Why "Gagnam Style" Is The Most Viewed Video Of All Time

It was reported over the weekend that Psy's "Gangnam Style" video had surpassed Justin Bieber's "Baby" for the most viewed ever online with over 806 million views. Think of that - 800 million views! There's been a lot of analysis as to why "Gangnam Style" became the video sensation that it is, from humor to explosions to kids to sexy girls to the dance (all true), but I have another take on it from a more macro perspective.

• There's a bigger online audience: The world is much more connected than any other time in history. As a result, there's a bigger potential audience for a phenomena like "Gangnam Style." You'll see this viewing record broken the next time a similar sensation takes place.

• He came from a different part of the world: Most huge trends like this tend to start in the US, but in this case, the US was only icing on the cake. With Psy being Korean, "Gangnam Style" broke out from the East and headed West, rather than the other way around. It was already huge by the time North America got hip to it, but what put it over the top was..........

• Exploitation: The fact that Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber's manager, got involved sent Psy and "Gangnam Style" to another level. All of a sudden, Psy was on every television show you could think of, from Saturday Night Live to the MTV Video Music Awards to the Today show to name just a few. With these appearances, he jumped generations from K-Pop (Korean Pop) to seniors dancing to it at the local rec center. As with most artists, management is still the key.

After another single or two you may never hear from Psy again as he goes the way of the Macerana, but you can be sure that you'll see something like this again probably sooner than later.

By the way, "Gangnam Style" also holds another distinction. It has the most likes of any video with more than 2 million. Beiber's "Baby" comes in 3rd following the 1.6 likes of LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem."

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10 Things That Can Destroy An Email Marketing Campaign

An email newsletter is much more important than most musicians think. It's easy to get coddled into thinking that social media is all that you need to stay in touch with your fans, but study after study reveal that when it comes to marketing, your email newsletter is your most effective tool. That said, there are right and wrong ways to do everything, and an email newsletter is no exception.

Here's a great post from clickz regarding the 10 things that can destroy an email marketing campaign, and how to fix them.

"Your consumers are in complete control. They are empowered by their choices, with their devices, and have the ability to leave you with a click of a button. Here are 10 things that concern them and can force them off your list.

1. They do not remember who you are. This can easily happen if you do not send them their first message quickly or let a lot of time lapse between messages. If your branding is not clearly defined, it is going to be harder for the consumer to recognize you.
Rx: Send the first message quickly, stay in touch, and keep reminding the consumer about your value proposition.

2. You send them too many campaigns. When the consumer signed up you may have promised them a message a week, important updates, or emails tailored to their preferences. Your campaign frequency has now gone up significantly.
Rx: Cap your frequency to match your consumers' preferences, and if they do unsubscribe, offer to reduce the frequency to a minimum.

3. Your emails are just not interesting. If the consumer considers your campaigns to be boring they are going to lose attention quickly.
Rx: Spice it up a bit, even if you are talking about "ball bearings." Factor in some user-generated content or questions - this is what will keep the consumer engaged.

4. You do not stop selling. I once opted in to receive emails from a financial institution to learn more about their loan instruments. I even opened an account. The nurturing campaign turned to an aggressive selling campaign, forcing me to get off their list.
Rx: Mix up your messaging; the best thing might be to include useful informational content in every marketing campaign.

5. You are not relevant. Many times, we are so influenced by the merchandising or information calendar that we forget what the consumer's preferences are. We either forget that the consumer has already purchased a particular product or target her with things that she has no interest in.
Rx: While it would be ideal to segment the consumer based on her preferences, keep asking the consumer if you are missing the mark and factor in her comments into your marketing campaigns.

6. You expect your consumers to test your content. How many times have you received an email where the images are broken, the formatting is messed up, or worse yet, the landing page takes you to the land of nowhere?
Rx: Test your campaigns internally and then test them in a control group. Only then should you release them to the entire list.

7. It takes too long to load. If you do not have the bandwidth to scale, you could really turn the consumer off. The consumer might wait for a couple of seconds and just hit the delete key.
Rx: If you are having page load issues, consider deploying your campaigns in smaller segments.

8. You look horrible on mobile. Many of us look at mobile when we are mobile. It is an absolute horrible practice to take the same content and render it on mobile because it is very hard to read.
Rx: Design your message with mobile in mind and reduce the amount of content for mobile devices - don't just optimize it. Remember, you can segment and target those that tend to open on mobile devices.

9. You flaunt their data. You might think it is good personalization by displaying the consumer's account number or her home address within the content. Many consumers are alarmed that you know so much and that you are showing it off, so they resort to doing two things - reducing the amount of information they share with you or switching back to paper statements (I did that with a major credit card company).
Rx: Remind consumers that their data is protected and encrypt information to show them how secure it is.

10. You screw it up completely. I received an email from a very reputable electronics retailer telling me that my monitor was ready for pickup. It wasn't my monitor, because that email was intended for someone else. You may have heard about the airline that goofed up by mixing the names and frequent flier numbers; or the bank that sent out an email to their consumers with someone else's bank logo (it was the fault of their ESP).
Rx: Audit your partners to make sure they know what they are doing. Test before you send. If you do screw up, apologize and have a crisis plan.
See these Email Marketing concepts in action during Sundeep's ClickZ Academy workshop: Email Marketing: Driving 51% Engagement at SES Chicago 2012."

Keep these tips in mind before you hit send on your next newsletter. You'll keep your subscribers happier, and have a better chance of your newsletter succeeding in achieving your goals.

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When An Artist Has A Meltdown

Here's a series of videos that are at the same time funny, sad and wonderfully informative. The first video shows the singer of the Antaris, Kris Roe, go bonkers on his drummer in the middle of the gig. There's more about that on my Big Picture production blog, but the real learning experience is the response videos.




Here's a video from the band attempting to explain what happened. It's all well and good, but it drones on and on for 6 plus minutes. By the end, it seems counterproductive, as you start to side with the drummer for having to put up with a hyper-controlling frontman.




Now here's a video response from drummer Rob Felicitti, as it defends himself.


Here's the upshot. Regardless of who you feel is right or wrong, this is a wonderful use of YouTube and social media. It enables the band to take an unfortunate incident and get in front of it, and it enables the drummer to both defend himself and raise his profile in the process. I'm not picking sides here, just saying that whether the parties were aware of it or not, they did absolutely the right thing by making these videos. From a PR standpoint, they caused an event, then followed up on it, raising the profile of the band(s) and the individuals involved along the way. From a professional standpoint..........well, read the Big Picture 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.

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The Top 10 Lists

Happy Thanksgiving to all those of you who celebrate it. I'm going to use today to look backwards a little at some of the lists that I've posted over the last year. There's a lot more than I was aware of, so determining the top 10 was next to impossible, so here are simply 10 lists that I liked from the past year.

The 6 Top Earning Dead Musicians In 2012

5 Ways To Take The Pulse Of Your Fans

Check D's 5 Tips For Music Industry Survival

3 Common Mistakes Made By Independent Musicians

The 3 Pillars Of A Successful Brand

8 Reasons For A Bad Band Picture

7 Tips For A Great Newsletter

10 Great Music Marketing Ideas

7 Tips From The Advertising Giants

13 Questions To Ask About Your Publishing Contract

Considering that I do about 260 posts a year, there are probably another 20 or so that could've been included in this list, and perhaps you'll see some more during the upcoming Christmas holiday. In the meantime, enjoy these, and email me with your favorite.

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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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Spotify Says 200 Streams Equal One Download

Spotify seems to be taking off is so many ways, with a service that now features over 20 million songs that's now available in 17 countries. With the company valued at just over $3 billion (!!, that's a little high to say the least), it just scored another cool $100 million round of venture funding. All this for a company that sports just a little over 4 million subscribers world-wide (although 15 million are said to use the free service each month), according to the latest estimates.

There's been a lot of speculation regarding how much an artist actually makes from the service that's getting so much traction, and Spotify's founder and CEO Daniel Ek didn't help the situation the other day when he stated in an article on Quartz:

“They’re saying, oh, they’re just paying a fraction of a cent every time someone plays a song,” says Ek. “And then you compare it versus the download revenue. Well, I can tell you it will take you 200 song listens before you make the same amount of money [as a download]. But because the consumption behavior is entirely different, and the revenue then increases in perpetuity, it’s not even a question of if this model is better, it’s just when in the lifecycle it’s better.”

So that means that on a 10 song album, you'd need 2000 streams to equal one download, right? It appears that there's a lot of BS being thrown around here. By most other calculations, Ek has his numbers very wrong. It's looks like the numbers are closer to almost 48,000 on Spotify, although it's been calculated that it takes over 300,000 plays on Pandora to equal a single album download. This was all illustrated quite nicely in an article by Damon Krukowski on Pitchfork a week or so ago.

So as Pandora beats up Congress for a royalty recalculation to a lower rate, the poor artist in the middle is making even less than before.

OK, here's the secret that no one has been talking about. All of the streaming services have already paid huge chunks of change to the labels for the rights to use their songs, but most of it goes right to the label's bottom line and not much ever reaches the artist. What's more, Spotify is partially owned by the major labels. Is that a conflict of interest or what?

Now there are a lot of artists that are outraged by the situation, and by all rights they really should be, but here's the bottom line. If we go all the way back to Sinatra, Elvis, The Beatles and up through today, 95% of a hit artist's income came from sources other than recorded music. That means that most of the a hit artist's income comes from touring, merchandise, licensing and publishing, and not recorded music.

It doesn't matter where you're at in the music artist food chain - your music is your marketing! If you're a new artist, it's more important to get your music heard than to make money from it (it won't be much anyway). If you're an established artist, it's more important that you stay alive in listener's minds so they'll pay to come and see you live and buy your merch. If they can't hear you, you're forgotten. Your music is your marketing. Remember those words.

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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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AC/DC The Latest To LIft Their iTunes Ban

While the vast majority of recording artists were receiving a new income stream from iTunes, acts like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Kid Rock and AC/DC refused to budge when it came to releasing their albums digitally. The hope of these rock legends was to preserve the integrity of the physical album, and with that, the cashflow that came from it.

One by one these bands started to realize that no matter how much they wanted that to happen, at least some of the world had moved on from CDs. If they wanted more income, the only way was to go digital and join the iTunes club.

AC/DC finally came to that conclusion and announced the news on their website this morning that their entire catalog was now available on iTunes. Although they gave no reason for the departure from their former hard-core stance, the band does have a new live album due out soon. Their last album Black Ice was distributed exclusively by Wal Mart, so there was a big payday there, but with no similar alternative this time around, going digital must have finally made sense financially.

There are not that many hold-outs from iTunes these days, with Garth Brooks and Tool being the most notable left.

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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 36 Rules Of Social Media

Here are some very relevant socia media rules that have come from all over the Interent but condensed into a nice infographic below. Most are common sense, but it's nice to have them all in one place. Pay fair heed to the them though, since they do cover just about all the basics of social media.

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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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Using The New YouTube Branding Features

As I stated in a post last week regarding what's new with YouTube, the service continues to roll out new features, sometimes without promoting them. One of the those unpromoted new features is a new way to brand your channel and videos. To access this feature:

1. Go to your YouTube channel and access Settings.

2. Under Channel Settings on the left menu, click on "InVideo Programming."

3. This will now provide two options; "Feature your channel" and "Feature a video." "Feature a channel" allows you to upload an icon that will then be attached to all your videos. "Feature a video" allows you to feature a video across all your other videos, which allows you to push a new movie across your entire catalog of videos.

Pretty cool, right? Slowly but surely YouTube is listening to all the complaints and suggestions and implementing them as new features. They're not always publicized, so it pays to poke around in the various menus once in a while to see what's been updated.

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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.

Use A Quote, Pay A Fee

A discussion on copyrights or patents is a good way to raise the excitement level in a room full of entertainment or tech executives these days. There are those that feel strongly that copyrights and patents are the stick that stirs the innovation coffee, the key to a start-up getting funded and later making money. On the other hand, you have those that just as strongly feel that copyrights and patents are an old fashioned, out-of-touch method of idea protection that actually stifle innovation instead of encouraging it (the recent rash of patent troll lawsuits plays into this somewhat). The market takes care of their own and the first mover always has the advantage, they claim.

Each has a good argument, and each can point to excesses that drag down the other's position. Well here's a situation that acutely shows how copyright can be taken to the extreme.

A news article in Private Eye states that the UK's Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) will now charge artists, musicians, labels and PR specialists who use review quotes a fee of $2,000! Now for that amount you get to quote 50 reviews, but the precedent it sets is not a good one.

In fact, what ended up happening is when the NLA sent their declaration around to labels and managers, they were promptly ignored. The NLA then stepped up the campaign and began legal action which not only charged for current quotes but past ones as well, which brought the typical charge up to around $10k instead. It's yet to be seen how this will end up shaking out, so for now it stops anyone in the UK from using review quotes.

This action doesn't seem to be helping anyone. The newspaper and reviewer don't get any additional exposure, so that's bad. The artist, label, PR company can't use the quotes, so that's bad too. The newspaper may make a sliver of money that doesn't really help it's bottom line, so that doesn't seem to be worth the bad blood induced. So it seems that there's no winner here.

I understand that newspapers all over the world are suffering a downturn and are looking for new revenue streams, but this isn't the way to do it. It's debatable whether even a modest charge is fair, but this seems like a shake-down.

In the US, quoting a review can be classified as "fair use" and therefore not subject to such a charge, but you can bet that there are a number of company and association attorneys watching this closely.

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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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The Cost To Break An Artist: $1.4 Million

A new study by the IFPI shows that 70% of artists still want to be signed to a label because of the marketing support that a label brings, and that there are more than 5,000 artists currently signed to major labels world-wide. What's more, 1 in 4 of those signings are new artists, meaning that fresh talent is still a priority, according to the report.

The Investing In Music report goes on to say that record labels spend about $4.5 billion annually in A&R, and this a greater percentage of revenue than other industries like computing, pharmaceutical or biotech.

But perhaps the most interesting bit was the fact that the average cost to break an artist was $1.4 million in the US. This was broken down in $200k for an advance, $200 to 300k for recording costs, $50-300k for video production costs, $100k for tour support and $200-500k for marketing and promotional costs.

Those numbers are obviously not for the average record label signing, and it's hard to believe that they're even an average. I guess I don't get to work in the rarified air of a major artist enough any more, but there aren't many artists that I know of that are getting a $200k advance or a recording budget of $200k. And didn't the days of paying $50k+ for a video went away when MTV decided they were better off programming reality shows instead of music videos? And tour support.........that vanished so long ago that most artists consider it a myth.

Once again, if you're talking about a star artist trying to break into superstar level, these numbers might be realistic, but to make it seem like they're average costs makes everyone believe that we're still living in the 1980s.

There are some other interesting figures in the report, some of which you might want to take with a grain of salt. Remember, the IFPI represents the world's record labels, and what they publish is biased accordingly.

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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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Bloomy's Introduces The Jimi Hendrix Clothing Line

I'm all for artist branding but there are some things that just feel wrong. Take, for instance, the announcement that a Jimi Hendrix clothing line is set to hit the shelves any day at Bloomingdales. This just seems like outright exploitation in so many ways.

The word is that the clothing line is designed by Lyric Culture, and will include graphic screen print t-shirts, scarves, dress shirts, hoodies and cuff links featuring Jimi's words, music and handwriting.

This feels like it's about 20 years too late to begin with, but it so reeks of cashing-in that Jimi must be rolling in his grave. Admittedly the guy had great style and a flare for the unusually hip when it came to clothes (his music goes without saying), but it feels as much of a money grab by his estate as does Bob Marley energy drinks.

It's a shame that family members can't just celebrate the music of their celebrity artists after they've passed, and instead begin to concentrate on the green. Let's hope that the clothes at least outline Jimi's fashion sense, because at least that would be a small win for ethics.

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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.

Major Warner Reshuffling Actually Makes Sense

It was reported last week that Warner Music Group was restructuring following the departure of their former music chief Lyor Cohen. Usually these types of reorganizations are more about consolidating power into new fiefdoms for the remaining or incoming executives, but this one actually seems to make sense.

According to an article in CMU:

Under the new structure, Warner in the US will have three divisions, frontline recorded music, publishing and catalogue, and label and artist services. The first division will consist of Warner’s record labels, principally Atlantic, Warner Bros and Warner Nashville, and will handle current talent and new releases. The second division will replace the Warner/Chappell publishing company, and also include catalogue marketing and the major’s catalogue label Rhino. The third division will bring together distribution operations and those Warner units working outside records and publishing. 

The second of the new divisions is the most interesting, with the major allying the marketing of its sound recording catalogue with its music publishing operations. 

A couple of things here are interesting. First is that Warner/Chappell is being replaced, which is hard to believe, since it's such a powerhouse brand. OK, brand aside, the fact that they're now combining publishing with catalog is huge, since they're now thinking more in terms of licensing, rather than sales. Licensing can be a much more profitable way to do business, since the overhead is far lower and manufacturing costs are essentially nil because the licensor does it all.

Many have predicted that this would be the business model for the next generation major label. Now it seems that we'll get to see the prototype in action and can evaluate whether those predictions are really valid.

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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.