Facebook's 140 Billion Friends And How To Leverage Them

Facebook reached a milestone a few weeks ago when it blew past a billion active accounts, an astonishing number any way you look at it. That said, a number that's often overlooked is one that perhaps more accurately measures the breath of the network - 140.3 billion.

What does 140.3 billion represent? That's the number of total friendships on Facebook. It means that every active member has 140.3 Facebook friends. What's astonishing about that number is that it's close to Dunbar's Number of 150, which is what social anthropologists use to signify the number of persistent face-to-face relationships that the average person usually has.

Obviously Facebook number is an average, because you all know people who have way more than 140 Facebook friends, but the point is that if you just look a single step away from your 140 average friends to their 140 average friends, then you're at 19,600 connections, which is quite a large network. Now image that you have the maximum number of friends on you personal page, which is 5,000. That means that you're one step away from 700,000 people. That's quite a network!

OK, so how do you leverage the friends you have? Facebook has now started a new program that will keep one of your posts at the top of your friends Newsfeed (just click on the Promote button on your post as in the picture on the left). This is perfect if you're announcing a new product, record release or a gig. The downside is that it'll cost you $7 each time you do it, so it can get expensive fast.

Yes, this is another way that FB is trying to monetize their user base, but it's not so far off from what other networks already do. People can buy trending topics on Twitter and users can pin Tumblr posts to the tops of follower's dashboards for $5, so FB is just upping the ante a little.

The bottom line is that there's a big network out there on Facebook, and it's there for the leveraging.

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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.

Lyric Sites Now A Target For Music Publishers

Several years ago music publishers, looking for new revenue streams, began to pursue lyric websites for violation of copyright for hosting the lyrics to popular songs without permission. One of the biggest wins in the publishers favor recently came at the expense of LiveUniverse.com and its owner Brad Greenspan, who were recently hit with a $6.6 million default judgement for not paying a license fee.

The judge arrived at the amount by charging $12,500 for each of the 528 songs whose lyrics LiveUniverse was accused of infringing from Peermusic, Warner Chappell Music and Bug Music. Some of the songs included "China Girl" by David Bowie, "Old Time Rock n' Roll" by Bob Seger, "Moondance" by Van Morrison and "Georgia On My Mind" performed by Ray Charles.

The irony is that Greenspan could have made a license deal with the publishers for much less than the judgement, but basically chose to try to stick it in everyone's face by not showing for depositions and hearing, not following the court's instructions, and going through a long line of attorneys that slowed the entire process down to a crawl. It wasn't like he didn't have the resources either, having been an original investor in MySpace and cashing out when it was purchased for $580 million by News Corp in 2005.

The fact is that there are a lot of lyric sites out there that offer lyrics legally. Lyric aggregator LyricFind has licensed lyrics.com, lyricsmode.com, lyricsfreak.com, songmeanings.net, lyricsty.com, leoslyrics.com, lyricsbay.com, lyrics.net, lyricsfly.com, musicsonglyrics.com, lyricsoverload.com, and many more.

The fact of the matter is that these sites make big bucks on advertising and they should share a part of the wealth with the originators of the music that made it all possible. If you make money on someone else's creation, you have to share; simple as that.

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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.

Two New Print Ad Technologies That Will Blow Your Mind

It seems to be common knowledge that print is dying these days as magazines, books and newspapers decline in sales. Here are a couple of new technologies now being tried out in print advertising that definitely announce that print isn't dead just yet.

The first was a small thin video playback engine placed in 1000 copies of the current issue of Entertainment Magazine. I'm told that it costs 55 cents per unit, and was used only as a test to gauge the reception. Very cool.



The next one will appear in the the Oct. 15th issue of Sports Illustrated and is something that Lexus developed in-house called CinePrint that's hailed as an "interactive" advert. I'm not so sure about the interactivity, but it sure looks amazing.



I'm not so sure that I'd buy the magazine just for this kind of tech, but I'd certainly pay attention to the advert. If anyone has any inside info on either of these, please let me know.

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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.

Japan Gets Draconian On Piracy

If you're living in Japan and illegally download a file, you can now face up to 2 years in prison and a fine up to $25,000, thanks to a change in a law that was passed in 2010. But it's those who illegally upload a copyright infringing file that really have to worry, as the punishment is now a maximum of 10 years in prison and $125k fine. In theory, this punishment can be enforced over a single pirated file.

You can bet the music industry in countries around the world will be looking closely at how this law pans out. On one hand it seems incredibly harsh, and on the other, something so extreme might be the only way to stem the tide of illegal downloads, especially on the upload side.

If you listen to the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), Japanese consumers illegally downloaded 4.36 billion music files illegally in 2010, while legally buying 440 million. The sounds suspiciously like the 10 to 1 ratio that the US RIAA has been using for some time (although sometimes they resort to an even higher 20 to 1 ratio). And as we all know, the RIAA's strategy of suing their own customers was a total failure as it didn't work and only resorted in very bad publicity for the industry.

But that was a civil matter, and while it carried some significant financial pain, there was no risk of going to jail. By changing this to a criminal matter, there is a different mindset involved as long as consumers are aware of the risk.

The question will be how the Japanese population will respond once its first 15 year old is sent to jail.

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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.

Music Sales Up This Year

While music sales in the US have been rather flat for the last few years, it appears that the music industry has now climbed past the plateau.

 According to Nielsen Soundscan, digital albums are up 15% this year so far and individual digital track sales are up by 6%. In fact, Americans have already purchased more than 1 billion downloads this year and are on a pace to to break the 2011 record of 1.3 billion.

On top of that, vinyl record sales are up 16.3%, although that only equates to about 3.2 million units, a drop in the bucket compared to other music products.

So what can we contribute this surge to? Decreased piracy? Maybe. There's been great strides made against torrents this year and as a result fewer illegal downloads have been tracked.

Better music? This could also be the case. Adele's 21, for example, is still going strong, and a Grammy win in the beginning of the year helped propel that album to heights we've not seen in a while. Plus there have been fewer weeks where the #1 record was below 100k in sales this year.

What do you think?

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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.

Top 10 Facebook Artists

This is kind of interesting. Thanks to Facebook's recent purge of Likes, there's been a realignment in the service's best-liked artists. And the winner is - Rihanna.

Not only has she dethroned Lady Gaga as the top female celeb, but she's also surged on other social networks as well, where she's second behind Justin Bieber on YouTube, and fourth behind Gaga, Bieber and Katy Perry on Twitter.

Here's the current top 10 chart, courtesy of Mashable and Starcount.

The only things I can say about this chart is that if you remember that Facebook has over 1 billion global users now, it puts these numbers a little more in perspective.

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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 Posts Cheat Sheet

I've been writing about the best times to post on Facebook and Twitter here for a few years, and as we get more granular data we continue to determine what works best when it comes to posts from a brand (don't forget, every artist is a brand). Buddy Media just released a study of over 18,000 Facebook pages from the world's biggest brands to determine the following "cheat sheet" for wall posts.

• Posts between 8PM and 7AM get 14% higher interaction because they present fans with content when they're the least busy.

• Posts published on the weekend get a 14% higher interaction rate than during the week.

• Post only once or twice a day. Brands that post more see 19% less interaction.

• Keep it short. Posts of 80 characters or fewer receive 23% more interaction.

• Use photos. Posts with photo attachments receive 39% more interaction than posts without.

• Be careful with video attachments. Video attachments receive fewer likes, views and shares than average.

• Call to actions work. When fans are asked to like a post, they do so at 3 times the rate than when they're not asked. The also comment at a rate more than 3 times times the norm. When asked to share a post, they're 7 times more likely to do so.

• Long URLs work better. Always include a URL including a link to your product, but use a long URL since it receives a 16% higher interaction rate.

• Use questions to drive comments, but be sure to place the questions at the end of the post. Posts with questions have 92% more comments.

• Experiment with emoticons. In some cases, emoticons can provide as much as 52% higher interaction, while in other cases, the interaction can be lower than average. :D and :P have the highest interaction rates.

These are all fascinating data points and worth considering before any post. You can download the full report here.

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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.

When A Label Just Doesn't Get It

When it comes to major labels, some are much hipper than others. Warner Music Group (WMG) has always been thought of as pretty progressive in terms of keeping up and buying into the latest technology, but that doesn't mean that all departments get it.

Here's a rather sad commentary on not only the old-school way of doing business, but bad marketing as well.

WMG recently wanted to alert radio program directors to a new single by the Crystal Fighters. Now most companies these days (not only those in the music business) would simply send an email with a link to a download. Not WMG. Instead they:

• sent an standard letter via snail mail.

• included a 104 character link that the music director would then have to type into a browser.

• didn't indicate that a password was required.

OK, let's count the ways that this is particularly crazy in our Music 3.0 world.

1. Imagine what it cost the label to send this in the first place. There's the cost of the letter and envelope, the 45 cent stamp, and the labor cost of the person printing out the letters, attaching postage and putting these in the mail. Money that didn't have to be spent.

2. You're asking someone to type in a 100+ character URL complete with underscores, slashes and numbers? Ever hear of a QR Code?  

3. Then even if you happen to luck out and get all the characters in the URL correct, find out that you still need an password to download the music.

Of course, it's the poor artist that has to suffer with the end result of this boondoggle. They get charged for an expense that they never should have, plus some bad will has been generated with radio music directors on their behalf.

Boggles the mind, doesn't it?  Click here to view the letter.

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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 Shattered Hit Record Model

We've all heard the complaints about the current Music 3.0 music industry model: physical product doesn't sell anymore, download sales don't make up for the shortfall, and streaming music cannabalizes sales and pays a pittance in royalties. Then lets heap on the accusation that music today is so formula and soul-less and generally a shadow of what it once was.

A lot of industry vets actually believe this, and like everything, there is a hint of truth in it all.

But then how to do you account for Mumford and Sons new album Bable being the biggest release of 2012 so far with sales of over 600,000 in the first week of release? How do you account for the fact that there's been over 8 million listens of the album on Spotify so far, shattering the record for number of streams in a week? How do you account for the fact that new records by superstars Green Day, No Doubt, Justin Beiber, Nicki Minaj, Madonna and Pink have only sold a quarter (if that) of what Babel sold, despite wider ranging publicity campaigns? How do you account for the fact that the Mumfords did this all without a hit single?

When it comes right down to it, there are two principles at work here that are perennial. They've worked in the previous eras of the music business and they work now:

1) Your music is your marketing. I preach this in the Music 3.0 Internet music guidebook and it holds true on any level. An artist can only build a brand by repeated listens, either through radio airplay, torrents, piracy, streams, downloads and anything else you want to put in here. The more people hear your songs, the more likely you'll find an audience for them.

Music is a marketing tool for the artist. If no one hears it, they won't buy it, or buy merch, or go see an artist in concert. If you limit the way they listen, you limit your marketing ability.

It's important to remember that most major artists never made their fortunes from the sales of music itself. In fact, there are numerous studies that show that record sales were never more than 5% of a major artist's revenue stream. For an artist to cut off Spotify because of the peanuts for royalties pay scale totally defeats the purpose of the service to an artist's brand, as Mumford experience brilliantly illustrates here.

2) Best-selling, long lasting music goes against the grain. Record labels love to follow trends, but they rarely set them. Music history is made by artists who refuse to follow the "hit" formula and choose to follow their hearts and their art instead. Most major artists that have a long lasting career are initially outliers that the industry broadly rejects (the biggest case in point is The Beatles), only to be found by the audience directly.

The English folk music of Mumford and Sons is so far away from the mainstream that the fact that they've had a hit with their first album (Sigh No More) and look to have an even bigger one with Babel is a shock, but it proves the point. The audience found the music before the industry did, and the music doesn't following what's currently considered the norm.

And how about Adele? Her 21 now has sold over 24 million worldwide and is about as far away from what's considered the mainstream today as you can get. But people the world over love it because for exactly that reason. It comes from the right place - the heart.

The moral here is that so many of the industry "truisms" aren't actually true at all, but the two above do seem to stand the test of time.

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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.

4 Rules For Crowdfunding

Here's a post from a couple of years ago that I thought I'd repost, given the every increasing interesting in crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding is becoming a popular way to finance a recording project, thanks to sites like Kickstarter, MyBandStock, indiegogo, Rockethub and Sellaband, among others. Regardless of which site you use, the idea is the same - it allows your fans to pool their money in order to fund your project.

If crowdfunding is something that you'd like to pursue, here are 4 rules to help your campaign be successful.

1) Choose an attainable goal amount. Everybody would like a $100,000 budget to work with, but unless you have a large fan base to begin with, you're probably dreaming if you think you can raise that amount. Even a once-huge selling band like Public Enemy had to cut their goal from $250k to $75k, so be realistic in both what you need and what you can raise.

2) Concentrate on low price points. Kickstarter's data indicates that $50 is the optimum investment point, closely followed by $25. While most artists also include amount in the thousands as well, don't count on these being filled.

3) Make sure the investment reward is sufficient. Remember that you're not getting a donation, it's an investment and your investors will expect something in return. Check out this list of incentives from Hind as an example. Of course, one of the most brilliant list of incentives comes from Josh Freese (Perfect Circle,  Nine Inch Nails, Devo, Weezer). A lot of it was meant to be funny for promotion's sake, but people took him up on it anyway.

4) Keep the campaign short. Kickstarter has found that the optimum campaign is 30 days, with longer campaigns performing significantly worse. The biggest periods of investment come right in the beginning and right before it closes, with everything in the middle a somewhat "dead period." If that's the case, you might as well make the campaign short since there's no advantage to dragging it out.

Kickstarter has some great additional info and data on a recent blog post that's also 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.

What Sony/ATV's Direct Negotiation With iTunes Means

In a move that may signal a change in the way business is done in the music industry, music publisher Sony/ATV Music will soon negotiate directly with iTunes, Amazon and every other online music distributor directly. In effect, they're cutting out the traditional performing rights organization middlemen of ASCAP, BMI and SESAC.

Sony/ATV with begin this new policy with The Beatles catalog, which obviously carries considerable leverage; so much so that The Beatles now have their distribution deal directly with iTunes that bypasses their record label EMI (let's see how long that lasts now that EMI is owned by Universal Music).

It should be noted that the direct negotiation is only for online distribution and doesn't apply to broadcast performance or physical product mechanical royalties.

By bypassing the PROs, Sony/ATV sets a precedent that the PROs should be very wary of. One of the things about online music distribution online is that the detail of information is high. You know exactly where every sale is coming from and can easily have that info at your fingertips. The PROs have a stranglehold on the analog world in that they do blanket deals directly with the broadcasters then pay out to publishers and songwriters by their own complex formulas, since the royalty data is a lot more nebulous.

While it seems a bit far-fetched that any publisher would even dream of cutting a PRO out of the picture, you have to believe that at some point the airplay info will become granular enough that they may begin to wonder why they need a PRO in the middle of everything.

Then again, The Beatles are such a unique case that they still warrant special handling. Regardless, keep an eye on this since it may be a harbinger of things to come down the road.

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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 Label Implications Of Neil Young's New Pono Music Service

As you may or may not know, Neil Young gave a brief peak at his new Pono high-resolution music service last week on the Letterman Show (see below). Young, who has railed against the quality of MP3s for years, wants to bring audiophile quality to consumers in what Neil is calling SQS, or Studio Quality Sound.

Pono is basically a cloud music service is combined with a new music player that seems to have the simplicity of an iPod, but with higher audio circuit quality. The recordings reportedly have all been transferred to 192kHz/24 bit, which while not as good as analog, does sound really good (CD resolution is 44.1kHz/16 bit).

Supposedly the Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Brothers are totally on board for launch next year, and why wouldn't they be? There are so many up sides and not many downsides for them.

First, Neil has a lot of credibility within the industry and press as being a maverick who does things his own way. He's not beholden to anyone, could care less about being commercial, and has a high profile when he chooses to use it. That's a win.

Second, this is finally a way for labels to do something they've been wanting to do for a long time - sell you the music you already own yet one more time. If it really does sound that much better (it should, but there are caveats), there is a group of people that will buy yet another version of the records that they may have purchased several times already. That's a win for them.

And finally, there's been word that Warners even invested in the project with Young (and licensed 8,000 albums to Pono as well), which might not be such a great thing. The tech world is littered with projects that a major label has invested in to protect its interests, only to have it eventually fold because the project was better for the label than for its customers. That said, Young is ferocious in his independence, so maybe Pono might turn out to be something truly groundbreaking.

High-quality audio. Imagine that. For more on the tech side of Pono, see my post at The Big Picture Music Production Blog.

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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.