and eventually developed into a group of musicians forming an indie record label.

All of the members of the group work under the Doomtree name and on under the name of their solo projects. Each member of the group contributes something different; Dessa is a spoken word poet, Paper Tiger does graphic design, Lazerbeak produces the artists. It's half a label and half a performing collective.

I love all of the artists on Doomtree. And their do it yourself style of running their group is fascinating and, I like, the direction many indie labels should be headed. (For a more in-depth discussion of the group, check their website. I'm not going to re-type interviews and such.)

Let's take a look at some of the ways that the Doomtree collective benefits every one of its members.

   -Label is run only by artists involved. No contract or conflict of interest issues.
   -The group periodically releases their False Hopes compilations featuring all their artists in between major releases to keep up momentum and build fan interest for all the artists.
   -Shared overhead expenses among artists reduces costs for everyone (website development, merch, recording, etc). Paper Tiger does the graphic design for everyone in the collective.
   -Cross promotion. The Doomtree crew promotes Doomtree. More voices promoting the same group = more and better promotion for everyone. Everyone benefits from the growth of the one brand instead of everyone pushing their own name.
   -Varied talents of each member allow the collective to build fan relations in unconvential, and effective ways. Dessa started a book club. Lazerbeak does weekly Tuesdays with Lazerbeak blog posts to consistantly connect with fans.
   -The selective nature of who Doomtree allows on their roster serves as both quality control and branding. What this means to fans is, if you see a Doomtree show, it'll be good. This cannot be stressed enough. With so many crappy bands in existence, going to a show is a gamble. With a consistent Doomtree brand, a music fan can reasonably trust that even if they don't know all the bands playing a show, it'll be worth it to go out to the show. They obviously understand this by holding a yearly Doomtree Blowout show in December.

However, there are some key points that must be in order for this collective to work.

   -The group has to be selective about who can enter for personality reasons. For a collective to work, the roster has to be carefully chosen to ensure there are no free riders or negative influences who would tarnish the entire group's reputation. Say for example the artist that runs merch decides to quit and takes all the passwords and merch with him. This could easily devastate the group.
   -The group also has to be selective about quality. If one of the artists isn't carrying their weight or is performing below the standards of the group, the entire collective suffers.
   -As with all organizations, the danger of group-think is always present. The group must maintain an atmosphere of being constructively critical of itself to ensure quality decisions.

I seriously hope these guys make infinity billion dollars. For a much more in-depth interview of how the group started, check this interview from way way back.

Now think about this:
How can you use the Doomtree model to help both your community and yourself?

Interview with Brothers Highhorse

A few months back we were kicking promotional ideas for the album. One of the more involved ideas was to create a short-form metal 'zine, but after realizing how much additional work that would be, the idea was scrapped.

That being said, it would be a waste not to post this interview with my homie Dan of The Brothers Highhorse, a Dallas-based metal band we play with all the time. The odd formatting and phrasing on my part was supposed to be a part of the 'zine's flavor and I didn't want to change that for this repost.



Q: WHO the hell are you and what’s a High Horse, Brother?


We are a 5 but soon to be 6 piece deathcore band from Denton, Texas. We like black metal and breakdowns and we have a chick keyboardist, whose our second guitarist sister. Thats who we are.

The name came from an inside joke from years ago and we decided to use it instead of having a generic sounding metal name. We felt it had a job for a cowboy like feel in that it doesnt obviously sound like the name for a metal band.

Q: WHERE are y’all going with your music? 


We are currently writing a full album and it has a theme. The theme is based on the concept that the ancient gods of now lost civilations were actually aliens and now they have come back to reenslave our civilization. They attempt to do this through turning humans into cyborgs and implanting mind control mechanisms into our brains, but fortunately their is a sole survivor who the mechanism fails and he leads a rebellion to take back the planet.

Each song on our album is going to be a part of the story.

As far as our sound progressing, we recently went through a significant line up change in which our old singer and drummer left because of musical and creative differences. So we added a new singer and new drummer and our bassist switched to second guitar and we added keyboards. (We have been looking for a bassist and we think we have one but we arent solidifing his position in the band untill after he has played several shows with us.)

I suppose if you had to label us we would be a deathcore band but unlike most deathcore bands around the area no one can seem to pinpoint any one band we sound exactly like, which we are fine with. The adding of keyboards has pushed us further our black metal elements which we all love. We still have breakdowns but we have keyboard melodies in our songs because sarah (our keyboardist) can actually play and doesnt just hold ond handed chords like most other bands weve seen around that have keyboards, lol. We are influneced but a variety of bands and we feel we take parts of all of them and fuse them together to sound unique.

Q: YOU just got sponsored by Uproar! Apparel. HOW did that happen?


The sponsorship with them happened by luck actually, they messages us and saw that we were friends with another band they sponsored and they said they were always looking for new bands if we were interested. So we started talking to them and gave them our gameplan so to speak and now we have a sponsorship deal with them.

Q: TELL us a story.


A: We played with Upon a burning body in may and they were amazing and because we were so impressed we gave their vocalist one of our shirts for free. We played with them again in September and they actually remembered us and we never mentioned what band we were and they remembered that we gave them a shirt and they like our design. That was pretty awesome that a signed band remembered us after only playing with us twice.

Another awesome story is, Mark (Second Guitarist), John (Vocalist) and I went to see Depised Icon's last US Tour at the Prophet bar. They started playing their set and one of their singers started handing out the mic to people in the crowd to sing the words and mark and I looked up and we see John on stage screaming the words of their song with them. It was pretty badass and I believe there are some videos of it out there so hopefully whoever has them will post them pretty soon.
Q: WHO is your fav local to play with? Why?


A: Our favorite band to hangout and know their on a bill is Onward We March because weve known those guys forever and their just really cool fun dudes. Whenever we know theyre going to be on a bill with us, we know its going to be a party.

Our favorite band to watch is Descendant, if you dont know who they are you need to check them out at a show. They are one of the very best bands in DFW. Their lead guitarisr/ vocalist Richard Dale is a beast and will solo circles around you. Everytime weve played shows with them they are as solid as can be and if you like melodic metal you owe it to yourself to check them out. 

How NOT To Social Network

Myspace, as a medium for social networking, is useless. The signal to noise ratio has plummeted so low that there is essentially no point in trying to reach fans through MySpace. It's all comment spam, automatic "friending" programs, and bots. Most myspace comment boards look like this:

Do your fans really want to be spoken to in this way? What does it say about you as an artist if you use the same tactics that mass junk mail operations to reach them? Does ANYONE ever have meaningful conversations through this medium that lead to a minor fan to becoming a superfan?

Let's think about this. You are a musician, and you have limited time. Presumably, you are much better at music than most other things and should be spending most of your time on it if that's how you intend to create a career. As such, you should always be conscious of the return on your investments (ROI), whether you're spending time, money, trust, or fan attention (yes, it IS a currency). If you put in x amount of time putting up myspace comments, how do you expect this time spent to pay you back? If you're sending out spammed messages, you're spending time, attention, and trust.

Would it take 10 of these comment posting to lead to someone buying a song? Probably not. How about 100? A 1000? Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a comment posted on a MySpace page and thought "Hmm, I should give these guys ten bucks" ?

Think on it.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

When you are choosing how you're going to market your music and talk to your fans, be very conscious of your ROI. You've got limited resources. When you spend, make sure that you'll be getting more back than you spent.

Unless, of course, you really want to get burned out and quit music forever. Then by all means spend frivolously!

Gimmicks

When I was an (unoffical) teacher's aide working at a technical school for music for a summer, I only remember meeting one guy there. He was nice enough, but I couldn't really take him seriously after hearing about his "big idea"!

His whole band played miniature instruments.

Making yourself easier to talk about is fantastic, there's nothing wrong with wanting to increase the velocity of your word of mouth. But don't forget that the medium is a part of the message. Are "tiny instruments" the hallmark of a breakout success band or a cover band at a bar and grill? It all depends what the band's goal is.  I know I wouldn't take their music seriously, but if they were in the background at my pub I'd be OK with listening to them.

Message.

If it contributes more to your art than it distracts, it's art.

If it distracts more than it contributes, it's a gimmick.
Where that line is, however, is the audience's decision.

"Going Viral" Is A Waste

Please don't waste your time trying to go "viral". Trust me, you don't want it.

Sure, it's a sexy buzzword. Sounds downright fun to get a million youtube hits in a week; "Woo woo! We're gonna get a million dollar record contract now, lets go out and buy golden toilets!"

Sure.

Speed of adoption is inversely correlated with longevity. Or, to put it more plainly:


The faster you rise, the faster you're gone.

The Beatles didn't "Go Viral", they worked their asses off on their music night after night after night. Michael Jordan didn't make a video of a cat playing a keyboard next to footage of him playing; he worked his ass off on his game night after night after night.


I'm not denying that the idea of getting your "Big Break From The Internets" isn't sexy. I've fantasized about the magical "discovery of our band" too. Sounds fun.

But don't forget how short memory is on the internet. Getting attention for the sake of attention is a waste of time. The only endurable way to build your musical future is to get attention because you've worked your ass off night after night after night, when your stage performance is so brilliant that anyone who sees you will tell their friends "Hey man, these guys are INSANE on stage! I want to steal their garbage they're so good!"

Protect Ya Neck - Your Rhymes Will Be Bit

Songs Get Stolen. (That's right, Zeppelin stole the into to Stairway to Heaven)

It's devastating when someone is out there making money off of your baby. It hurts. Just pray they're not more famous than you which, in the public's eyes, means the bigger group wrote the song. (If you were proactive enough to get a copyright, by all means go after them! You're lucky!) But often issues such as this might get overlooked, or not be properly covered, the copyright is only good on a full moon, etc. 


Often, there is very little you can do. The internet is the wild west; once a song is out there, it's out of your control.

Don't despair. Don't freak out. Don't give up.

You should probably be flattered when someone blatantly steals your art. It means someone else believes your art is good enough to be worth stealing!

Remember, the greatest value you have as a musician is constantly delivering high value content. If you become known as a fountain of good ideas and songs, then you're power to defend your competitive advantage is iron clad. You're famous for songwriting not that one song.


People can steal your songs, but they can't steal your brain.

You should be constantly creating new and better songs to build up your reputation as someone who makes good songs. It's the same as with the software industry. New software can usually be reverse engineered and pirated within days of release. How do software company's stay profitable and keep competitors from swooping in copying their product at a cheaper price? It's the brand name that keeps you strong.

Apple makes well designed devices, not brilliant, super-high-tech gadgets using the most state-of-the art materials and software packages. Their customers think "Apple makes well designed devices that 'just work'". It doesn't matter than many other companies jump on the bandwagon to copy the iPhone. The iPhone is strong because of Apple's reputation for making well designed devices.

If David Byrne is in on a new project, I want to hear it! Yes, he wrote song great songs with the Talking Heads, but he's famous because David Byrne writes good music. You can't take that away.

Yes, you should get a copyright (PR & SR for my US readers). But it's not copyrights that protect you. It's your ability to constantly deliver high value content.

The Fine Line

As a young band, it's very tough to get the attention of taste makers without a fan base. And it's hard to get a fan base without taste makers.

Bummer.
 
Why is this? Why do so many people in the music industry seem like they live to ignore your music?

Let me introduce to you my buddy, the slush pile.

This is what music industry professionals see every day. There is essentially inifinite music on the planet now. It's inevitible your music will get lost if you don't do something. (That's what this blog is about; getting through the noise)

So in the beginning, we're left with the very unappetizing but very necessary task of bugging people until they listen. Excessive promotion/hype backfies, (you didn't actually need this scientific proof for that, did you?), and not-promoting isn't an answer either.

So how much is enough?

Sadly, there's no easy answer. This is one you have to learn for yourself. Every person you deal with has a different threshhold for how much promotion you can wave at them. Always be concious of how much you talk, what you're saying, and how the other person reacts. The more you learn how to empathize and read people the more effective your marketing will be.

Is your producer battling with an unproductive but very lucrative major label band that's behind deadline? You should probably go easy on contacting them. Stress means a shorter fuse. Is your promoter thinking about cancelling your event? Might be a good time to offer to chip in for flyers and help run them. Think about people.

Yes, this is very simple  stuff but it has a profound effect on how people will react to your promotion. You don't want to be a no-name band who is too pushy / stupid / not pushy enough. You'll stay no-name.

It just takes practice.

The Salesman With A Bow Tie

(Continued from last week's post on bragging)

So now we know the most effective way to brag requires that the person we're talking to bring up the subject we want to brag about.

But how do we get people to regularly bring up the topic of our band without goading them?
---

I knew a salesman who wore a bow tie in an office with an (understood) dress code advocating a normal tie. And he wore that tiny, audacious little bow tie all day, every day.

I was puzzled, to say the least. If the whole point of being a salesman is to become liked and trusted, why a wear a beacon like a bow tie? It's all I could focus on when I was talking to him, like one of those 600 pound pumpkins in a stack of regular pumpkins. I don't trust giant pumpkins.

So I asked.

His explanation, "It's makes my sales easy. It's different. People notice it and, since almost no one wears them, they always ask the same question. 'How do you tie that thing?' Since I know what they're going to ask before they ask it, I have a planned conversation where I guide them into asking me questions about my products. Once they ask, it's clear sailing."

Whoa. That's deep.
---

So the message is wear bow ties.

Nah.

It's about the idea of the bow tie. You want to have something, either physical or verbal, that people have predictable responses to so you can build a well-crafted response that is effective at promoting your band, while still not coming across as uncalled for bragging.

  -Talking to a coworker who wasn't aware you were in a band.
       Coworker: "Hey man, how're you doing today?"
       You: "Meh, alright. I've got a little writer's block is all, but I just got my TPS report in on time so I'm happy about that."
       Coworker: "Writer's block? About what?"
       You: "Well, my album..."
They asked, which gives you permission to brag. Score.

It could be something simple as when you open your wallet to show your ID at a bar, having a guitar pick placed precariously so it falls out on the bar counter. Neat!

---
UPDATE: This just happened to me. There's a chain around Dallas that touts itself as a "good 'ol hometown diner", the kind of place where you envision every waitress is named Flo. Awesome, love it.

Anyways. I'm idling while my friend gets his wisdom teeth eviscerated so I'm studying my copy of Tour Smart coated in sticky notes.

As the waitress brings my waffle, "Hey guy, so what are you studying?"
"Eh, we're going on tour this summer and I'm kinda scared about how complex this whole thing is, so I'm studying this."
"Oooh, sounds tough. So you're in a band? What type of music do you play?"
"Heavy metal."
"I love metal! Metallica is my soul!"

Whoa. Flo knows how to party.

Me: "Right on, that's awesome! Here, let me give you my card. We've got our album coming out this summer, and I think you might like it!"

Score.
---

 NOTE: The trick is in the subtlety of your delivery. If you go overboard, like have a guitar tattooed on your face, it'll be too obvious that you're fishing for comments. That's exactly the same as a badly executed brag. Don't be a wanker who brings an acoustic guitar to a small house party. You want it to seem as if you've just casually mentioned something band-related without harping on it. Remember, if the other people believes they were the one who asked, you'll have a good brag.

How To Brag Without Coming Off Like A Wanker

Now this is a brilliant post from the BPS Research Blog.

Quick Version: We've all met that one person whose sole purpose in life is showing off their new car, job promotion, paternity test etc. Not only is it annoying, but it's counterproductive. Repulsing the people you're trying to convince to like your work is not a sustainable strategy.

The alternative of avoiding self-promotion is also not an option. Remember, the most visible reap the most rewards. Playing only to your fifteen cats and extensive porcelain doll collection won't have you selling out stadiums. (Might get some YouTube hits though.)

So what is it that makes one brag effective and the other off-putting?

For a brag to be effective, the person receiving the brag must have brought up the topic.
If someone asks you, "Hey, how's that friend peanut butter and banana sandwich?" and you reply, "Good, which reminds me about our album due out next Spring which will feature...." That's off-putting. They wanna know about that sammich.

If someone asks you, "Hey, how's your band doing?", you've got free reign to fire away with your best elevator pitch. They want to know about your band, so let em have it.

Now this is good stuff. But how do we take advantage of this?

Check out next week for the answer. I'm excited to share this with you.

It's good.

Real good.
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By the way, if you've just started reading I'd love to talk with you! Leave me a comment, follow me, shoot me an angry email, whatever! Conversations make us smart.

Lack of People Skills Will Stunt Your Music Career

I've been dealing with this realization for quite some time. This is a tough one, especially for someone who isn't naturally outgoing like myself.

The excuses are as numerous as they are easy. "Can't I just play my music?" "They came here for music, I shouldn't have to go around meeting and greeting." "It doesn't matter anyways. If they like my music they'll remember me."

It amounts to wussing out. We know this is what the game is all about. But that doesn't make it any easier.

In last week's post I introduced the concept of the velocity of your fans. Guess what spurred that idea on?

Your music doesn't seek out people's ears. (Although that'd make a sweet music video.) You've got to carry it there. And even then, there's no guarantee people will remember you even if it's amazing music. The world is built around personal connections. Use this truth to spread your music.

Good people skills helps in two ways.
  1. Increases the chance that someone who hears you will like and remember you.
Even seemingly trivial things have a profound effect on how people remember things. You want a fan to be able to say 'Oh yeah, I met ______. They're awesome, really cool to talk with. Here, I'll play you a song." This will increase the chance that someone who hears your music will remember it, like you, and (possibly) become a fan.

  2. Increases the number of people that will hear you.Surprise! For as good as social networking is for contacting people, they're not nearly as effective as face-to-face contact for building relationships. Don't bother friending random people on Myspace, your time is better spent at a concert for a band similar to yours, talking to everyone in line about your band.

In later posts I'll detail little nuggets of knowledge about what "good people skills" exactly are. It's been a difficult process developing these talents, but they're already paid off a million-fold. Social skills are AMAZING to have.

Yes, it's hard if you're not naturally out schmoozing.
But yes, it will get your band results.

You Can't Be An Ass Anymore (Fan Velocity)

You've got your music. But that will only carry you so far.

The real multiplier for your music career's success is the velocity of your fans. Do they rabidly promote your band because they connect with you and love what you stand for? (As much as I dislike them, you can't deny the efficacy of Juggalos for supporting their band.) Or do the people you've touched actively go out of their way to discourage others from listening to your music?

It used to be that there was an invisible wall between the artist and their fans. PR spokesmen, artist managers, burly security guards, tinted limos etc. If you didn't want to talk to the public beyond your music, you would have someone step in for you and create a buffer. You could live in space when you weren't on stage as far as anyone was concerned. Rest assured there was someone out there actively interacting with fans, spreading the gospel of your music.

But the middlemen are disappearing.

Today it's just you and the fan. They can interact with you directly through twitter, myspace, forums, email, carrier pigeon... If they see you before or after a show, they wanna talk to you. The fan *expects* to be able to interact with you. This is part of your job description as an artist. Communicating emotion involves communication.

Why is this? 

Choosing to listen to a band is an identity decision.

When I say "I'm a HUGE fan of Boris", it's an identity statement. Music is all about emotions, philosophy, and stories. When we state our preferences, we're explicitly saying "I identify with the message they are conveying to the world. This band and their music represents how I see the world." We project the person we want to be onto our artists.

As such, we as your fans want to know as much as we can about who we have decided is worthy of membership into our "Personal Identity Club". This is a club for cool people *only*, because we're the president of it!

So if we finally interact with an idol and they look down on us, blow us off, or call us chumps, they're out of our club. Gone. Even worse, any time the former-fan hears the artists name, they're gonna chime in saying "They're a dick! Don't listen to em!".

Even not replying to their messages is a slight. If you don't respond to fans' attempt to connect with you, to them it feels the same as a gorgeous woman who won't return their calls. It hurts.

You can't ignore or hate on your fans anymore. They're the only ones keeping you afloat.

Know your fan velocity. Do everything in your humanly power to maximize it.