Thursday, March 10, 2011

Bigger Is Better Online

Most visual items online are small, be it a video, a picture, or album artwork, and one of the things that can defeat the entire purpose of these items is if they're not made with that fact in mind. It's really difficult to get the point across in 320 pixels or less, but it can be done if you keep the following in mind.

1) When shooting videos, wide shots don't usually work unless your shooting items that are really large. Most of the time you need to shoot at least medium close-ups to get the point across.

2) The same goes for pictures. There's not much impact with a wide shot so you have to go in close. Take a look at the two shots below. Which one works better?


3) On album artwork, make sure the name of the artist or band is large enough. Always think about if you can identify the artist if the artwork was shrunk to 150 pixels. Remember, what works on a CD doesn't necessarily translate to a smaller version. Which one works better here?

It's very easy to overlook when shooting video or designing artwork, but it's really worth the effort in the end. The chances of your pictures, videos or artwork appearing in a reduced form are great, so best to prepare for it up front.

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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.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Music Marketing With Gummy Skulls

I just love out-of-the-box marketing ideas, but this one may be the best of many already great ones this year. The Flaming Lips will soon self-release their as-yet-untitled, four-song 12 inch EP featuring Neon Indian, which is cool but nothing too outrageous in itself.

Soon thereafter, however, the band will begin to sell gummy skulls - yes, that's replicas of a human skull made out of gummy. As FL leader Wayne Coyne explains, "It's a life-sized human skull completely made out of edible gummy bear stuff. It also has a gummy brain inside of it and, inside of that there's a USB flash drive that has three new songs on it. It's pretty outrageous."

OK, the gummy skull is a novelty, but what I really find cool about this is that they're releasing their music on a flash drive. The great part about distributing music this way is you can not only have your music available in MP3 and AAC format, but also as a higher resolution Wave or AIFF file as well. I don't know if FL are going that far, but I sure hope so. They've gone to this much trouble already, they might as well go all the way.

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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.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

A Plan To Help Retailers Stock More CDs

Record labels have a synergistic relationship with retailers that can't be denied. In the US, 50% of their revenue still comes from the sale of about 300 million CDs, which is a big amount by any stretch of the imagination. But with the major big box retailers of Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target carrying fewer and fewer CDs in their inventory, it's even less likely that a consumer can find exactly what they want when they want it. This creates a fast downward spiral of decreasing CD sales that we're experiencing now.

Now I don't think there's anyone who believes that CDs sales are going to increase under any circumstances, but there are people that still buy them, and it might be possible to slow that spiral down. But how?

According to an article in the Financial Times, the UK retailer Tesco is trying to get the major labels there to implement a novel idea that might give the retailer some relief so it's it's able to stock more CD inventory. Instead of paying $11 to $13 dollars up front for a CD (in the US it's more like $8 to $9), they're asking to pay just 80 cents up front, with the remainder paid after the sale. The idea is that this amount will cover the actual manufacturing cost of the disc only, although that doesn't even touch the royalties, overhead, production costs and more.

A trial is now being made with Robbie Williams, and Tesco claims that sales are up 40%. That doesn't tell us much however, since the only way the program would make a difference is if more different CDs were stocked than before to give consumers more choice.

In any event, it's a step in the right direction. Record stores are vitally important to the music business, and it's important that they get any help they can from any place they can. Let's hope something similar takes place in the US.

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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.

Monday, March 7, 2011

The "Pay What You Can" Music Label

I always thought that Radiohead had the best idea when they asked their fans to pay whatever they wanted for their 2007 online release of In Rainbows. By all reports, In Rainbows ended up being far more successful than the band ever believed it could be, and didn't dent their traditional CD sales one bit when they released it about six months later.

This, I believe, is a great model for an artist or band just starting out. Ask your fans to pay whatever they want for online downloads. Ask them to pay whatever they want for CDs at your gig. They might surprise you with how generous they are, and even if they don't pay anything, it still means there's more of your product out in the marketplace. Remember, your music is your marketing in Music 3.0!

That being said, a new music label out of Detroit has popped up called BeeHive Recording, where people can pay whatever they want for the releases of artists on their roster. While this might work for an individual artist or band, I'm not quite sure how viable it is for a record label. Still, you have to hand it to them for at least trying something different.

Here's a video about what they're doing. I don't know where Steven of BeeHive gets his figures about what an artist gets paid from a traditional record contract, because they're just flat-out wrong (way too low). Even so, let that part of it go and listen to the rest.

The site has 600 site members and between 3,500 and 4,000 downloads have occurred so far.


Beehive Recording Company from Alec on Vimeo.

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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.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Who Controls The Music Business

Here's an excerpt from the Music 3.0 guidebook that illustrates who controls the infrastructure of what's left of the old music business. At least to some degree, this structure will always remain to some degree, especially at the superstar level, but the times they are a changin' and that influence is waning by the day.
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Although it may not be readily apparent, Wall Street and Madison Avenue indirectly control the remaining M2.5 music industry through their tremendous influence on the financial bottom line of record labels, record stores, concert promotion, radio, and television. If you’re owned by a publicly traded conglomerate (as all major labels, major concert promoters, and radio and television stations are), then you’re in the business of selling stock, not servicing the consumer. What that means is that nothing matters more than quarterly earnings. To keep those earnings as high as possible, Wall Street turns to Madison Avenue to devise the best marketing strategy for keeping the profits high. Madison Avenue (in the form of the major advertising agencies) can bring in the big ad dollars, but only under certain content conditions (like programming that is tailored around the advertising), and the process repeats itself over and over. The advertising industry (Madison Avenue), not the music industry, therefore drives the music cycle in the United States. 
In Music 2.5, it’s all about passing focus-group tests, which have separated listeners into the distinct demographic groups that advertisers are then able to tell stock analysts they have micromarketed their products to. As a result, radio, television, and live performances are no longer about aggregating and entertaining large audiences, but rather just a group of market niches. The bright side to this fact is that there’s one heck of an opportunity opening up for folks who don’t get hung up on trying to sell advertising.
Wall Street and Madison Avenue have tried to redefine what music means to people, but most people are voting with their wallets by refusing to buy any new recordings. The view of the vast majority of consumers is that very few new recordings are worth buying compared to those released a couple decades ago, and this has become the dilemma of the industry. You have to sell product to survive, but it’s impossible to develop that product while trying to please your corporate masters. It might work when selling soap or clothing or any other consumer product, but a creative endeavor like music just doesn’t work that way. It’s too personal, both to the artist and the consumer, to be a mass-market product.

Control In Music 2.5
Wall Street and Madison Avenue control the media
Record labels need to keep stock price and quarterly profits high
Radio and television only play what appeals to advertisers
Consumers divided into demographic groups
Music becomes devalued

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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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