How to make your fans more dedicated

You'll have noticed that there are few sites that we regularly refer you to on the MiiM Dailies sites. That's because they invariably write really insightful stuff that we think will help you in your quest to be a successful musician.

One such is the blog at Mic Control. I batted a few emails back and forth yesterday with Jon Ostrow who writes the blog. His take on online music marketing is bang on.

The latest post looks at how to make more of your fans be more dedicated. Great post.

A 'Super Fan' is the most important player in your fan base. In chess, it would be your queen. Influential, proactive, genuinely dedicated, and most importantly willing to spend money on you. So of course, it makes sense that you want to cater to the needs of your super fans.

But what about all of your other fans?

Many will argue that by categorizing your fans and focusing only on the most dedicated, you are alienating those less committed to your art. However in reality, these boundaries allow you to understand your fan base at all levels of dedication and interest, and gives you the opportunity to convert weaker fans into more dedicated ones.

Read the whole post here.

 

Get your music on Pandora to be heard

We know from direct experience that having your music on Pandora can have an incredible effect on your profile.

An artist whose album we released 5 years ago has, over the last 2 years, slowly seen a rabidly loyal following grow - all of it thanks to his popularity on Pandora. His music is recommended on that service when people listen to other more mainstream artists whom he sounds like. Because his record is brilliant, he gains new fans every day directly from that exposure.

We have also seen his digital sales of an album that had sold a few hundred copies on release steadily grow month after month. This is the long tail!

Check out his music here - He's called Little People.

As part of the Edison Reasearch report, they have seen that Pandora is still growing massively fast and is the first stop for music discovery for one in 5 young Americans.

I know it works - you should be on there.

Read our blog post about how to get your music on Pandora from a while back.

And go and check out the blog post specifically about the growth in Pandora from the Edison Research.

 

You should make vinyl!

If it has any relevance in your genre and if you can muster enough fans to buy it, you really should make vinyl versions of at least some of your releases.

We try to do it as often as possible - fans love it and the very act of your material being available on vinyl marks you out as being serious and aids your music promotion.

The article below was another that I picked up from @BuzzSonic and looks at the resurgence of vinyl's popularity.

We live in the age of new technology. It seems the face of music, and the way in which we receive and listen to it, is constantly changing. CD’s can be listened to on thousand dollar sound-systems with multi-disk changers, or a stereo sitting in your mom’s kitchen. CD’s themselves are quickly on their way out, with the creation of MP3’s and products like the IPod. In the face of all this change, however, lies a huge contradiction to our generation’s seemingly constant urgency to go bigger, better, newer and shinier. This is of course, the resurgence in popularity of vinyl records.

Read the whole article here.

Build excitement before an album release

I love pretty much everything Mic Control write - insightful and no bullshit.

This piece on how an artist can engage fans in the lead-up to an album release has several killer ideas that all artists can employ but those engaged in a direct to fan release should be doing something along these lines for sure.

If fan-funding has proven one thing, it is that dedicated fans desire an experience more than a product, and are willing to pay good money to make that happen. Any fan can purchase a new album for $9.99 from iTunes or download it for free in exchange for an email address through Bandcamp, so why would they be willing to contribute $50, $100, $500 and even upwards of $2000 or more to experience the same music?

It is not because of some incentives or prizes, though some of them can be really cool, but because the super fans of the world are in love with the idea that they can join their favorite artists in the experience of creating their next album. This allows the fans to feel more connected to the music, simply because they felt like they were there with you through the creative process as it all came to be.

Read it here.

Singles no longer shifting albums

Photo by uitdragerij

As the previous post pointed out, some British acts are seeing some serious success in the US with what could be described as UK Hip Hop - or some better description from someone who listens to it, because I don't! - but it seems that it is all singles based and they aren't selling albums.

Why is that?

Hypebot have had a look at some of the reasons - personally I believe it's all part of the sea change that the digital music area has heralded. There will be album artists but not all artists will make albums in the future - they will survive on a stream of singles, radio hits, live appearances (rather than traditional touring as such) and online fanbases.

The old saying goes that for every great man, there is an ever greater woman behind him.  The same has traditionally been true for music - for every hit single, there is an even bigger selling album behind it.

Read what Hyebot think here.

 

Where are all the new guitar bands hiding?

This news piece from the BBC is obviously UK centric but the theme that guitar bands aren't breaking though to major success is true of the US and other markets as well.

It's a good article but it misses the point that UK acts that have grown up on a US R&B and Hip Hop heritage are now succeeding worldwide (at least with singles) in a way that they never have before. And, on top of that, our UK radio system is closing the doors on the new guitar bands because of Radio 1's insistence on concentrating on the UK urban scene rather than a wider demographic.

It also ignores the fact that there are some phenomenal acts doing their own DIY musician thing both here and the US and they will surely break through to have long careers.It's just a question of when.

From The Beatles to the Arctic Monkeys, Britain's great rock bands have belted out the soundtracks to our lives and carved a place at the heart of our culture.

So why have so few new bands broken through in the past couple of years? And what are new acts doing to keep guitar music alive?

It's well worth a read though. Read it here.

Facebook Marketing Cheat Sheet

I can't really say much about this other than you HAVE to look at it and bookmark it.

The lovely people at AllFacebook have done all of us an incredible favour and pulled together many of their key posts to give you a handy reference guide that you can use to seriously boost your facebook music marketing.

While you could write a book about Facebook marketing, the reality is that the most important things can be summed up in a few sentences. After covering Facebook marketing for the past few years, I’ve decided to compile the most important things you should know. Bottom line: you’ll look like a Facebook marketing genius after taking one look at this page!

Don't MISS this post. Really!