Taking Advantage Of YouTube's Redesign

I don't know if you noticed, but YouTube quietly redesigned its site over the last few months. What you now see is a streamlined version that's a lot less cluttered so that it fits better with mobile browsing. YouTube is trying to make the site stickier, so the emphasis is now more on channels rather than individual viewing, although that's not something that's particularly overt. And of course, the more social they can make it, the better, since that adds to the stickiness as well.

As with other social sites, a redesign frequently means that you must do some updating in order to take full advantage of the new features, and this case is no exception. Here are some things that you an do:

1. Select an avatar. The channel avatar is your main marketing image and appears everywhere across your channel, so choose it wisely.

2. Choose your channel details. Both the name of your channel and the description also appear in a number of places, so it's important that you take care in how they're created. For instance, in some cases only 45 characters of your description appear next to your avatar, so make sure that you can get your message across with those limitations.

3. Choose your video metadata. This includes being sure that you have a keyword in your video's title (preferably the first word), and you have both an informative description (don't skimp on the copy here) and the appropriate links included.

People forget how important SEO is for their videos, but the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google is a good enough reason to pay extra attention to the details.

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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 Popular Facebook Music Apps

As we're all aware, Facebook is the 800 pound social network in the room, but don't forget that there's more to social networking than telling your friends what you ate for lunch. Here are the most popular music apps on Facebook, according to Evolver. There are probably more, but the study cuts off at 50,000 users per month.

Name/Link	Official description	Monthly Active Users (minimum)
Spotify	Spotify is a streaming music service that gives you access to millions of songs. Play, discover and share new music.	24 million
iHeartRadio	iHeartRadio is a free, all-in-one digital service that lets you find more than 1,500 of radio’s top Live Stations or create Custom Stations featuring artists or songs you select and similar music.	4.1 million
Deezer	Discover, listen to and share all the music you want – anytime, anywhere. Completely free.	3.4 million
BandPage	Our mission here at BandPage is to revolutionize the way musicians, fans and the industry interact. (Updated: Facebook does not list BandPage in the music section of its App Center.)	2.4 million
Bandsintown	Bandsintown is an application for live music fans and artists.	1.7 million
ReverbNation	Discover great local music, browse the local charts, and share with your friends.	1.2 million
Songza	Working? Relaxing? At the gym? Songza plays you the right music at the right time.	1 million
Vevo	Watch over 50,000 HD music videos plus concerts and original programming from the leading premium music & entertainment platform.	780K
Jango	Jango.com is a free personal internet radio that streams music on the web and to your smartphone (iPhone/Android).	610K
MixCloud	Listen to and discover great radio created by enthusiasts from across the world.	610K
Vagalume Playlists	Listen to music on Facebook, share and find people with the same musical taste.	610K
8tracks	8tracks is a handcrafted internet radio network — the “social” alternative to Pandora. People who know and love music curate online playlists, streamed by listeners by genre, mood, activity or artist.	380K
Slacker Radio	Listen to and share over 150 expert-programmed stations, millions of songs, or playlists and stations you create.	300K
TuneIn	Listen to music, sports and news from around the world — over 70,000 stations and 2 million on-demand programs	300K
TTNET Müzik	TTNET Müzik is a digital music service with millions of songs. It’s easy and free to register TTNET Muzik.	270K
MetroLyrics	Find more lyrics faster than any other lyric service, and completely free of charge.	160K
Playlist.com	Playlist.com is the web’s premier music playlist site.	150K
MOG	Listen free to millions of songs. Share with friends. Discover new music.	150K
Rdio	Rdio lets you listen to millions of songs ad-free wherever you are – on the web and on your phone, even offline.	150K
Spreaker	Create your own radio show and broadcast live from anywhere.	150K
Saavn	Listen to, share, and discover Bollywood and Indian music with Saavn.	130K
Mixlr	Mixlr makes live audio social, easy and fun.	120K
Dhingana	Listen to the largest collection of Bollywood and Indian music for free with Dhingana.	110K
Gaana.com	Listen to songs for free. Choose from the largest collection of music of Indian, regional and international genres.	100K
Bug Music	Listen to 2.2 million songs. Enjoy your music life with the best music services in South Korea from Bugs.	70K
ZippyTune	ZippyTune is a service that allows users to express themselves in the world of music and share their tunes with one another.	70K
Online Pianist	OnlinePianist.com is a one of a kind free animated piano tutorial application for beginner & advanced players alike.	60K
SoundTracking	SoundTracking is a fun & easy way to share the music you’re listening to with your friends on Facebook.	50K

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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.

3 Twitter Hashtag Secrets

If you've been reading this blog for a while you know that I'm a big proponent using Twitter as a promotional tool. The key to using Twitter that way is by including hashtags in your tweets, or the # symbol before a keyword (like "#musicmarketing" which I'll be using when I tweet about this blog). This is one of the ways that people can find your tweet when they do a such for a particular topic.

If you're using them already and you don't find your followers increasing, check out the following "secrets:"

1. Don't be ironic. I know that it's the cheeky thing to post something like #badcupofcoffee or #rudepeople, but that doesn't help you reach the people that you want to reach. To find the right keyword, go to search.twitter.com, plug in the keyword that you think will work, then check out how popular it is and what some of the other keywords that people are using.

2. Limit the number. It's been proven that using more than 2 hashtags in a tweet is counterproductive. It just confuses people reading the tweet. Stick to only 1 or 2.

3. Target your audience. Once again, do a search to find which hashtags fit for the audience that you're trying to reach. I have a list of about 20 that I can mix and match depending upon the nature of the tweet and which audience might like it more. For instance, the list is different for the tweets from this blog, which is about the music business, than for my Big Picture blog, which is about music production. To narrow it down further on that blog, I have a list that's targeted to musicians (#drums, #drummers, #guitars, etc.) or recording (#recording, #producers, etc.).

Using hashtags isn't hard and they can bring results beyond anything you might expect. All you have to do is use them correctly.

By the way, today is the last day of social media maven's Ariel Hyatt's crowdfunding campaign. I've contributed a few rewards to her various tiers, so be sure to take a look.

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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.

There's A New Music Service In Town

There are a lot of music services online vying for a piece of the pie that iTunes is leaving behind, but for every single one of them it's a tougher go than what meets the eye. The license fees demanded by the major labels makes it almost prohibitively expensive to get into the market, then the royalty payout makes it even harder to stay there.

That's why when headphone manufacturer Beats by Dr. Dre purchased the streaming service MOG earlier in the year for only $14 million, the collective industry reasoning was - why? After all, MOG only had 500,000 active users and the purchase didn't even include its advertising network.

But Beats founders Dr. Dre and Interscope exec Jimmy Iovine were apparently looking at the MOG acquisition in a different way from the rest of the industry. On Thursday they named Topspin CEO Ian Rogers as the new CEO to join Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor, who had been previously hired to act as creative director, of a new unnamed music service going by the code name of "Daisy."

Ian and Trent are two of the smartest guys in digital media today, and right away you have to think that they'll come up some something out-of-the-box that hasn't been tried before.

But here's where the brilliance of the MOG acquisition comes in. Basically Beats could care less about the MOG infrastructure I'm guessing. Nothing special there. But the licenses with the labels hold real value. With licenses in hand, the company doesn't have to go through the elongated and expensive negotiating process (at least not until they have to be renewed), so that leaves them free to design their own platform on a more timely basis. And both of those guys know about software development and the user and artist experience, which is why we can look forward to what they come up with.

There's yet another big advantage that Daisy could have and that's the connection to Beats. There's a lot of customers who love the product and would be predisposed to trying a new service. Plus it could be offered with the purchase of a new Beats headphone in the future.

You can read an excerpt of an Ian Rogers interview that he did for the Music 3.0 guidebook. It's quite enlightening as to his outlook on the music business.

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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.

9 Amazing Social Media Facts

Social media is a huge part of our lives, but sometimes we underestimate just how big it really is. Here are some truly astounding social media facts, courtesy of socialnomics, that provide some perspective on the biggest part of our online lives.

1. Facebook's 1 billion members makes it the world's third largest country behind China and India.

2. Every day 20% of Google searches have never been searched before.

3. Two new members join LinkedIn every second. This is about the same as the entire enrollment of the Ivy League colleges every day.

4. By the end of 2013, social gamers will purchase $6 billion in virtual goods, but moviegoers will only purchase $2.5 billion in real goods.

5. 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

6. YouTube is the world's second largest search engine (of course, it is owned by Google).

7. 53% of people on Twitter recommend products in their tweets.

8. 92% of people trust reviews and recommendations compared with only 14% who trust traditional advertising.

9. Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry have more Twitter followers than the populations of Germany, Turkey, South Africa, Canada, Argentina and Egypt.

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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.

Search For Music By Your Mood

Here's one that had to come about sooner or later. Clear Channel's iHearRadio Internet radio platform recently announced a feature that allows users to choose their listening options based upon their mood or current activity.

The new feature is called "Perfect For" and allows the user to browse through "hundreds of carefully curated stations" after they browse through a menue of possible moods and activities for the day and time. iHeartRadio has a catalog of over 1,500 stations from across the country, but they're adding "thousands of new stations," so it seems pretty likely that one of them should be playing something to match your current mood.

The feature is available on their iPhone and PC app, but will soon roll out to other mobile and tablet devices soon, according to Clear Channel.

I'm usually pretty suspicious of anything that Clear Channel does since it was one of the prime movers behind today's homogenized radio, but mood listening does seem to be a leap forward. That said, sometimes you want just the opposite of your mood. For instance, if you're depressed, music that reflects that mood may just sink you lower into depression, while something more uplifting might have a better chance of pulling you out of it.

Regardless, sentiment programming just might be a next step into the future of online radio.

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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.

5 Content SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimization is something we should always be thinking of whenever we're creating content that will end up online. After all, what's the point of posting it if it can't be found?

Here are 5 tips for making your content a bit more friendly to search engines.

1. Use relational linking. If you have a story that can be linked to a big brand or name, you'll get extra points from Google if you do it. That said, if you link to a page without any context to your content, Google will punish you.

2. Use Alt tags. Every image that you use should not only have a descriptive title, but an alt tag as well. That's the extra tag that provides further info as to what the image is all about that usually only a search engine can read. That way, you can be extra sure that the search engine will list the picture higher and add it to the correct search. For instance, the name of the image to the left is "SEO" while the Alt tag is "SEO image from Bobby Owsinski's Music 3.0 blog."

3. Use Header tags. HTML uses a series of header tags (H1 to H6) that work as a page, category or paragraph heading. The problem is that many WYSIWYG web design programs allow you to just make a font larger or smaller without regard to these tags. Search engines use the header tags to distinguish between copy lines, and lend some weight than others depending upon the tag. That's why it's a good reason to all use them if you can.

4. Use bold text for key terms. Bolding key terms and phrases can make them more searchable because a search engine reads the HTML and sees them as more important.

5. Use full names. Search engines like it better if you use a full name. Kanye West is better than just Kanye, and Adam Levine is better just plain Adam, even if we all know who you're talking about.

These five tips are extremely easy to implement, and while they won't guarantee a high search ranking by themselves, they'll help to improve it. For a real eye opener as to your page's SEO, go to this SEO site checker.

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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.

Audio As The New QR Code

I always thought that the QR code was a rather inelegant clunky idea. The concept behind it was fine, but the execution leaves much to be desired. After all, who wants this ugly black and white splotch on your fine artwork. It takes up a lot of space and adds nothing unless someone happens to go through the motions of decoding it and following the link.

But the idea of an analog link to the digital world is sound, and more and more companies are looking at doing something similar in a different way.

Now comes word that Shazam, the fourth most popular iOS app of all time, plans to let views tag the audio coming from their TVs during the February 3rd Super Bowl broadcast this year. This will let users enjoy somewhat of a "second screen" experience as they watch the game with their smartphones and tablets. In fact, brands plan on giving away plan on giving away over a million items to people who tag the audio during the game.

Among the companies that are participating are Interscope (label home of half-time artist Beyonce), Toyota, Best Buy, Cars.com, Pepsi, Teleflora, Bud Light, Bridgestone, GE, Disney and game company Relativity. Plus, second-screeners will be able to keep up with game stats and polls as the game progresses.

With this type of buy-in for the biggest broadcast of the year, it looks like audio tagging (sometimes called "fingerprinting") is here to stay.

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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.

Digital Sets Records But Album Sales Fall In 2012

SoundScan released its yearly report and it seems that 2012 brought us some surprises when it comes to record sales. Here's a brief outline of the year that was.

• Album sales fell by 4.4% from 330 million to 316 million. 

• Digital albums accounted for 37% of the sales, but CD sales still dropped by 13%.

• Digital sales were up 5% from the previous year to an all-time high of 1.34 billion units.

• Country was up 4.1% in album sales, rock (still the biggest selling genre) was up 1.4%, but every other genre slipped from the previous year, with jazz down 26% and classical 20%.

• The top album seller was once again Adele's 21 with 4.4 million copies, followed by Taylor Swift's Red at 3.1 million and One Direction's Up All Night at 1.62 million.

• In terms of individual track sales, most genres rose in sales, with world music increasing the most with 111%, EDM at 36%, and blues by 24%

• Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know" topped all digital sellers with 6.8 million downloads, followed by Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" at 6.7 million and fun.'s "We Are Young" at 5.7 million.

• Vinyl was up over last year once again, with 4.6 million copies sold, lead by Jack White's Blunderbuss at 34,000 and The Beatles Abbey Road at 30,000.

• Rod Stewart's Merry Christmas, Baby was the biggest selling holiday album at 858,000, followed by Michael Buble's Christmas at 622,000. 

What's significant in these numbers is that it's increasingly obvious that we're in a singles world (as if you didn't know already), regardless of what the major record labels might want. Album sales continue to fall except in rare cases as consumers have increasingly decided that they want the hits and the hits only.

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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.

Public Domain Day

Public Domain Day is January 1st of every year and celebrates the moment when copyrights expire. Films, photos, books and music become "free as the air to common use" if their copyrights are finished, and they then become part of our common culture.

So how many works entered into the public domain in the United States this year? None, zero, nada, nothing! Not a single published work entered into the public domain this year, and won't next year or the year after that. In fact, there won't be anything entering into the public domain until 2019 at the earliest.

That's because the copyright term is now the lifetime of the author plus 70 years, and every creative work is automatically protected whether the author files the paperwork or not.

The long copyright term wasn't always the norm. When the first copyright law was written, the term lasted 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author desired, and this was later extended to a 28 year renewable term. 85% of authors did not renew, so works entered the public domain much faster in those days.

Many copyright scholars feel that the length of the copyright term is now too long, and as a result, creativity and innovation suffers. In fact, some would like to return to the 14 year renewable terms. Of course, if you're an artist, you'd like to retain the income from a popular copyright for as long as possible, then allow your family to claim the benefits after you've passed.

There are lots of good arguments on each side. For some great insight on the subject, take a look at this FAQ from Duke Law School and let me know what 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.

MP3 Players Are Dead

What was once a hot business sector now looks to be going the way of the CD player and cassette deck as sales for MP3 players have plummeted over the last year. Although that part of the electronics business is still a somewhat signifanct revenue stream, it's going down fast.

According to numerous sources, sales in the UK have dropped 22% in the last year alone, and Apple has found their global iPod sales down a full 19%. That figure still meant sales of 5.3 million units in the last quarter, but you can see the trend here.

All this sounds pretty ominous for music, right? Well it turns out that people are still listening to more music than ever, just on a different device. That's right, there are more than 1 billion smart phones in use around the world and that's what people are doing most of their listening with. What's more, consulting firm Strategy Analytics believes that figure will double in the next two years.

So say goodbye to the device that saved the music business, and hello to the one that may save it again.

How many of you haven't made the transition to a smart phone yet?

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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.

A Big Promotional Mistake That Artists Make

It's important to be serious about your music career if you expect to get ahead, but sometimes it's possible to actually be too serious about things. Music should be fun both in the creation and listening, and if it becomes too much of a job for an artist it translates to the audience, who can immediately pick up the vibe. Here's a video by CD Baby founder and former CEO Derek Sivers about what he's found to be a big mistake that many artists make.

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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.