The Friday Five - 29th June 2012

Yep it's the end of the week, and here are this weeks five things we thought you might just want to take a look at.

 

1. Fanfunding Tip: Offer Imaginative Incentives to Entice More Fans

The DIY Musician have created a great list of pledge ideas to hook in new fans.

http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2012/06/fanfunding-tip-offer-imaginative-incentives-to-entice-more-fans/

 

2. Musical ‘Stock Market’ TastemakerX Puts Your Money Where Your Ears Are

An Iphone app/game that allows you to invest in your favourite acts with virtual currency, sort of like the stock exchange meets the pop charts.

http://evolver.fm/2012/06/22/musical-stock-market-game-tastemakerx-is-now-public/

 

3. Get Venues to Ask You Back: 8 Tips You Can Use For Your Next Show

Nice small article from Reverbnation on how to get a venue to ask you back. Could be useful....

http://blog.reverbnation.com/2012/03/21/get-venues-to-ask-you-back-8-tips-you-can-use-for-your-next-show/

 

4. How To Make Your Facebook Timeline POP!

Ariel gives a whole bunch of tips on getting your Facebook timeline to work better for you.

http://arielpublicity.com/2012/06/19/how-to-make-your-facebook-timeline-pop/

 

5. Free Music Making Samples Download

There are beats and hits aplenty for you in this week's bundle, plus a collection of FX stabs.

http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/sampleradar-13154-free-sample-downloads-217833/111

 

 

Music Business pdf Guides

This is a post for those who don't follow us on Twitter or visit the main site that often.

On Friday we posted about 2 free pdf guides to the Music Business written by the folks at Berklee College of Music.

Go to our main site to get these music business pdf's.

Freemium works - you can't blame P2P!

Dr Sean asked if he could repost my comment on a DIY Musician thread in this post.

I'm happy for more people to read it. But don't take it the wriong way!

If your efforts to build a fanbase by giving music away for free are failing, the lesson isn't that you won't ever 'make it' and that you should give up. The lesson is that you need to have a very harsh and reslistic review of your material, your band line-up, your commitment to improving and then make the changes that you know, deep down, are necessary before your music will be good enough.

Don't give up, but do learn to make your art as good as it can possibly be.

Read Dr Sean's post here.

The 3 most important platforms for musicians

Are:

Email

Twitter

Facebook Shares

.....according to Topspin.

This is a short post that sets out the direct to fan specialist's view, backed up by their data, that those are the three most important platforms artists can use to drive direct sales. Note that it's about sales and they also give a large nod to YouTube for engagement.

It's also refreshing that their advice is to spend all your attention on developing your art and finding people who can do the marketing for you. Clearly, your material needs to be great for any marketing effort to be worth the bother.

But, read the piece and don't ignore their data and the reasons. Email creates sales.

If you're not running an artist website that offers free tracks in return for an email.....you are an idiot!

Read the piece here.

10 ways to force your fans to download your song

Marcus at The Musicians Guide (@themusicguide) posted this useful list the other day.

He was inspired to write it by Brian Hazard's post on ways to get people to hand over their email addres - which we also looked at here.

In my opinion, none of the tips below will increase the rate of visits to downloads (or conversion rate) quite as much as an improvement in song quality, but these tips are still likely to have a positive effect when used to complement great music.

1. Offer your fans exclusivity
We all love something that’s special to us, exclusivity in itself is a form of incentive as it gives a feeling of superiority. Offer your mp3 exclusively to your mailing list subscribers or Facebook fans or live show attendees before the rest of the world to reward them for their actions.

Get all 10 tips here.