What Data Should Musicians Collect?

The Internet has given today's musician the ability to collect mounds of data about her fans like never before, but the quality of that data is just as important as the quantity. Once again Jon Ostrow has hit the nail on the head with a great article called "What Data Should Musicians Be Concerned With" on the MicControl blog. Here are 5 data points that the article suggests you collect and why.

Location Data 
This is important so you know where to perform, and so you can better target your promotion.
  * Best way to collect: Make it a required field during mailing list registration.

Age
This allows you to choose the best venues to play. No use playing in a club if most of your audience can't get in.
  * Best way to collect: Once again, make it a field during mailing list registration, or check your blog, website and YouTube stats.

Social Media Use
To maximize your social promotion, you have to know how your fans are using social media.
  * Best way to collect: The article suggests following some related blogs and watching the comments, but another way is to design a survey and ask them.

Time Of Social Media Use
You have to know the best time of day to tweet or post to maximize your promotion.
  * Best way to collect: Hootsuite and Facebook analytics, but the article also suggests a new service (at least to me) called Timely that analyzes your tweets and suggests the best way. You can also try TweetWhen, but be aware that their suggestions differ.

Method Of Music Purchase
This is important because it not only tells you where your fans like to purchase music but how much they're willing to spend. This allows you to tailor your offerings to their spending habits.
  * Best way to collect: Once again, ask your fans with a survey from Polldaddy.com or SurveyMonkey.com.

Read Jon's fine article in its entirety for more great insights.

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The Music 3.0 Week In Review

Here are the posts from the last week of Music 3.0: The Blog Behind The Book.

Record Labels Claim They Lost $75 Trillion To Piracy.
When asked to estimate the damages they incurred in their suit against file-sharing service Limewire, the major record labels claimed they lost $400 billion (with a "B") on the low end, to $75 trillion (with a "T") on the high end. Read More...

10 Great Music Marketing Ideas
Here are 10 music marketing ideas from the Music 3.0 Internet Music guidebook. It’s easier to sell your music if you add extra value to it, so it helps to think outside the box when it comes to distributing your music. Read More...


Amazon Is First To The Digital Locker. So What?
Today Amazon announced a digital music locker service that enables users to upload and stream their music on multiple devices...  Read More...


The Best Time To Tweet
If you're using social media for promotion, then the timing of when you do it is critical. Read More...



How "Friday" Proves That Payola Still Exists
What's confusing is that the 60 million views have turned into just 12 radio plays so far. Read More...

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How "Friday" Proves Payola Still Exists

By now everyone has either heard or heard about the runaway viral YouTube hit "Friday" by 13 year old Rebecca Black. You can argue all you want about the merits of the song, but one thing's for sure, with more than 60 million views so far, someone out there loves it. So what's confusing is that the 60 million views have turned into just 12 radio plays so far. Yes, you read that right - just 12 radio plays.

But listen to what one radio programmer told Digital Music News:
"It's not going to get played unless a major label promotion department brings all of its resources to get it played, otherwise things just don't get added. Nothing's getting incented or enticed - it's the reason why there aren't that many independent songs on the radio right now. It's also the reason why records like 'Friday' and 'Bedroom Intruder' don't get radio play."

Excuse me, but doesn't that sound like the programmer is admitting to payola? They won't play a song unless it's incented or enticed? There are strong laws against payola (where a label pays a station or programming for them to play a song) and the music and radio business has seen at least two major payola scandals that nearly brought them to their knees.

Forget about the payola for a second. Just how out of touch is radio if they have this huge consumer demand yet they ignore it? If there was ever an example that radio and the major labels are about nothing but money, this is it.

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The Best Time To Tweet

If you're using social media for promotion, then the timing of when you do it is critical. Do it when most people are busy and not paying attention and you'll never get your message in front of them.

In a post a while back, I showed where the ideal times for Facebook posts were at 11AM, 3PM and 8PM Eastern time. Now a new study shows that later in the day is the best time to tweet as well.

According to Dan Zarrella, a researcher at Hubspot, who looked at millions of tweets and showed their results in a webinar entitled "The Science of Timing," the later you tweet in the day, the better. The reason is that from 2PM to 5PM your followers are more likely to see your tweet because there are fewer things demanding their attention. In fact, 4PM was deemed to be the best time of the day.

Zarrella also found that the weekends are great for tweet attention as people are more relaxed and aren't conflicted by work. The other thing that was interesting was that he also found that tweeting the same link multiple times a day is an effective strategy, and unlike excessive emails, people don't seem to mind. I know this for a fact because I've been tweeting my blog post links twice a day for a while now and can see the positive results.

Finally, Zarrella has also put together a nice page called TweetWhen that will analyze your last 100 tweets and tell you when the best times for you to tweet are. Mine's at 7PM on a Friday night so you can expect it then.

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Amazon Is First To The Digital Music Locker - So What?

Today Amazon announced a digital music locker service that enables users to upload and stream their music on multiple devices (PCs, Macs, and Android phones and tablets, and anything on the Android operating system, which eliminates iPhones nor iPads for now). The service is called the "Amazon Cloud Player" and all US Amazon customers start with 5GB free, which they then can then upgrade for $20 a year to 20GB. The twist is that just by buying an MP3 album at Amazon, you will automatically get the extra 20GB for free (which sounds like a great deal).

And the rest of the world breathes a hearty sigh and says, "So What?" This might've been a bigger deal had the announcement come from Apple or even Google, but Amazon, while a leader in books, is a distant second to iTunes in the digital music space with only 15% of the market compared to 70% by iTunes.

The price may be right but you'd be hard-pressed to find a music consumer who couldn't wait for this product. In fact, I'd venture to say that most don't or can't see the advantages to a cloud service for their music. Plus, Amazon pushed full speed ahead with the launch without getting the consent from the labels first, which may be problematic as time goes on.

The idea here is that instead of storing all you music on one desktop, laptop, phone or tablet, you probably want the music on all of those devices. The big pain is having to copy and transfer everything over, and in many cases you just won't have the storage space to do so anyway. A cloud music locker like Amazon's means that you store all of your music on their online servers ("The Cloud") which you can then access from any of your devices, saving you the time of transfer and the storage space.

The downside is that the major labels want to get paid a second time for this privilege, saying that the music that you already bought once doesn't give you the right to stream to any device that you want. Now you can debate that a number of ways, but both Apple and Google (who are rumored to have their own digital music lockers set to debut sometime later in the year) are in discussions with the labels to come to some sort of agreement on this issue. Only time will tell how that will play out.

I guess there's some advantage to being a "first mover" rather than following the crowd when the other companies launch their services, but the fact they haven't done their homework with the labels can end up costing them their advantage. Let's see what the next week, and the label's response, brings.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear your comments on your Amazon Cloud Player experiences.

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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.

10 Great Music Marketing Ideas

Here are 10 music marketing ideas from the Music 3.0 Internet Music guidebook. It’s easier to sell your music if you add extra value to it, so it helps to think outside the box when it comes to distributing your music. Thanks to Bruce Houghton of the great music blog Hypebot for numbers 7 through 10.

1) Develop a package - This could mean anything from a CD and a vinyl album, to a digital download and album with all alternative mixes, to a boxed set of CD’s or anything in-between (Trent Reznor’s Ghosts I-IV is a great example). The idea is to go beyond just the typical CD and digital offerings.

2) Sequential numbering - Numbering a physical product (for example; "#5 of 1000") gives it the feeling of exclusivity. The product becomes a special edition and a must-have for the true fan.

3) Tie it to merchandise - Offer a physical product that contains the code for a free download of your album. Mos Def was so successful with the T-shirt release of The Ecstatic that Billboard magazine even began counting it as a music release on their charts. Other artists have sold their music via codes on such items as golf balls, bandanas and even canned food!

4) Release a “double-sided” digital single - Rhino Record's digital releases celebrating 60 years of the 45 RPM single set a fine example for this format. For between $1.49 and $1.99, Rhino provided the original hit song, its B side (the flip side of the vinyl record) and the original artwork. You can do the same by providing two songs for price of one - an A and a B side.

5) Release on an old alternative format - We’ve seen some artists (The Decemberists Hazards of Love come to mind) release a vinyl-only physical product to great success. Cheap Trick did it on the old 8-track format from the 60’s, and some bands have even recently released on cassette tape. Releasing on a older format can be good as a publicity tool (as long as everyone else isn’t doing it) and who knows, maybe you can start a trend?

6) Release on a new alternative format - A new alternative format that’s getting some traction is flash memory, or the common USB memory stick. Once again, Trent Reznor met with great viral success by planting unmarked memory sticks in bathrooms at Nine Inch Nail’s concerts, and Sony even released the 25th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s Thriller on the format. Everybody uses these things so you’re bound to get at least a look, which you can’t always say about other formats.

7) Three Sides - Offer a song in an early studio version, the final mix, and then captured live.

8) Radical Mixes - Offer two or three very different mixes of the same song, perhaps even done by the fans.

9) Two Sides of (Your City) - Two different bands each contribute a track to a series chronicling your local scene.

10) “Artist X” Introduces _____ - Add a track by your favorite new artist/band along with one of yours. This is similar to a gig trade-out with another band that many bands use as a way to play in new venues. The idea is that the band you feature will also feature you on their release as well.

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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.

Record Labels Claim They Lost $75 Trillion To Piracy

Yes, you read the headline correctly. When asked to estimate the damages they incurred in their suit against file-sharing service Limewire, the major record labels claimed they lost $400 billion (with a "B") on the low end, to $75 trillion (with a "T") on the high end. This is what they estimate they've lost to piracy in the 10 years of its existence.

OK, let's look at how incredibly grossly inflated those figures are. First of all, $75 trillion is more than the GDP of the entire world, which was only $59.62 trillion when last calculated in 2008 (you can bet it hasn't gone up since then).

Now let's look at the low end of $400 billion. In 2010 the world-wide revenue from recorded music was $35.1 billion, and the US portion of that was $12.6 billion, according to eMarketer:Global Music. And how does that add up to $400 billion? Even over 10 years at a generous 20% loss, it still only adds up to $25 billion. And recent figures by the NPD group found that only 16% of Limewire users downloaded music at it's peak, and the figure in later years was closer to 9%. Regardless which figure you go with, the numbers thrown out by the labels are completely absurd.

Luckily, the judge saw through the farce and called it like it is - ridiculous.

This is the problem with the music business today. It's all about the money. If record labels and the conglomerates that own them would concentrate more on the music than the accumulation of green, we'd have a much healthier business with more quality music and lots more fans that want to buy it. Fat chance of that happening.

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

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Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Is This iPad App The 21st Century Album?

There have been a lot of attempts to build a new digital album format that properly represents what people might want today, with very little excitement or penetration so far. Now EMI (of all companies) seems to be on the right track with a new iPad app version of Swedish house producer super group Swedish House Mafia’s ‘Until One’.  The product is actually an app version of the trio’s book and album combined with additional features layered on top (see screen shots below). The features include:

  * 9 tracks from the album

  * All of the photos from the book

  * Live and behind the scenes footage

  * Interviews

  * Social feeds

  * Dynamically updated news content

The app/album costs $9.99 and is available at the iTunes App Store.

This is very cool because it's thinking outside the box, but it's really not that far out. It's more of a natural extension of what the album can be. I see it as the wave of the future.

Here's a look at what the app can do.

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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.

Has Social Media Growth Hit The Wall?

It may be that the excellent growth in social media that we've all been experiencing may be at an end. According to a new eMarketer study, 63.7% of US web users already use social media and they only expect that number to climb to 67% by the end of 2013.

More than 90% of 18 to 24 year old users already use social media regularly, as does 80% of 12 to to 34 year old online users, which means that you can't rely on simple organic growth anymore - you got to work for it the old fashioned way. It you don't cement those relationships now, you may not get a second chance.

Here are a couple of charts that tell the story.

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The New Word For Spam - Bacon

There's a new classification of annoyance in your email box and it's called (I'm not making this up) "Bacon." Spam is unsolicited, unwanted email from an unknown sender that's trying to get you to buy something or scam you out of something. Bacon is legitimate email sent from legitimate senders that's trying to get you to buy something (you probably even asked for at some point).

It's also turning into a huge business and much more profitable than Spam. As the infographic below shows, once a marketer has you on their list, it's unlikely that you'll try to, or be able to get off. Everything you need to know about Bacon can be found below.

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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 Court Decision That May Change The Music Business

There's just been a decision by the United States Supreme Court that may have major financial implications on the major record labels that could very well push some of them over the edge into insolvency. I've been reporting on the legal battle between Universal Music Group (UMG) and Eminem's FBT Productions for a couple of years, and it now looks like the case has finally been decided in Eminem's favor. Here's the gist of the decision and why it's important.

FBT brought the suit against UMG stating that a download sale shouldn't be treated like it is in a normal record agreement, but as part of a license deal. The difference is that in a record deal, the record label manufacturers the product (CDs) and pays the artist a royalty of anywhere between 12 and 20% of the wholesale price. In a licensing deal, the record label provides the licensee (such as a distributor in another country producing CDs) with a master, and they in turn manufacture the product. The record label and the artist split the proceeds from the license deal 50/50.

FBT contended that since UMG was only providing a master to an online distributor like iTunes or Amazon, and the distributor was manufacturing the product (in this case making a copy of a digital music file), all online sales are in fact license deals and should be paid as such - at a 50% rate instead of 12% in FBT's case.

You can see the financial implications here. If FBT won, not only would UMG owe them a ton of money, but every other artist at every other label would then sue for more money using the case as a precedent. The entire major label economy would be rocked!

UMG won the first round of the case, but FBT appealed and had the ruling overturned. Then UMG essentially appealed the appeal and took the case to the US Supreme Court for a ruling. The Supreme's refused to hear the case though, and sent it back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to determine the damages.

There's some speculation that this is at least a $50 million decision for Eminem and FBT, and every other major artist will now go back to their record labels with their palms open wide. Lady Gaga and newer artist's will not have this ability however, as labels have since tightened up their contract language regarding downloads, but anyone with an older agreement can probably expect some dough.

The reactions from the industry over the next week or so should be very interesting.

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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.

Apple's Cloud Music Strategy

While most music industry pundits have been predicting that music streaming would soon hit critical mass, it certainly isn't here yet even though it continues to grow. Those same pundits also declare that if Apple would change iTunes to a streaming instead of a download model tomorrow, the rest of the world would follow, which is no doubt true.

The Apple streaming anticipation has grown to a fever pitch, especially after last year's acquisition of Lala, but don't expect that to happen any time soon. Here's why.

1) Downloads are still a big business.

2) Streaming requires new license agreements with the record labels.

But aren't there rumors abounding about Apple in new license talks with the major labels? Yes, they're having those discussions, but not for the reason you think.

Indeed, Apple will soon be announcing a new cloud service (storage via the Internet instead of on board your device), perhaps as soon as the beginning of April, but the idea is that it offers a sort of "insurance" for the end user in case her songs are wiped out on her computer, iPhone or iPod. If all your songs live in Apple's cloud, you can access them from any device instead of storing them locally (although you can do that too, or both). Hard drive died? No problem, the songs are stored in the cloud.

The problem is that the record labels wanted to get paid for a second download for the cloud privilege, so Apple had to enter into new licensing discussions as a result. Who wants to buy the same music twice?

Want another good reason why you'll see an Apple cloud service soon? We'll all soon be living in a tablet world, where iPads replace laptops so you won't have as much on-board storage. But you won't need that storage either, if everything lives in the cloud. Expect Apple to call it something other than "the cloud" though. Right now, the bets are on "personal locker."

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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.