Your Digital Music Marketing Strategy - professional insight.

Dan Kruchkow knows his shit.

He does digital marketing for a major US management company - Crush Management - see their clients at that link.

In this interview at Musician Coaching he talks about various elements of a music marketing strategy that we can all learn from. We have a great step-by-step plan for download on the main site if you haven't seen that as well - Music Marketing pdf.

What about methods of delivery for that message? Are there a handful that you think are absolutely required at this stage?

DK:

They’re almost standard equipment at this point:  a Facebook profile; a Twitter account; a YouTube profile. And Tumblr’s a huge community that the entire industry has started gravitating towards in the past year or so. The entire hip hop industry is moving over to Tumblr as we speak. I think the official website for the artist, when done right, is really important as well.

Read the whole interview here.

 

7 sets of resources for writing lyrics

This is a great post that everyone should take some time to check out.

AudioTuts has great info on technical production stuff but also loads on general career tips.

This one looks at places that you can turn for help on writing lyrics and I've rarely seen such a useful list of ideas.

Writing lyrics is a very personal thing, and it is that sense of individualism that can really help people relate to a song. There are no strict rules that must be followed, but having a helpful collection of songwriting resources can really help. Here are 7 sets of lyric writing resources with a bunch of helpful links.

Read it here.

Bln.kr launch their 'tweet for a track' service

I wrote about Bln.kr in the Dailies and then in the latest part of our Twitter music Promotion guide - please check it out if you haven't yet.

Well, Bln.kr have launched the 'tweet for a track' (which, in fact, is also a Facebook share for a track service as well) in a bit of a private Beta.

I am loving their whole service and can see it being a default for rapid sharing online. In fact, if you're not going for the paid option that the actual Tweet for a Track site offers, in order to collect the email addresses of downloaders, then I don't see why you'd choose that service now over Bln.kr. Bln.kr offers more and is adding new stuff all the ntime.

Check out their video of this particular bit of the service.

 

 

If you want to get on and use it, it seems that at the moment this isn't available on their site and you'll need to email them at feedback@bln.kr. Obviously, this will be an on-site faeture in the very near future.

The pressure on artists

I'm going to tweet the original link but for readers who subscribe to the Dailies only, I've taken this whole piece from this post on Digital Music News:

"When you talk to artists and people that work with artists, they very rarely talk about tools.  Because they know, this is their business.  They know that it works best when the tools disappear.  If you have a great connection with a fanbase on a particular platform, it's not about that platform - it's not about Twitter - it's about your conversation with your audience and your relationship with your fans.

So, why then is there a glut of tools, why is there so much conversation about the tools?  Well, it's obviously about the money, it's about the investment.  In any industry, you're talking about - and investing in and focusing on, on stages like this one - the opportunities for growth.   And there's been such catastrophic decline in the traditional music business, the infrastructure is so badly broken, that we're turning over every rock looking for opportunities to grow something to replace it.  And as a result, there's tremendous pressure on artists.              

I mean we're asking so much of artists.  And when you talk to them and you talk to the teams that work with them, they do feel put upon, they do feel overwhelmed, they do feel that the expectations are so high.  Because they are supposed to rise up;- we have this expectation that there's this revolution going on, where they are supposed to rise up and replace what was lost.  And I don't know that that's a meaningful expectation or a reasonable expectation for us to be putting on independent artists and the people that represent them."

It's taken from this MIDEM keynote speech that is well worth watching. A bunch of experts chewing the fat!

 

How to profit from file sharing

People will download your music for free - it's a fact and you aren't going to stop it.

What you can do though, is engage in some smart 'search engine optimisation' so that a page offering your music (perhaps for free in exchange for an email) in an easy to obtain way (or perhaps a very cheap one click download) ranks above any pages that you might see come up in a search where people could download for free - e.g. torrents or rapidshare and that kind of thing.

We looked at band website SEO in that post on our main blog, and the video I made is very good basic training. I suggest you check it out if you need to learn the first steps.

But, this post on Music Think Tank deals with specifically setting up your SEO to make sure that your site ranks highly when people search for 'your band free download' or 'your band torrent'. It's a tricky skill to master but I believe in SEO for musicians and think you should take the time to learn what it can do for you.

Sean Parker of Napster fame recently stated in an interview, “you look at the data, somewhere between 4 trillion and 10 trillion songs are illegally downloaded every year.  And we’re looking at maybe 4 billion or so legal downloadeds per year.”

Music will always surface on file sharing platforms and consumers will continue to download music for free, but recordings are even more important for artists than ever before.  There is a new purpose for recorded content; artists will no longer generate revenue directly from recordings, instead this will be the entrance point for consumers into the brand.  Great music will generate revenue through merch or ticket purchases, or lead to sponsorships as major brands seek out artists to enhance the value of their own product.  The solution to file sharing is for artists to better manage their recorded music by creating a dedicated landing page on their own website, housing a free album download.

Read the whole post here.

Note that Google has started very recently filtering some of the 'piracy' words out of elements of their search (see this Mashable piece for that news) and I expect this to increase, but this remains a very sensible strategy.

Two key elements to make you a great live performer

Tom Jackson is widely held to be a unique coach for artists in the music industry - I don't know of another who preaches perfecting the art of the live performance like he does.

And he's done it for some major artists - he is the real deal.

At the core of what he teaches is that you NEED to work on your live performance. For most, it isn't natural. And, the more you do to study and work on it, the better you'll get.

Every band I've ever worked with gets better over time - you can see the process - but he shortens the learning curve.

He sells his teaching at his site - Tom Jackson's On Stage - it's not cheap!

But, he has a YouTube channel where there's loads of stuff for free!

Here's the two clips that stuck out for me - Taking charge on stage & Filling the gaps!

And the second one: But, also, click through to his channel here and have a look at the whole lot if you can find the time - it'll pay dividends.

10 things to nail down for your album release party

This is a great post from a great blog - Brian Franke's 'Thinking Aloud'

Brian is a working musician in Washington DC who writes from his personal experience - so he knows what's worked and failed for him! There are great posts all over the site to help the DIY musician and it's well worth digging around for some gems. He also goes out of his way to provide a hub for the DC scene.

This post covers all of those things, talking as it does from his own experience in setting up an album release show.

You just left the studio and recorded the final notes for your album.  There’s the mixing and mastering process for your producer to take care of and the artwork for your album and any merchandise to do–but the real deal is when all of this comes together and you officially release your album at a CD release party.  A lot goes into making a CD release party a successful one and it rests entirely on how well you prepare.

There are many key areas that make it successful that I will discuss below, but to keep it short and sweet I would say the most important things are: be in tip-top shape and form musically when you perform, give lots of lead time to get it ready, have your album ready in CD and digital form on the day of your show, and ask for help when you need it.

I most recently went through this process and while some things were tedious, when my big night finally came, it turned out to be everything I wanted it to be for my fans.  I spent a good three months putting my CD release party together.  That’s not to say yours will take as long.  Depending on what you want to do may shorten or lengthen how long it can take.

But looking back on those three months, these are the 10 key things to do to have a successful CD release party.

Read the 10 key things to nail down here.