Music Celebs Extend Their Brands

It used to be that a celebrity musician was loath to do anything commercial for fear of "selling out."

If you were successful with your music, you risked all of your credibility with your fans if your music appeared in a commercial, or your image was found on a consumer item.

Those days a long gone, as music celebs everywhere do whatever they can to extend their brands. It's a money grab that's now condoned, accepted and even expected by management and fans alike. And all without any stigma whatsoever.

I've posted about musician's private brands and even custom items like toothbrushes and clothing (even Jimi Hendrix!),  but once again we have multiple examples of music celebs reaching way beyond the music that made them famous.

Take for instance, Beyonce and Taylor Swift becoming the new faces of Pepsi and Diet Coke respectively. Depending upon which study you use, these are mostly unhealthy products endorsed by women who exude health.

Then we have Sean "Diddy" Combs and Mark Wahlberg investing in the premium water AQUAhydrate for fit, active party people. At least it's healthy.

Hip hop girl group OMG Girlz are the new spokespeople for Wat-AAH, another premium water product.

Pop-Water, a new flavored low-calorie product (I thought water is supposed to have zero calories) is backed by Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter. Then there's Golnside, a tea product, courtesy of manager Kevin Liles (Nelly, Big Sean, Trey Songz and a dozen others).

The fact of the matter is that success in music is merely a departure point to consumer product success for most artists these days. But can you really blame them?

In the days when "selling out" was considered taboo, artists weren't used to making or spending the kind of money available to them today. And those that did actually make that kind of money in music could have it sustain over long periods of time because the business was healthy, selling more product than ever, and even growing at the time.

Today, with the industry roughly half the size that it was before, success is much more fleeting, and the money that's here today probably won't be there tomorrow, which makes artist's desired to catch whatever financial wave they can more understandable. Plus, management is smarter than ever at exploiting every opportunity and even creating new ones for their artists.

That doesn't mean that some self-aware artists understand that expanding their commerciality beyond their music isn't inherently good for their brand. That still happens, and those artists should be applauded, but even those they will look for products that best fit with their brands, even it they won't be found on a convenience store shelf.

So to all you old school people longing for the "days of artist integrity," get over it. It's a new world. You may not like it, but it's not going back to the way it was any time soon.

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Social Media Listening Tools

Simon Tam wrote a great piece on Music Think Tank about the social media that every artist should be doing. One of the best aspects of the article was a section called "Free Listening Tools" that listed a number of tools that could be used to monitor your mentions on social media. It's worth repeating, so here it is:

"First, let’s talk about some of the free tools available to you. Here are some that I use everyday:

• Google Alerts: Google Alerts is a basic way to discover when a website is posting about you. However, it doesn’t capture everything and it certainly doesn’t cover social media or most blog sites. Still, it’s a good, automated, entry-level way to get some feedback about any kind of search query emailed to you. Sign up at www.google.com/alerts.

• Hootsuite/TweetDeck: Both Hootsuite and TweetDeck offer some tools to consolidate and manage your social media accounts. You can also add search columns that are scanning Twitter in real time. Not everyone who tweets about you will be using your hashtag or tagging you so this is a convenient way to spot what is being discussed and reply immediately.

• Icerocket: Icerocket specializes in blog searches. Their “big buzz” option also captures activity on Facebook, Twitter, and image sites such as Flickr too. It’s free, easy to use, and does not require registration of an account.

• Social Mention: Social Mention collects aggregated data across multiple platforms. You’ll see results from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, photobucket, etc. and there are some basic analytics that help you determine if the sentiment is positive or negative, how many different sources are active, etc. It’s also free and doesn’t require registration.

• Topsy: Topsy is similar to Icerocket and Social Mention; the main focus is around social media, especially multimedia and blogs. You don’t have to register, but you do have the option of creating an email alert (it ties into your Twitter or Facebook).

None of the tools are all-inclusive. They catch bits and pieces of what is out there but don’t always get it all. If you run a search every day, it will only takes a few minutes to scan through anything new. Make a habit of searching and listening. In addition to the above, I also run searches on Google, Bing, and Duck Duck Go twice per day."

I've talked about most of these in individual posts in the past, but this is a good list of them all in one place. For more good tips from Simon, go to his article.

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

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

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.

Studies Show Piracy Doesn't Affect Music Sales

If you've read this blog for any length of time, or my Music 3.0 Internet music guidebook, you know that my mantra is "Your music is your marketing." I've advocated that you never worry about piracy, and should in fact embrace it, since that's the single best way for people to become aware of your music. In fact, sales will grow precisely because your music was interesting enough to be freely shared.

This was born out by the latest studies by the NPD Group and IFPI, as shown in this recent post. Now a new study from the EU has concluded that "digital piracy should not be viewed as a growing concern for copyright holders in the digital era."

Digital Music Consumption On The Interent: Evidence from Clickstream Data is a 40 page study full of statistical detail by the EU's Information Society Unit that used data from 5000 Internet users from the EU's five largest countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. While most of the data pertains to Europe, the conclusions are the same as previous studies.

No artist, songwriter or copyright owner wants their property stolen, but an odd quirk of music online shows that the more it's available for free, the more it sells. A number of artists have found that when they take the free music down from their website, their iTunes sales fall. Put it back up and the sales rise. You can look at it loosely like radio, where a song is heard for free, but it exposes it to people who might want to buy it.

It used to be that you'd buy the song or album because you wanted the convenience of hearing it when you wanted, instead of waiting for it to be played on the radio. Today you can find most songs instantly anywhere online, so the convenience factor is gone if you're into streaming. That said, some fans want to pay simply as a way to support an artist. Then again, it's been found that the biggest sharers of music are also the ones that buy the most.

Regardless, unless your music is heard in some way, it's invisible. That's why it doesn't matter how someone hears your music, just that they hear it.

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

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

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.

Soundcloud Goes Pro

SoundCloud, the song hosting service that provides instant audio streaming of your material, has just announced a new subscription service called SoundCloud Pro. The new Pro and Pro Unlimited plans replace the previous Premium Lite, Solo, Pro and Pro Plus programs.

The company didn't mention many details in their press release last week, but it leads one to believe that this has much to do with its recent agreement to be the audio backbone of Twitter Music. In fact, you could see this coming when SoundCloud basically rebuilt it's platform in December, improving the user interface and making it Flash-free.

My guess here is that SoundCloud saw in Twitter Music an opportunity to scale in a way not possible otherwise. They could get massive growth in a short period of time, which is a way for their investors to make their money back and more. In fact, SoundCloud received $50 million in January 2012 from KPCB, one of the most revered venture firms in Silicon Valley. KPCB also happens to be an investor in Twitter as well, so this collaboration was probably baked way back then and only coming out of the oven now.

While you could look at all this cynically as just a money grab, I don't think it is. On all sides there are well-regarded, highly competent people that have a tradition of caring for the customer as well as for making money. That's why I look forward to both the new SoundCloud and Twitter Music. What we see now is probably only the tip of the iceberg.

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

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

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 Ins And Outs Of Cookies

We're exposed to so much technical jargon every day that we think that we know everything just because we're familiar with a term. Take "cookies," for instance. So many of us have heard of the term, and we may loosely be aware that they have something to do with our browser, but that's probably it. If that's you, then let me take some of the mystery out the term.

A cookie is a small piece of data that a website stores on your browser while you're looking at a website that's used to track the number of visits and unique visitors to a site. In other words, the next time you visit the site that deposited the cookie, it records the fact that you've come back and how long you stayed.

There are two main types of cookies; transient and persistent, although sometimes they're called "session" and "user" respectively. A transient cookie is set when you visit a site and disappears when you leave, but measures everything about the experience while you're there, including what you clicked on and how long you looked at a page.

A persistent cookie is set the first time that you visit a site and stays with your browser for a period of time that can be finite (say 12 months) to forever. These alert the browser the next time you return and any preferences that you might have set, then act like a session cookie during that time. While this sounds somewhat insidious, it's important to understand that persistent cookies don't contain any of your personal information, and have only a simple character string that the company that inserted it can read. It's also important to understand that you can choose to delete it at any time, and each different browser has a way to do this in their Settings section.

Another type of cookie is a "secure" cookie, that's used on encrypted HTTPS sites, like for banking or sales. It's encrypted along with the transaction info of the site so it's less likely to be exposed to any outside eavesdropping.

Then we have first and third party cookies. First party cookies come from the site that you visited itself, while third party cookies that come from a different domain name. These are sometimes used by sites to measure what happens once you leave a site. For instance, Yahoo may insert a cookie that watches when you go to eBay, or any site with banner adds needs to utilize them to track the click throughs. Sometimes these are rejected by your browser, or you're specifically asked if you want to accept them.

There are many other types of cookies as well, but the idea here is to give you a reason not to fear them. A cookie is just a way for you to personalize your settings on a site, and for the site to measure what you do once you're there. No more, no less.

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

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

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.