3 Questions To Ask Before You Send Your Newsletter

An email newsletter is critical to the financial well-being of any artist, as it's responsible for informing your hard-core fans of what you're doing, where you're doing it , and who you're doing it with. It can be the best marketing tool you have, or it can be a complete turn-off to your audience if you're not careful. Here's an excerpt from the Social Media Promotion For Musicians book that poses 3 essential questions you should ask yourself before you hit send on your next newsletter.

"There’s a lot of thought that goes into creating a newsletter. If your title doesn’t attract attention, the email may not get opened. If the content is weak, the next one might not get opened, or worse yet, the person could unsubscribe. You could have a great offer that no one acts on because it’s presented poorly or visually buried. Let’s take a look at the elements of a great newsletter.

Sending out a newsletter for the sake of sending one out isn’t a good strategy. There has to be a good reason for you to communicate with your subscribers. Don’t forget, they gave you permission to contact them in the first place. It’s up to you not to soil that agreement. Before you decide to send any newsletter, ask yourself these three questions:

• What is this email about? Are you informing your subscribers about the latest news? Are you trying to promote something? Is this an announcement of some kind? Decide what your email is about, then keep that as your central focus.

• Why do my subscribers care? Is this something they would be sorry about missing? Is it something they want to participate in? What’s in it for them?

• What do they do about it? Do you want them to pass something along? Buy something? Come to a show? Stay informed about your life? Whatever it is, be sure to ask them to do it.

If you can answer these questions, then you know you're ready to send your newsletter or any other email."

You can download a free chapter of Social Media Promotion For Musicians, or read additional excerpts from it and my other books on the excerpt section of bobbyowsinski.com.

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Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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.

Social Media Courses On Lynda.com

If your not hip to lynda.com yet, you should be, since it's one of the best learning resources out there for any software or app you can think of. The production standards are incredibly high, and they really hold their authors to a high standard, which is immediately evident in the video courses. As a result, you can learn a lot about almost any subject, and learn it fast.

I've been a part of the lynda family for a few years now with a number of courses on the audio side of things (recording, mixing, mastering, mastering for iTunes, acoustics), but now I'm pleased to announce a new series of social media video courses, specially designed for musicians, artists, bands, engineers, producers, songwriters, music execs, and anyone in the music industry.

These video courses are based around the Social Media Promotion For Musicians book, and give you an insight to everything that you need to market yourself, your band and your music online. The courses include:

Social Media Basics for Musicians and Bands 

Facebook for Musicians and Bands 

Twitter for Musicians and Bands 

YouTube for Musicians and Bands  

Website Management for Musicians and Bands (A sample video is below) 

Mailing List Management for Musicians and Bands 

Blogging Strategies for Musicians and Bands 

Google+  for Musicians and Bands 

Bookmarking Sites for Musicians and Bands 

Pinterest for Musicians and Bands

There's a lot to learn in each course, but you can click here to get 7 days of free unlimited access to lynda.com. Check the courses, and lynda.com out. You'll be glad you did.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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 YouTube Music Awards Misses It’s Chance

As you may have read in my previous musings on the subject, the YouTube Music Awards (or the YTMA’s as it’s now being called) seemed like an ideal event to represent the best of the new music business. Or should have been. Here’s what we got during Sunday night’s extravaganza instead.

1. A show that was poorly viewed. The show was viewed by only 220,000 viewers at its peak, which is embarrassing for a platform the size of YouTube. The fact is that most of the performers alone could have done better numbers without the network’s help, which means that YouTube did a woeful job getting the word out.

Now think about that for a second - YouTube, which is the most powerful platform for discovering new music online, and which is owned by Google, arguably the most powerful of all Internet companies, could only generate 220,000 viewers! Even 10 times that amount would have been embarrassing. Just for comparison, the MTV VMA’s had a viewership of 10.1 million this year.

The interesting thing was that the YouTube Music Awards got a lot of coverage from the mainstream press, which clearly didn’t address the market that the show was aimed at. Shouldn’t a company so steeped in modern mass communication know better?

That said, the show did have a fair amount of social action, with over 300,000 tweets over the three hours before during and after the show. The problem here is that the tweet dropped off drastically when the show went live, which could have been from the fact that most viewers were watching on a phone or tablet, and it’s difficult to tweet and watch at the same time when you only have one screen. Read more on Forbes.

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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 and Facebook 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 Tips To Make The Most Of Spotify

There's been a lot of discussion over the financial value of Spotify for artists, and while that subject alone is worth a number of columns (I've written a book about it, in fact), the fact is that you can make money on the platform. How much money naturally depends upon the number of plays a song gets, and if there are others (like a record label) getting a split of the revenue.

Since it all comes down to how much you songs are getting played, here are a few tips on how to maximize your plays.

1. Include your Spotify destination in all communications with your fans. That includes newsletters, websites, blogs, posts and emails. The more people that know where to find your music, the better.

2. Create Spotify playlists. Playlists are a great way to help fans discover your music. You can post some that consist of only your songs, but it's better to mix in other songs from other similar artists or artists you like.

3. Release your music to all platforms at the same time. It makes no sense to give an exclusive to iTunes or another platform (even though they didn't ask for it) for a period of time before it's available on Spotify. Having your music available on both at the same time will reinforce your numbers on both platforms.

Remember, your music is your marketing! The more people that hear it, the better it is for any artist or band as it increases the demand for your catalog, show tickets and merch. Don't hold back your music from subscription platforms because the income is small right now. If people like what they hear, you'll find it will increase soon.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

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 Losing The Critical Teen Demographic

Facebook still says it's growing, but it's beginning to lose the critical teen demographic, at least in the US, according to Piper Jaffray and shown below in an infographic from Statista.

Facebook is also beginning to see attrition with bands and brands as well, since it's more difficult than ever to reach your entire audience without paying (the average post only reaches about 16%). With fewer teens paying attention, there's less and less of a reason for an artist, band or musician to be on the network. You won't see a mass exodus from the service yet, but watch out in the future!


You will find more statistics at Statista

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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.