Sony Enters Music Subscription

Make way for another entry into music subscription. On Thursday Sony launched its new service called Music Unlimited Powered By Qriocity in the United States, offering 6 million on-demand songs available to their 60 million Sony PlayStation gamers who play video games online. The service is also available to their Brevia HDTV and Blue-Ray disc player owners.

For $3.99 a month Qriocity provides subscribers with a Pandora-like service which lets them select the music genre or artist. For $9.99 a month, users can choose any song they want to listen to.

The difference with Qriocity from other subscription services is that they're focusing more on the living room than the mobile, thanks to the connection to the PlayStation.

It's hard to tell what the selection is like on Qriocity, but all of the hits seem to be there. Check it out for yourself here.

While it doesn't seem to be in Sony's corporate DNA to pull something like this off, so the next few months should be interesting to see what the subscription rate will be.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

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8 Best Email Practices

I've advocated email lists here many times before for marketing so there's no need to belabor that (you can subscribe to mine here, if you're interested). Jed Carlson, who's a co-founder and COO of Reverbnation, posted a great article on Email 101 For Artists on Music Think Tank that's essential for every artist with a mailing list to read.

Below is an excerpt, but there's a lot more, so be sure to check out the entire article.
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Specifically, here are some ‘best practice’ tenants to consider when it comes to email marketing to a fan base:

Always…

1. Always respect a person’s desire to unsubscribe to your list. IMMEDIATELY UNSUBSCRIBE THEM IF YOUR EMAIL SERVICE DOESN’T DO IT FOR YOU.
2. Always give before you get.  Give the fans something special before you ask them to do something like vote for you in a contest.
3. Always talk to them without swearing.  It may be part of your ‘persona’ as a band, but some people don’t like that language.  The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Yahoo mail, hotmail, AOL, etc don’t like it either, and your message will go directly to the junk box.  You wouldn’t talk to your grandma that way, would you?
4. Always avoid ‘scam’ words in the subject line.  Words like ‘Free’ and ‘Help’ will land your message in the junk box 100% of the time. 
5. Always message them no more than 4 times per month.  Ideally it would be less than 3 times.  Fans want to be kept up to date, but they don’t want to feel like they are your only fan.  Messaging them all the time gives the impression that you don’t have anything more important to do.
6. Always target them with messages that are RELEVANT to them.  If you have a show in Seattle, don’t message your fans in Miami.  Keep your powder dry for a message to them later about something else.
7. Always give them the basics about the information you are conveying.  Reporters call this the ‘who, what, why, when, where, how’ model.  If you have a show coming up, do your fans (and yourself) the service of providing dates, times, locations, ticket links, and lineup of the show.  Over 75% of Artists miss this essential piece when they email.  If you want someone to respond and come to your show, for goodness sake, go so far as to give them driving directions if you can.  Each ticket sold is money in your pocket.
8. Always link them to some place to find out more info about the band.  This could be ReverbNation or MySpace or a homepage or blog.  But ALWAYS give them a way to find out more.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

The Grammy Bounce And The Real Seller

It used to be that a Grammy performance was worth a million unit sales. That's obviously not the case anymore, but at least for some artists, the Grammy's can mean a significant sales bounce. Arcade Fire, Lady Antebellum, and Eserpanza Spalding all saw big iTunes gains after their performances on Sunday's show (see the chart on the left). Mumford and Sons saw spikes as high as 156% for some songs.

And while that might seem impressive, consider this. The Grateful Dead began presales of their Europe '72 65 CD set (yes, 65 discs) and sold out their 7200 unit run in 4 days - at $450 each. That's $3.3 million dollars, an amount that any record label would kill for these days.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Are Teens On Twitter And Facebook?

It's long been thought that Facebook and Twitter were social networks that teens aren't particularly high on, and some new data clearly confirms that fact. According to Comscore, Facebook saw their age 18 and younger visitors recently increase by a mere 1.2% (up to 11% of users), but Twitter saw an erosion of a whopping 8% (down to 9.5% of users) in that same demographic.

What does this mean? Although you can reach some of the 18 and younger set on Facebook or Twitter, don't count on it for major marketing outreach. Most teens still stay social via text message, according to Pew Research. That means you have to earn their buzz the old fashioned way - through word of mouth (or word of text, as it were).

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Paypal Introduces Micropayments

As many of you who read this blog know, I'm a huge proponent of potential of micropayments as a catalyst to increase music sales (see #2 of my post "4 Steps To A New Music Business"). Micropayments are transactions that are much less than a dollar and may be as little as one cent. The reason why they haven't been incorporated as of yet is that the transaction costs imposed by banks and credit card companies make penny, nickel or dime transactions impossible since the transaction costs are greater than the transaction itself.

It's been my contention that an artist can make more money with a great number of small transactions than with a smaller number of larger (like $0.99) transactions, hence the need for some sort of microtransaction platform.

Now comes word that Paypal has instituted a new digital micropayments solution, that while not allowing penny transactions, is a great start. Paypal will charge 5 cents plus 5% of any transaction under $12 in their new system, which is great news for any band or artist with a lot of fans, views and/or low-cost products. It means that if an artist sells a track for 99 cents, they get to keep 89 cents of the transaction, plus get to keep all of the purchasers data as well (rather than giving it to iTunes, Amazon or the like).

Although I don't predict that many will get rich as a result of micropayments (although some undoubtedly will), any income stream is better than none at all, lowering the price point of musical product (and the resistance point as a result) can only help.

Find out more at Paypal.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.