The Importance Of A Short Release Cycle

If you've read my book, "Music 3.0: A Survival Guide To Making Music In the Internet Age," you know that one of the things that I recommend to artists and bands is to release music in a far more timely manner than we're used to today. In order to stay relevant to their fans, an artist must release a song or two at least every quarter (preferably every 6 to 8 weeks). This keeps the fans involved and has the added benefit of giving the fans a chance to absorb each song, instead of gravitating to only one or two when an album is released. Indeed, the days of the 2 year wait in between albums is over if an artist wants to keep his fan-base.

Now it seems that Warner Nashville has gotten the message and is now prepared to release 6 song albums on a more regular basis.  In face, Warner's is dividing Blake Shelton's "Hillbilly Bone" as a "Six Pak," a 6 song album of new material to be released on March 2 that will be followed by another six-song release in August.

Warner Music Nashville SVP of Sales and Marketing Peter Strickland told Billboard that the Six Pak will enable artists "to deliver music to [fans] on a much more regular basis at a value price package." The only thing they've not told us yet is how much the package will cost, which will be a major key to its success.

Headed For Only 3 Majors

With EMI in a death spiral due to a huge debt burden that it can't possibly pay, it looks like the 4 major labels (dubbed "The 4 Ugly Sisters" by former EMI exec Rupert Perry) will soon be 3.

If you think that the other majors are right behind EMI though, think again. Sony Music just had a great sales year thanks to Michael Jackson's untimely demise and ultimate huge boost in sales. Warner Records, for all the predicted doom and gloom (including from yours truly), is actually gaining market share and their stock price is rising, and Universal Music Group is still the king of the music world in terms of sales and ancillary income streams.

The venerable EMI was a special case among the majors in the last couple of years. Private equity investment group Terra Firma bit off more than they could financially chew at the peak of the market, thinking that if nothing else, EMI's enormous catalog would see them through. With the stock market tanking last year, major talent like Paul McCartney and Radiohead leaving in droves, and with the label's decimated staff not capable of bringing in new acts with hits, this once great and well-run label became a shell of its former self.

At this point, it looks like a long shot that EMI will survive as a label, although its enormous catalog is worth a lot of money (just not enough to allow it to prosper). Still, sometime in the near future, the major label ranks will shrink to 3.

The State Of The Internet - Part 2

A few days ago, we posted The State of The Internet numbers that looked more at Internet users than anything else. Pingdom recently posted some amazing stats about "Internet 2009 In Numbers," that are more about the Internet itself. Here are some highlights.


There are:

• 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; 18% increase in Internet users since previous year.

• 81.8 million .COM domain names at the end of 2009; 12.3 million .NET and 7.8 million .ORG

• 234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.

• 90 trillion emails were sent on the Internet in 2009. There are 1.4 billion email users worldwide.

• 26 million blogs on the Internet.

• 27.3 million tweets on Twitter per day as of Nov 2009.

• 350 million people on Facebook and 50% of them log in every day. There are more than 500,000 active Facebook applications.

• 4 billion photos hosted by Flickr as of Oct 2009. 2.5 billion photos are uploaded each month to Facebook.

• 1 billion videos served by YouTube each day, and 12.2 billion videos viewed per month. 924 million videos are viewed per month on Hulu in the US as of Nov 2009. The average Internet user in the US watches 182 online videos each month.

The Internet and its use continues to grow at breakneck speed. Let's see what the next year brings.

Social Media Management

Let's face it, social media is complicated, especially for a musician who would rather be playing or writing than dealing with something that can be so abstract. It wouldn't be so bad is there was only a single network like MySpace or Twitter to look after, but the fact of the matter is that the typical artist or band has a presence on at least the following:

• MySpace
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Your email list

Plus you could add in Sonicbids, Reverbnation, blogs or any of the nearly 100 other social networks with over a million subscribers.

In order to use these tools efficiently so there's enough time left in the day to make some music, an artist/band needs a strategy to make social media into an effective tool of growing an audience and communicating with them. Social Media Management (SMM) is not only the overall strategy for using all of these social tools, but the way you use them as well.

Here are some of the strategic points that SMM covers:

1) How the email addresses of friends and followers are harvested to a central list
2) Which social media networks will be used and when
3) How the artist/band website integrates with the social networks
4) How social PR (public relations) will be used in conjunction with the social networks
5) How SEO (search engine optimization) will be used in all text copy
6) Crafting and controlling the message
7) Crafting and controlling any additional media
8) Measuring and analyzing the above

In upcoming posts, we'll be looking at the various aspects of social media management and how they can be employed to increase you audience and keep them happy without it taking 20 hours out of your day.

The State Of The Internet

Focus.com offered this great graphic that tells exactly who uses the Internet, what they do with it, and how often. Unfortunately, the graphic won't go any larger than you see on the left in Blogger, so you'll have to go to Mashable to see it in full.

Here are some of the interesting points that the graphic makes:

- Internet use is as even as it gets. 74% of men use it, but so do 74% of women.

- 93% of people ages 18-29 use it, 70% of people 50 – 64 are online, but only 38% of people 65 and older.

- The higher the income level, the more someone has broadband access.

- 94% of college graduates are online (that low?), while only 39% of people with less than a high school education are.

- Just like you'd expect, Internet use is up significantly in just the past five years. In 2005, 27% of people surveyed used the Internet “several times a day.” Now it’s 38% (once again, that low?)

- 58% of users have a desktop computer while 46% have a laptop.

- Ages 25 – 44 make up the majority of people who blog. Only 7% of people under 25 do but people 55 – 64 make up 14%.

- 54% of bloggers consider themselves experts on whatever it is they’re blogging about, 15% are "confessional" and 16% are "snarky." 41% are journalistic while 44% are "humorous."

- Norway has the highest level of Internet penetration, while the United States is in fifth place.

- Japan has the fastest Internet connections on average with the average speed at a whopping 61mbps!!! The US is 15th with an average of only 4.8mbps.

- The average mobile Internet connection is only about 700 Kbps, which is no surprise if you own an iPhone and you like to surf the web.

The Number of Followers Isn't Important

There's too much emphasis on the number of friends, contacts or followers that one has these days. Regardless of whether we're talking about a social network or email list, to many, it's just a game and the one with the most friends wins.

In Music 3.0, that's not how it works though. The number of friends is really irrelevant. It's the quality of those connections that are important. Big Twitter follower numbers don't matter much if most of your contacts ignore your communication. They have to truly want what you have to offer for the connection to be worth much.

In fact, your focus should be on how often you connect and collaborate with your followers, since that's far more important than the shear numbers of followers that you have. You have friends and followers for a reason, and that's because they believe that you can offer something helpful or something interesting to them, or in the case of music, something they really want to experience. You are there for them, not the other way around.

Marketing To Your "Tribe"

An artist has 2 categories of fans - casual fans that may like you or your type of music but don't love you, and really passionate fans that love everything you do. Some call these your "true fans," "superfans," or "uberfans." Marketing guru Seth Godin calls them your "tribe."

Here's a brief excerpt about marketing to your tribe from my book, Music 3.0 - A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age.

"Be extremely careful about how you market to your tribe. Chances are your tribe wants everything you have to offer, but they don’t want to be hyped on it. Make an announcement about a new release or a piece of swag, but don’t oversell it. Tribe members don’t need to know that you think your new music is the greatest thing you ever did and it’s better than the Foo Fighters last release. They’ll decide for themselves and then sell it for you in their own conversations if they like it.

The way to market to your tribe is by simply presenting your product to them. Just make them aware that it’s available, and they’ll do the rest. You can take it a bit further by offering them information about the product - the more exclusive, the better.

Instead of a sales pitch:

• Give them a behind the scenes story about the making of the product.

• Tell them where the idea for it came.

• Tell them about all the people involved, especially other tribe members.

• Provide interviews with others involved in the project.

• Give them all the trivia involved in the project, no matter how small. True fans will eat it up. If it’s a new song, tell them where it was recorded, who the engineer and producer were, how many tracks were needed, how long the mix took, how many mixes you did, how the final mix compared to the rough mix, and all of the hundred other fine details that go into producing a song. If you just produced a new T-shirt, describe where the design came from, why you chose the manufacturer, what the shirt is made of, why you chose the color, etc. Get the idea?

Giving them insight that no ones else has makes them feel special, will keep them loyal, and will show mere fans and lurkers the benefits of tribal participation."

You can read more excerpts from the Music 3.0 Internet music survival guide and look at a table of contents on the Bobby Owsinski website.

The Music Industry of the Future

We live in a time when the music industry is in a state of flux. It's trying to adapt to the new while holding on to the past - some months more in the present, and other months still steeped in the old. One thing we know for sure is that it's changing quickly. Music 3.0 is here to stay and music 2.5 isn't coming back.

So what will the music industry of the future look like? There are 5 areas where it will change, as I see it.

1) Subscription Music - Industry pundits have been predicting for ages that digital music distribution will ultimately change from paid downloads to subscription, and they'll finally be right. The upcoming US introduction of the Spotify service will push the ball up the hill. The iTunes subscription service (which I predict will debut in 2011) will seal the deal.

2) Hybrid Record Labels - Even today most record labels are more concerned with selling music products than anything else. In the music industry of the future, the new hybrid labels will be more concerned with rights management than actual sales. Since it's so easy for an artist to produce and even market his own product (the traditional duties of a record label), they'll no longer need those functions. But they will need an entity that's expert in overseeing their digital rights in the variety of distribution streams that will exist, from streaming to download to subscription to licensing (supplanting the traditional publisher) to even physical product like CDs (while they're still around) and boxed sets.

3) A New Gig Model - A band dies if it doesn't gig. That's always been the way an artist made the majority of its income. It's pretty impossible to gig outside of an act's home area unless they have an agent, and the agent had a good relationship with promoters and venues. The new model would make it easier to connect an artist directly with venues, either eliminating the agent or as an adjunct to an agent. On the concert side of the music business, the agent is the middle man, much the same as a record label. Agents will have to change the same way that labels have.

4) The New 5th Beatle - Producer George Martin was always the uncredited "5th Beatle," since his input was such a huge part of their success. In the future, that person will not be a musician, but a web presence expert. It'll be a kid that's spent all of his time on every social network, learning all the ins and outs. The guy who just graduated from college who learned everything about web design and programming that he could just because he thought it was so cool. The kid who loves music, loves the band, can't play a lick, but can handle every aspect of their social media presence better than anyone in the organization. He's the guy that allows them to utilize Music 3.0 (the interaction with their audience) to it's fullest.

5) A New Media Package Replaces The Album - The album as a package was great for it's time, but that time is not now. At some point in the future a new multi-media package will combine audio, video, photos, text and interactivity into a new product that's fit for the time we live in. There are already a number of experiments that we'll soon see come to life (MXP4 is one technology; the major label backed CMX is another). Regardless of whether these catch on or not, it's inevitable that some combination package will.

In some ways, the future is almost here. We're starting to see the social media 5th Beatle pop up. Subscription music has been around for a while and growing, but still not at critical mass. Record labels are getting hipper to the needs of Music 3.0, a new gig model is brewing, and the rich media album is about to be born. The question is not longer if, it's when will the future get here?

A&R - The Movie

Here's another post along the lines of "The A&R Guy" from the other day. Too bad that it's so close to reality.

Once upon a time, there were some great A&R people out there, but that was back in the days of Music 1.0 (before big business took over the major labels) and 1.5 (at the beginning of conglomerate rule of the music business). As the music business turned into really big money and Wall Street became interested, everything began to change. Then came MTV, which pushed the mainstream industry down a path that it finds itself today.

Lucky for us all, Music 3.0 can be the savior, since an artist can easily reach an audience without the help of a record label. Record labels do have their place and can supply an artist with the needed infrastructure when it's time to take things to the next level, but letting them have a piece of all your income streams (as the animation suggests) isn't necessary or even realistic on their part.

The mechanics are now in place to do most of the work yourself that a traditional record label used to do. The difference is, you can do it better.

12 Social Media Tactics For Artists

Heidi Cohen at ClickZ recently had a great post regarding the 13 tactics to make social media work harder. I've adapted her post for Music 3.0, since her points are excellent, but I've found that only 12 of them apply. They are:


1) Understand how and why your fans use social media. This is the best way to make sure that you're interacting with the majority of your fans in the first place.

2) Develop content that meets your fans needs and interests. This shouldn't be too hard. They like you already and will probably want anything you give them. Don't be afraid to offer rough mixes, rehearsal and studio out-takes, and behind-the-scenes videos.

3) Use a variety of forms of content and understand the role that each plays in social media. Blog posts, video, forums posts, Twitter and Facebook posts are all important. Many fans prefer one over another, so it's best not to ignore any of them.

4) Encourage your fans to share content. The key to a healthy fan base (or Tribe" as "Seth Godin calls it) is not only their interaction with you (the artist), but also with each other.

5) Support and promote consumer-generated content. Mash-ups of songs and videos can be as important as your own releases.

6) Integrate product information into your content/story. Don't sell or hype your fans, inform them. They'll do the promotion for you.

7) Use content in social media to help build organic search optimization. Always think of SEO (search engine optimization) when developing content. Using the proper keyword phrases in your copy and metadata (even for videos) is crucial for being found, and therefore getting the word out.

8) Listen to, interact with, and recognize your fans. Communication can't be just one way. When they reach out, you must reach back.

9) Provide immediacy and nimbly react to events as they unfold. Social media is immediate by nature, so your fan base expects a more-or-less immediate response.

10) Participate in social media with a human voice. For social media to work well for an artist, the artist herself must participate. Certain communication can work through a surrogate, but fans can see right through a post that's supposed to be you but isn't.

11) Encourage band members and crew to participate in social media. The perspective of everyone involved with an artist is valuable to the fan, that's why it's important that everyone in the artist's circle should participate at least a little.

12) Track relevant conversations, responses, fan relationships, and sales across social media forums. The real key to effective and efficient social media management is measurement.

These are all great points and worth considering in your social media management.

The A&R Guy

This is a hilarious animation depicting an exchange between a stereotypical A&R guy and a remixer regarding some work. Forgive the language and crassness of the video for those reader sensitive to such things (if you're in the music business, you're certainly not), but it's so spot on that it's pretty funny.

Still No DIY Breakout Artists

The music industry news on the net has recently been abuzz with some comments that Tommy Boy Records and New Music Seminar founder Tommy Silverman made regarding the scarcity of DIY (do-it-yourself) breakout artists.

Tommy analyzed all 105,575 album releases from 2008 and found that only 225 had sales of more than 10,000 units. Of that, only 12 were unaffiliated with a record label, be it major label related or indie. Now this seems like a staggeringly small number but it illustrates a couple of points:

1) Just because distribution is relatively easy in Music 3.0, it doesn't mean that you don't need to infrastructure to get to the next level. Modern M30 music distribution, either physically or digitally, still requires specialists in promotion, PR, social media and distribution techniques to make an audience or potential audience aware of the product, then make it easy for them to consume it, then find something that the artist can monetize. While you're starting to see some indie acts breaking through lately (most visibly Vampire Weekend at number 1 last week), it's still an overwhelming job that requires a lot more time and expertise than a DIY artist usually has available.

Granted, Silverman is the longtime owner of a successful label so he's biased on the label side, but facts are facts. As it stands right now, DIY can only take you so far, then you need a label to take you the rest of the way. Except that there are a few companies on the horizon which might turn out to be the intermediary between DIY and label that will become an alternative for the artist. Stay tuned for more news as it becomes available.

2) Just because production is so easy it doesn't mean the music will be any good. It's easier today to make a recording than ever before. The simplest, lowliest, least expensive recording package has more horsepower than the Beatles ever had at their disposal in their prime, yet you can't say that we're in the golden age of music at the moment. I've had an ongoing debate with several of my contemporaries about whether this is a musical, social, economic, or cultural phenomena, but whatever it is, we've had periods when music was far more vital than what we're living through at the moment. One thing you can say about Music 1.0 through 2.5, the labels were great gatekeepers and you really had to be good to get by them, and they usually just took the cream off the top.

Once again, just because it's easy doesn't mean it'll be any good. If you don't put in the time (the 10,000 hours to genius as Malcolm Gladwell would put it), you just can't develop the skills, and today's songwriters, musicians, producers and engineers have far fewer opportunities to develop that skill than ever before. Fewer studios to apprentice at, fewer venues to play at, and fewer teachers who really know how to make a record to learn from severely limits someone just starting today and it reflects in the music.

Keith Barr, one of the founders of Alesis, once complained to me that he thought that his ADAT digital tape machines would cause of revolution in music that would bring about new artists every bit the equal of The Beatles, Stones, etc., but unfortunately that never came to pass. That's continued into the current day of DAWs, but you can't blame today's musicians, it's just the unfortunate hand they've been dealt.

We really need a revolution in the music business. One that takes everyone by the ear like we know it can be done. We're in a transitional period in Music 3.0, but the new dawn is just around the corner. We can all feel it.