11 YouTube Tips From The Pros

RealSeo just ran a great post about 11 YouTube mistakes and tips from some of the most successful video makers on the service. You can read the entire article here, but below I've condensed it to just the main points.

1. Have a main channel.

2. Make your vlogging channel unique so you stand out from other vloggers.

3. Try humor to keep your viewer's interest.

4. Don't steal or copy other people's tags, descriptions or titles for your video.

5. Don't keep putting up videos when your not getting views. Find out why they're not connecting, or collaborate with someone with more subscribers.

6. Don't try to be someone else. Originality is important.

7. Don't forget to add hyperlinks in the description box.

8. Don't make things too long.

9. Don't forget to have a Subscribe button at the end.

10. Don't do something just because you think it might get views. Do content that you care about.

11. Don't forget to watch other videos for inspiration and tips.

These are all pretty common sense tips, and a number of them I've already touched on in previous posts. Keep in mind that they're all from people who've had much success on YouTube, so they're worth some consideration.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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The 3 Pillars Of A Successful Brand

I've discussed branding a lot here and in my Music 3.0 Internet Music guidebook, and I've found that the thought of it either intrigues or appalls most artists. One of the problems with the process of branding is that by being such an obvious goal, it can feel like a sell-out. That very well may be true in some cases were the branding is created more for manipulation than for overall promotional strategy, but it is a new fact of life in the current music business that everything is based upon brands.

The problem is that whether you like it or not, if you're an artist you're already a brand. It may not be a strong brand, but then again, it very well may have become just that without any thought or effort on your part. What I want to outline here is exactly what a brand is and how it's created.

First of all, what exactly is a brand? In all situations, it's a promise of quality and consistency. For McDonalds, that means that anywhere in the world you can easily recognize a franchise, and a Big Mac will taste the same. For an artist, that means the sound and feel of their music and their image will retain the same familiarity. Madonna changed her style in clothing and music over the years yet her sound and image has always been relatively the same. The same goes for The Beatles or any of the legacy acts that have lasted 20+ years.

So what are the pillars of building the brand? There are 3:

Familiarity: You can't have a brand unless your followers or potential followers are familiar enough with who you are. They don't even have to know what you sound like to be interested if you have enough buzz and they've heard about you enough to want to check you out.

Likeability: Your followers have to like you or something about you. It could be your music, or it could be your attitude or your image. You could even say how much you hate your fans and do everything to ridicule them, and that could be the thing they like about you. It doesn't matter what it is, but there has to be something.

Similarity: Your fans have to feel that either you represent them either in a cause or movement (like a new genre of music), or that they can be you someday. Female Olympic athletes usually don't do well in this category because their sleek and muscular look is so far beyond what the ordinary girl or women can attain that they can't relate to them. On the other hand, young girls love Taylor Swift because they feel that she could be their best friend from next door.

If you have those three things along with consistent quality product (which hopefully is your music), you've got a brand. I wouldn't intentionally try to manufacture your brand so it absolutely complies with these pillars (people usually see right through that), but always keep these things in mind that this is how your audience looks at you, although none of them may even know 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.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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Amazon Cloud Player Now Does Song Matches

Talk about a long time coming. Amazon recently updated their Cloud Player music service so it now has a function similar to iTunes Match where it scans your computer to match the songs in a master database. This allows you to listen to your songs on multiple devices without having the laborious task of uploading them to every one.

The only trouble was that iTunes had this over a year ago.

Here's the problem. A feature like this requires a new license from the record labels, which Apple was way ahead of the curve to get. Amazon had a long tough negotiation after the fact, since the labels felt that they could get a better deal than they got from Apple. So now that just leaves Google's music service on the outside looking in, but chances aren't good that will happen, since the majors don't feel that Google does enough to prevent piracy to begin with.

The new Amazon Cloud Player is available in two tiers; 250 songs stored for free, or up to 250,000 for $24.99 a year. The trick is that anything bought from the Amazon store isn't counted in those numbers, and even if you purchased a song at a lower fidelity, all songs are now available at 256kb per second. And the catch? - it won't upload anything with copy protection, which includes just about everything from the iTunes store prior to 2009.

Catch 2 - If you have more than 250 songs already uploaded and he opt for the free version, it will delete any songs above the limite, although you can reimport them when you upgrade. Catch 3 - Amazon has now separated Cloud Music from their Cloud Drive service, so they're now separate subscriptions. That means that you can't store your files along with your music on a single cloud area.

Oh, and there's a catch if you're an artist waiting for a payday thanks to the new license fees extracted from Amazon. Forget about it, since you'll see pennies on the dollar. Most of licensing money goes directly to the labels bottom line and not the artist's.

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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 State Of Music Then, Now And Tomorrow

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the following graphic from theoatmeal.com is worth 10's of thousands, as it illustrates the music business of yesterday, now and tomorrow so perfectly.

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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 Most Common Crowdfunding Mistakes

Crowdfunding campaigns for artistic projects are all the rage these days, but many of them fail when they probably shouldn't. Let's look at some of the most common mistakes you can make in a crowdfunding campaign.

• The goal is ill defined. If potential investors aren't sure exactly what you're trying to do with the money you raise, they most likely won't invest.  

• No audience to begin with. Although it's not out of the question that you can raise money for a music venture without an existing fan base, it really takes an outstanding idea, great promotion and an excellent campaign to do so. If you have an existing fan base, the bar is set a little lower in that you're already a known quantity. 

• The goal amount is unrealistic. If you're trying to raise $200,000 to record an album, you better have a good explanation as to where the money is going. Major label budgets are down to $40k and 50k these days, and everyone knows that most musicians have their own recording gear, so a large amount has to be justified. Remember, if you can't reach your goal, your campaign automatically fails. 

• The investment rewards are unappealing. If you have an investment tier of $100 and all the investor gets for that is a CD with a "thank you," you're going to fail. You have to make the rewards well worth the risk.  

• The price points are wrong. If your minimum investment begins at $100, you'll probably fail. Most investment comes from much small $25 and $50 denominations, but don't be afraid to include a $10 tier as well. Every little bit counts, and the more people that are on board, the more moment the project will have.  

• The campaign is too long. Most successful campaigns last for 30 days. If you think that you'll raise more money with a longer campaign, the facts don't bear that out. The first few days usually shows a big bump, followed by about 25 days of a lull, then there's a big investment push at the end. A longer campaign just stalls your momentum for little gain. 

• No pitch video. Most successful campaigns include an effective pitch video. It doesn't have to fancy, but it has to be sincere and get the point across of exactly what your idea is, and what the rewards will be for investing. 

• No call to action. Just like with all selling, ask for the sale in the video and elsewhere in the campaign.

Crowdfunding for music projects has a pretty good rate of success, with well over 50% being funded. Don't take that number for granted though, because a great campaign still needs a great idea, a lot of planning and a little luck to be a success.

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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.

8 Principles Of Fan Communication

Here's one of my first posts a few years ago on this blog. Back then there weren't many readers, so I thought it was worth a repost, since the info has changed and is as important as ever.

Staying in touch with your fans is probably about the most important thing an artist can do these days, but the way it's done is equally as important. In an excerpt from the Music 3.0 Internet Music Guidebook, here are 8 principles of fan communication.

1 - Talk to your fans, not at them. Don’t try to sell them, but keep them informed. Anything that reads like ad copy might be counterproductive. Always treat them with respect and never talk down to them.

2 - Engage in communication. Communication is a two-way street. Fans want to know that they’re being listened to. You don’t have to answer every email, but you have to acknowledge that you heard it. The more questions you ask, polls you supply and advice you seek, the more the fan feels connected to you.

3 - Keep your promises. If you say you’re going to do something, do it in a timely fashion. Don’t let the fans wait. If you promise you’re going to email a link and post a song, sooner is always better.

4 - Stay engaged. Even if you’re only sending something simple like a link, take the time to engage the fan. Tell her about upcoming gigs, events or releases. Take a poll. Ask for advice. This is a great opportunity for communication, so take advantage of it.

5 - Utilize pre-orders. If you have a a release coming soon, take pre-orders as soon as you announce it, even it’s free. It’s best to get people to act while the interest is high, plus it gives the fan something to look forward to. To motivate the fan for a pre-order, it sometimes helps to include exclusive content or merchandise.

6 - Appearance means a lot. Style counts when talking to fans. Make sure everything looks good and is readable. Spelling or grammar mistakes reflect badly on you. Try to keep it simple but stylish, but it you or your team don’t have the design chops to make it look good, it’s better to just keep it simple and readable.

7 - Cater to uber fans. All of the members of your tribe are passionate, but some are more passionate than others. Fans have different needs and wants and it’s to everyone’s benefit if you can cater to them all. Try to always include a premium or deluxe tier for every offering such as a free T-shirt or backstage pass as a reward for posting, a free ticket to an upcoming show, signed artwork, extra songs, anything to satiate the uber fan’s interest.

8 - Give them a choice. Give fans numerous ways to opt-in since not everyone wants to receive their information, or the type of information, the same way. Ask if they would rather receive info by email, SMS or even snail mail. Ask if they’d like to receive info on upcoming shows, song releases, video content, or contests. And ask how often they’d like be contacted.

Follow these 8 principles and your communication with your fans will remain both smooth and profitable.

To read additional excerpts from the Music 3.0 guidebook and all my other books, go to bobbyowsinski.com.

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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.

Spotify's First Year

Spotify certainly still is the music subscription service that still gets the most press, so let's look at its first year in the United States. There are some numbers that the company should celebrate, and others that should shake it to its core.

• First all, in the last year Spotify garnered more than 3 million US users, with about 20% of them being converted to paying customers. That's good.

• Not everyone is in love with the service, since a lot of those paying subscribes are not re-subscribing, and not many of the others are willing to upgrade their service to paying. That's bad.

• American users streamed 13 billion songs last year and shared almost 28 million. That's good.

• 55% of those came through Facebook, 41% came from Spotify itself, 2.7% came through Twitter and the rest came from other sources. Spotify has a tight integration with Facebook, which isn't looking all that strong these days of post IPO madness. That's potentially bad.

• Facebook users used the Spotify client almost 24 million hours last year. With 950 million users and over 500 million of those daily at about 45 minutes per, that's not all that much. Not so good.

• For artists, Spotify pays $.0051 per free stream, .0078 per unlimited stream, and .0153 per premium stream. It takes 47 plays to equal a single $.99 sale from iTunes, according to Ditto Music. Not so good if you're a musician, although it's better to get paid something rather than nothing.

What we have to remember is that these are still the early days of subscription streaming music. Things are still shaking out, and will probably change significantly when some major players enter the market (hint: iTunes). Let's check back next year and see how much progress has been made, not only by Spotify, but the streaming service market in general.

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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.

BandPage Posts Everywhere

The one thing that most artists find most precious is their time. There's usually never enough of it to do the one thing they love to do best, which is create.

Regardless of where you're at on the music business success ladder, social media is an extremely important part of reaching your fans, but to do it well, it unfortunately takes a lot of time. One of the main strategies of Music 3.0 is the ability to make your social media time more efficient so you can free up that creative time that everyone wants and needs.

BandPage has been a pretty good one-stop platform for posting your music, photos, videos and tour dates to multiple sites, but now they've introduced BandPage Everywhere that allows you to also post to your social media sites, blog and website from their dashboard.

Here's a promo video that describes the feature. It's worth checking out.

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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.

McCartney Takes His Talents To Kobalt

Talk about timing; EMI Music Publishing is just being taken over by Sony/ATV and one of their biggest clients bolts. It seems that Sir Paul McCartney didn't like the looks of what was going down with EMI/Sony and decided to take his talents elsewhere.

But he didn't go to another so-called "major" publisher. No, Paul took his MPL Communications to the upstart Kobalt Music Group, who is quickly becoming one of the major players in the publishing world. Why? Because Kobalt has built it's business on technology, which they claim gets the songwriter paid as much as 25% more and up to two years faster than the more traditional publishing companies. In fact, Kobalt has enticed the likes of Pear Jam, Trent Reznor and Dr. Luke into it's fold, and its share of Top 100 hits has already grown to 15%, which is just under what long time market leader EMI has.

While MPL's move might be symbolically ominous, it doesn't hit the bottom line of EMI as much as you might think, with estimates at less than 10%. The deal with Kobalt does not include North America, Britain and Ireland, which MPL administers itself. But MPL is a heavier hitter than just the McCartney catalog as it includes songs by Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and Broadway shows like The Music Man.

This just goes to show that even old traditional businesses can be improved with technology, and when that happens, it doesn't take long for artists to take notice and jump on board.

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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 Rules For Giving Away Music For Free

I just love this list from Matt Parsons, founder and CEO of Ditto Music. It's the 10 rules for giving away your music for free.

The gist of it is that your music costs time and money to produce, so you must be compensated for it, but that compensation doesn't have to be in money. In fact, until you're somewhat of a star, fans won't pay money for it anyway, so you must be paid some other way. How? With social currency (see #3 below).

Check out the list:

1. Keep it simple. Choose just one platform to give away your music and direct fans there. [I'm not sure if I agree with this one.]

2. Do not forsake your current fans. Free music is not just for new fans. Reward your mailing list with free songs. Do NOT post MP3s within the email, since this can eat into people's bandwidth and annoy them. Always make sure that you add a link to the download.

3. Music is not free; fans should pay in "social currency." Ask for a Facebook Like, a Tweet, or preferably an email address in exchange for your music. If you're sending to your mailing list, ask them to retweet the link to their friends. Use a platform like bit.ly so you can track the click throughs.

4. Social currency is reciprocal. Tag fans on Facebook/Twitter when they buy the album or talk about you.

5. Follow up on social. Send out regular emails to your list, post at least once per day on Facebook and Twitter.

6. Don't charge too much in social currency for your music. If you ask for too much information, they'll give up and go somewhere else. Just stick to basic data like name, age, location and how they heard of you.

7. Let people listen before they download. No one will spend the time on music they've not heard before.

8. Have a strategy. Once you decide that you want to exchange your music for social currency instead of money, have a long-term strategy for how you will make money in the future.

9. Manage your copyrights. If you plan to make money from merch purchases, be sure to copyright any logos or graphics that you use so no one else can reproduce them and cut you out of the loop.

10. Don't stop promoting. Just because your music is free doesn't mean that you have to promote it any less. Also, don't stop promoting just because you're songs or album has been available for a while.

Don't forget that when you ask someone to retweet or follow you, make it easy for them by providing  embedded buttons. See this page for ways to do that easily.

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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.

Van Halen Discuss Their First Record Deal

Okay, so you still want to be a rock n' roll star despite everything you know about the business? Sometimes all it takes is just one more horror story before the reality of the business sinks in.

Here's a great video with Eddie and Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth of Van Halen as they discuss their first record deal. In it they reveal how they had a platinum album (1 million sales) and toured for a year and still owed the record label $2 million, all the while collecting weekly checks of only $83.83 a week.

Think it's changed much since then? Guess again.


Jump to 1:20 to get to the best part.

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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.

Facebook User Satisfaction Falling

I guess we should've expected this sooner or later, but according to a newly released study of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook dropped 8 points from their survey of last year. The score of 61 out of 100 is the 4rth lowest score among all 230 companies scored in the index, and it's the lowest of any Internet company.

But let's put this into perspective, Twitter and Linkedin only scored a little higher at 64 and 63 respectively, which are both in the bottom 10 of all companies polled. Pinterest received a score of 69, YouTube a 73, and most surprising of all, Google+ topped them all with a 78, which tied Wikipedia.

So why is Facebook's user satisfaction dropping like a rock? Here are the 9 features that users most dislike, according to the Huffington Post:

1. Timeline
2. Constant Game Updates 
3. Game Invitations
4. Ticker
5. Check-ins
6. Newsfeed
7. Pokes
8. Facebook Chat
9. Registrations

Facebook's stock may have gained a little momentum, but it doesn't seem to matter to its users. Could it be a matter of time before it turns into MySpace or Friendster?

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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.