The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media

I've been posting on this blog since November of 2009, which amounts to almost 900 posts. If you've ever tried to do a search here, you know that the Blogger platform isn't the most friendly for finding archive material. That's why after continued requests, I've gone back and collected the best posts and categorized them into an eBook called The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media: Tips and Tricks For Using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.

This first volume primarily looks at social media concepts for musicians, and examines the various tips and tricks for using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ as a promotional tool.

Among the concepts covered in the book are:

• the principles of fan communication
• tips for growing your online audience
• the best way to measure your social media exposure
• the best days and time of day to tweet or post on Facebook
• the secret to increasing your Twitter audience
• YouTube tips and tricks from the pros
• the features of Google+ especially for artists

The book also includes a chapter of useful links, an extensive social media glossary, and tips for using social media for promotion. Best of all, it's only $2.99! and available now from Amazon, and Barnes & Nobel, and soon from the iBook store.

This is Volume 1 of the From The Music 3.0 Blog series, with Volume 2 covering music and merchandise sales and touring coming in a month or so.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did putting it together.

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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.

Taking Advantage Of YouTube's Redesign

I don't know if you noticed, but YouTube quietly redesigned its site over the last few months. What you now see is a streamlined version that's a lot less cluttered so that it fits better with mobile browsing. YouTube is trying to make the site stickier, so the emphasis is now more on channels rather than individual viewing, although that's not something that's particularly overt. And of course, the more social they can make it, the better, since that adds to the stickiness as well.

As with other social sites, a redesign frequently means that you must do some updating in order to take full advantage of the new features, and this case is no exception. Here are some things that you an do:

1. Select an avatar. The channel avatar is your main marketing image and appears everywhere across your channel, so choose it wisely.

2. Choose your channel details. Both the name of your channel and the description also appear in a number of places, so it's important that you take care in how they're created. For instance, in some cases only 45 characters of your description appear next to your avatar, so make sure that you can get your message across with those limitations.

3. Choose your video metadata. This includes being sure that you have a keyword in your video's title (preferably the first word), and you have both an informative description (don't skimp on the copy here) and the appropriate links included.

People forget how important SEO is for their videos, but the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google is a good enough reason to pay extra attention to the details.

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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.

The Most Popular Facebook Music Apps

As we're all aware, Facebook is the 800 pound social network in the room, but don't forget that there's more to social networking than telling your friends what you ate for lunch. Here are the most popular music apps on Facebook, according to Evolver. There are probably more, but the study cuts off at 50,000 users per month.

Name/Link	Official description	Monthly Active Users (minimum)
Spotify	Spotify is a streaming music service that gives you access to millions of songs. Play, discover and share new music.	24 million
iHeartRadio	iHeartRadio is a free, all-in-one digital service that lets you find more than 1,500 of radio’s top Live Stations or create Custom Stations featuring artists or songs you select and similar music.	4.1 million
Deezer	Discover, listen to and share all the music you want – anytime, anywhere. Completely free.	3.4 million
BandPage	Our mission here at BandPage is to revolutionize the way musicians, fans and the industry interact. (Updated: Facebook does not list BandPage in the music section of its App Center.)	2.4 million
Bandsintown	Bandsintown is an application for live music fans and artists.	1.7 million
ReverbNation	Discover great local music, browse the local charts, and share with your friends.	1.2 million
Songza	Working? Relaxing? At the gym? Songza plays you the right music at the right time.	1 million
Vevo	Watch over 50,000 HD music videos plus concerts and original programming from the leading premium music & entertainment platform.	780K
Jango	Jango.com is a free personal internet radio that streams music on the web and to your smartphone (iPhone/Android).	610K
MixCloud	Listen to and discover great radio created by enthusiasts from across the world.	610K
Vagalume Playlists	Listen to music on Facebook, share and find people with the same musical taste.	610K
8tracks	8tracks is a handcrafted internet radio network — the “social” alternative to Pandora. People who know and love music curate online playlists, streamed by listeners by genre, mood, activity or artist.	380K
Slacker Radio	Listen to and share over 150 expert-programmed stations, millions of songs, or playlists and stations you create.	300K
TuneIn	Listen to music, sports and news from around the world — over 70,000 stations and 2 million on-demand programs	300K
TTNET Müzik	TTNET Müzik is a digital music service with millions of songs. It’s easy and free to register TTNET Muzik.	270K
MetroLyrics	Find more lyrics faster than any other lyric service, and completely free of charge.	160K
Playlist.com	Playlist.com is the web’s premier music playlist site.	150K
MOG	Listen free to millions of songs. Share with friends. Discover new music.	150K
Rdio	Rdio lets you listen to millions of songs ad-free wherever you are – on the web and on your phone, even offline.	150K
Spreaker	Create your own radio show and broadcast live from anywhere.	150K
Saavn	Listen to, share, and discover Bollywood and Indian music with Saavn.	130K
Mixlr	Mixlr makes live audio social, easy and fun.	120K
Dhingana	Listen to the largest collection of Bollywood and Indian music for free with Dhingana.	110K
Gaana.com	Listen to songs for free. Choose from the largest collection of music of Indian, regional and international genres.	100K
Bug Music	Listen to 2.2 million songs. Enjoy your music life with the best music services in South Korea from Bugs.	70K
ZippyTune	ZippyTune is a service that allows users to express themselves in the world of music and share their tunes with one another.	70K
Online Pianist	OnlinePianist.com is a one of a kind free animated piano tutorial application for beginner & advanced players alike.	60K
SoundTracking	SoundTracking is a fun & easy way to share the music you’re listening to with your friends on Facebook.	50K

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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.

3 Twitter Hashtag Secrets

If you've been reading this blog for a while you know that I'm a big proponent using Twitter as a promotional tool. The key to using Twitter that way is by including hashtags in your tweets, or the # symbol before a keyword (like "#musicmarketing" which I'll be using when I tweet about this blog). This is one of the ways that people can find your tweet when they do a such for a particular topic.

If you're using them already and you don't find your followers increasing, check out the following "secrets:"

1. Don't be ironic. I know that it's the cheeky thing to post something like #badcupofcoffee or #rudepeople, but that doesn't help you reach the people that you want to reach. To find the right keyword, go to search.twitter.com, plug in the keyword that you think will work, then check out how popular it is and what some of the other keywords that people are using.

2. Limit the number. It's been proven that using more than 2 hashtags in a tweet is counterproductive. It just confuses people reading the tweet. Stick to only 1 or 2.

3. Target your audience. Once again, do a search to find which hashtags fit for the audience that you're trying to reach. I have a list of about 20 that I can mix and match depending upon the nature of the tweet and which audience might like it more. For instance, the list is different for the tweets from this blog, which is about the music business, than for my Big Picture blog, which is about music production. To narrow it down further on that blog, I have a list that's targeted to musicians (#drums, #drummers, #guitars, etc.) or recording (#recording, #producers, etc.).

Using hashtags isn't hard and they can bring results beyond anything you might expect. All you have to do is use them correctly.

By the way, today is the last day of social media maven's Ariel Hyatt's crowdfunding campaign. I've contributed a few rewards to her various tiers, so be sure to take a look.

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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.

There's A New Music Service In Town

There are a lot of music services online vying for a piece of the pie that iTunes is leaving behind, but for every single one of them it's a tougher go than what meets the eye. The license fees demanded by the major labels makes it almost prohibitively expensive to get into the market, then the royalty payout makes it even harder to stay there.

That's why when headphone manufacturer Beats by Dr. Dre purchased the streaming service MOG earlier in the year for only $14 million, the collective industry reasoning was - why? After all, MOG only had 500,000 active users and the purchase didn't even include its advertising network.

But Beats founders Dr. Dre and Interscope exec Jimmy Iovine were apparently looking at the MOG acquisition in a different way from the rest of the industry. On Thursday they named Topspin CEO Ian Rogers as the new CEO to join Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor, who had been previously hired to act as creative director, of a new unnamed music service going by the code name of "Daisy."

Ian and Trent are two of the smartest guys in digital media today, and right away you have to think that they'll come up some something out-of-the-box that hasn't been tried before.

But here's where the brilliance of the MOG acquisition comes in. Basically Beats could care less about the MOG infrastructure I'm guessing. Nothing special there. But the licenses with the labels hold real value. With licenses in hand, the company doesn't have to go through the elongated and expensive negotiating process (at least not until they have to be renewed), so that leaves them free to design their own platform on a more timely basis. And both of those guys know about software development and the user and artist experience, which is why we can look forward to what they come up with.

There's yet another big advantage that Daisy could have and that's the connection to Beats. There's a lot of customers who love the product and would be predisposed to trying a new service. Plus it could be offered with the purchase of a new Beats headphone in the future.

You can read an excerpt of an Ian Rogers interview that he did for the Music 3.0 guidebook. It's quite enlightening as to his outlook on the music business.

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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.