Tunecore Publishing President Jamie Purpora On The Latest Inner Circle Podacst

Jamie Purpora, Tunecore's president of publishing, is my guest on my latest Inner Circle podcast. We discuss the merits of  Tunecore publishing versus other publishers, foreign rights, and more. Jamie's a fountain of wisdom and experience when it comes to publishing, so there's a lot of great information to soak up.

In the intro, I'll discuss why more people are going into tech than music these days, as well as Guitar Center's labor dispute with employees.  

Remember that you can find the podcast either on iTunes or at BobbyOInnerCircle.com, and now also on Stitcher

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3 Steps To Creating An Online Contest

One of the great things for an artist about being online is that there are so many options for promotion. A great one is launching a contest. Here's an excerpt from my Social Media Promotion For Musicians book that outlines general contest basics.

"Artists, bands and musicians are always looking for ways to increase their fan engagement and contests can be a good way to do that. A white paper from Launchpad6, a site that specializes in conducting all kinds of online contests, had a number of suggestions regarding conducting a successful one with video. The following three ideas from the paper are worth considering.

1. You need a premise. A premise is the basic idea of the contest itself. Here are some ideas to ask yourself first:

• Is content for the contest readily available or easily created?
• Is that content interesting?
• Is the content shareable?
• Is there enough passion for the idea?
• Is an element of voyeurism involved?

2. You need a prize. Cash is always king when it comes to attention, but sometimes smaller more niche prizes can be more alluring to your target audience. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the prize appeal to my target market?
• Will my market find the prize valuable?
• Are there any other smaller prizes that I can offer?

3. You need promotion. Your contest won’t get any traction if it’s not promoted and you get people to enter. Here are a few ideas to consider:

• Create a video for the contest and seed it around the web
• List your contest in directory sites
• Don’t forget social media
• Try partnering with a blog or industry publication or anything that has more reach than you do."

Be aware that many platforms have very strict rules about contests, so be sure to read them before you launch. In most cases, it's much easier to use a third party plugin to help even though you may have to pay for it.

You can read additional excerpts from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and my other books on the excerpt section of bobbyowsinski.com.

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Digital Music Revenue Is Now 70% Of Total US Sales

Physical music product is quickly falling by the wayside as digital music revenue is now 70% of total US music sales, according to the latest mid-year figures from the RIAA and shown in this Statista infographic.

While vinyl is still on the rise (up 41% this year so far), CD sales continue to fall (down 19.1%). What's interesting is that music downloads have remained fairly constant, but streaming adoption is happening at a fast clip, as seen in the following chart.

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Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Partners With The Enemy

Our digital music world is continually evolving and both artists and record labels are constantly forced to try something new in an effort to maximize revenue, as evidenced by the latest U2 album giveaway on iTunes. Thom Yorke, the lead singer of the band Radiohead, has a very high global profile and a track record of going against established industry business practices.

That’s why his latest BitTorrent Bundle solo release, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, is such an interesting test case. If it sells well (and it appears that way so far), many within the industry look to it as a model for what the album release of the future may look like.

Of course, BitTorrent has been widely known as a primary source of content piracy in the past, a reputation that the company hopes it can finally shrug with it’s Bundles format, which puts content owners firmly and securely in control.

A Bundle allows music artists, authors, and film makers to create a digital package that allows a combination of free and “gated” (paid) content. It’s actually a single downloadable file that can contain audio, text, graphic or video assets in any combination. Each Bundle can be unlocked via a payment, Facebook Like or Tweet or anything else the content owner chooses. 

Bundles were first introduced in May of 2013, and since then more than 120 million have been downloaded. There have only been a few high profile artists like Yorke though. Madonna released her Secretprojectrevolution movie on the platform as did Moby with his Innocents album. Of course, BitTorrent hopes that more high profile artists and groups will now consider Bundles as a distribution alternative on the heels of Yorke’s release. Read more on Forbes.

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Urban Outfitters Is Now The Biggest Vinyl Retailer

We all know about the resurgence of vinyl in the US, but it's interesting that the demographics don't skew to the older "classic" album buyer who grew up with them. In fact, it's the younger music consumer that's pushing the format's comeback.

This is now outlined by the fact that the bastion of hipsterdom, Urban Outfitters, recently announced that it is the now the world's biggest seller of vinyl records. The company is also a main retailer for turntables as well.

Although Urban Outfitters is the largest brick and mortar retailer with 8.1% of the market, Amazon is actually the largest vinyl dealer in the US at 12.3%.

Urban Outfitters actually uses a very innovative way for stocking vinyl product. The company rents out it shelves to more than 100 vendors. The company then provides its 288 stores with an online list of inventory that they can then stock on consignment.

All that said, only 6.1 million vinyl albums were sold in total in the US in 2013, which is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the industry's bottom line. That number should be surpassed this year, as the year to date total is already at 5.9 million according to Billboard.

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How Students Listen To Spotify

Spotify did an interesting survey to discover how students listened to its network in 40 colleges across the United States. There are distinct listening trends at almost every school, but here's some of what they found.

• Peak listening time is at 4PM for every school.

• Virginia Polytech, University of Minnesota, University of Georgia and University of Alabama play the happiest songs.

• Texas A&M follows musical trends more than any other school.

• Ohio State listens to the most classical music.

• University of Alabama listens to country music at twice the rate of other schools.

• University of Pennsylvania, University of Florida, and University of Minnesota Twin Cities listen to the most latin music.

• University of Washington listens to the longest, most instrumental music.

• NYU students get an hours less sleep than everywhere else and listen to more slowcore and hipster playlists.

What does this mean? You can use the info to target a particular school or area if they tend to like the type of music you play.

You can discover more from this great study, including the most popular artists by school, by going to How Students Listen.

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