BandPage Posts Everywhere

The one thing that most artists find most precious is their time. There's usually never enough of it to do the one thing they love to do best, which is create.

Regardless of where you're at on the music business success ladder, social media is an extremely important part of reaching your fans, but to do it well, it unfortunately takes a lot of time. One of the main strategies of Music 3.0 is the ability to make your social media time more efficient so you can free up that creative time that everyone wants and needs.

BandPage has been a pretty good one-stop platform for posting your music, photos, videos and tour dates to multiple sites, but now they've introduced BandPage Everywhere that allows you to also post to your social media sites, blog and website from their dashboard.

Here's a promo video that describes the feature. It's worth checking out.

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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.

McCartney Takes His Talents To Kobalt

Talk about timing; EMI Music Publishing is just being taken over by Sony/ATV and one of their biggest clients bolts. It seems that Sir Paul McCartney didn't like the looks of what was going down with EMI/Sony and decided to take his talents elsewhere.

But he didn't go to another so-called "major" publisher. No, Paul took his MPL Communications to the upstart Kobalt Music Group, who is quickly becoming one of the major players in the publishing world. Why? Because Kobalt has built it's business on technology, which they claim gets the songwriter paid as much as 25% more and up to two years faster than the more traditional publishing companies. In fact, Kobalt has enticed the likes of Pear Jam, Trent Reznor and Dr. Luke into it's fold, and its share of Top 100 hits has already grown to 15%, which is just under what long time market leader EMI has.

While MPL's move might be symbolically ominous, it doesn't hit the bottom line of EMI as much as you might think, with estimates at less than 10%. The deal with Kobalt does not include North America, Britain and Ireland, which MPL administers itself. But MPL is a heavier hitter than just the McCartney catalog as it includes songs by Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and Broadway shows like The Music Man.

This just goes to show that even old traditional businesses can be improved with technology, and when that happens, it doesn't take long for artists to take notice and jump on board.

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

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.

10 Rules For Giving Away Music For Free

I just love this list from Matt Parsons, founder and CEO of Ditto Music. It's the 10 rules for giving away your music for free.

The gist of it is that your music costs time and money to produce, so you must be compensated for it, but that compensation doesn't have to be in money. In fact, until you're somewhat of a star, fans won't pay money for it anyway, so you must be paid some other way. How? With social currency (see #3 below).

Check out the list:

1. Keep it simple. Choose just one platform to give away your music and direct fans there. [I'm not sure if I agree with this one.]

2. Do not forsake your current fans. Free music is not just for new fans. Reward your mailing list with free songs. Do NOT post MP3s within the email, since this can eat into people's bandwidth and annoy them. Always make sure that you add a link to the download.

3. Music is not free; fans should pay in "social currency." Ask for a Facebook Like, a Tweet, or preferably an email address in exchange for your music. If you're sending to your mailing list, ask them to retweet the link to their friends. Use a platform like bit.ly so you can track the click throughs.

4. Social currency is reciprocal. Tag fans on Facebook/Twitter when they buy the album or talk about you.

5. Follow up on social. Send out regular emails to your list, post at least once per day on Facebook and Twitter.

6. Don't charge too much in social currency for your music. If you ask for too much information, they'll give up and go somewhere else. Just stick to basic data like name, age, location and how they heard of you.

7. Let people listen before they download. No one will spend the time on music they've not heard before.

8. Have a strategy. Once you decide that you want to exchange your music for social currency instead of money, have a long-term strategy for how you will make money in the future.

9. Manage your copyrights. If you plan to make money from merch purchases, be sure to copyright any logos or graphics that you use so no one else can reproduce them and cut you out of the loop.

10. Don't stop promoting. Just because your music is free doesn't mean that you have to promote it any less. Also, don't stop promoting just because you're songs or album has been available for a while.

Don't forget that when you ask someone to retweet or follow you, make it easy for them by providing  embedded buttons. See this page for ways to do that easily.

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

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.

Van Halen Discuss Their First Record Deal

Okay, so you still want to be a rock n' roll star despite everything you know about the business? Sometimes all it takes is just one more horror story before the reality of the business sinks in.

Here's a great video with Eddie and Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth of Van Halen as they discuss their first record deal. In it they reveal how they had a platinum album (1 million sales) and toured for a year and still owed the record label $2 million, all the while collecting weekly checks of only $83.83 a week.

Think it's changed much since then? Guess again.


Jump to 1:20 to get to the best part.

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

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.

Facebook User Satisfaction Falling

I guess we should've expected this sooner or later, but according to a newly released study of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook dropped 8 points from their survey of last year. The score of 61 out of 100 is the 4rth lowest score among all 230 companies scored in the index, and it's the lowest of any Internet company.

But let's put this into perspective, Twitter and Linkedin only scored a little higher at 64 and 63 respectively, which are both in the bottom 10 of all companies polled. Pinterest received a score of 69, YouTube a 73, and most surprising of all, Google+ topped them all with a 78, which tied Wikipedia.

So why is Facebook's user satisfaction dropping like a rock? Here are the 9 features that users most dislike, according to the Huffington Post:

1. Timeline
2. Constant Game Updates 
3. Game Invitations
4. Ticker
5. Check-ins
6. Newsfeed
7. Pokes
8. Facebook Chat
9. Registrations

Facebook's stock may have gained a little momentum, but it doesn't seem to matter to its users. Could it be a matter of time before it turns into MySpace or Friendster?

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

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.