The Full "20/20" Show From 1980

A few weeks back I posted an article entitled "The Music Industry Crisis 30 Years Ago" that showed a clip from a 20/20 television news show back in 1980 about the music business. Only the first half of it was available as the second half was reportedly taken down by Universal Music.

Reader Brad Wilson took the initiative to reach out to the person that originally posted the piece (thanks, Brad!), who then posted the entire 20/20 show clip one more time.

Here it is in it's entirety. It's a hoot to look at the fashion, editing, production and opinions from that period, but it's also a little bone-chilling how close some things are to our current slice of the music industry as well.

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Turning Passive Fans Into Committed Fans

There are basically two kinds of fans - those that are "committed" in that they have a high level of interest in you, and those that are "passive." These are fans that kind of like you, but don't feel a need to stay connected, since they don't "love" you yet. The easiest way to grow your audience is to convert those passive fans to ones that are committed.

How do you do that? Passive fans already like what you're doing, so a great new song can easily push them over the edge, providing that they hear it. When a band who's been around for a while finally breaks out big, this is usually what happens.

Sometimes they just need a gentle push over the edge though, and a way to turn them around is by simple communication. CD Baby's DIY Musician blog had a pretty good piece about that recently that recommends that you directly ask the fans what they want from you. There may be something simple that you can do that you never thought of that will help you connect. Ask them.

Here are some questions (from the article) you should be asking, as the feedback can most directly correlate to stronger fans, stronger sales and less wasted efforts.

- Where do you live?
- What do you enjoy more: studio recordings or live performances?
- How important is it that you obtain copies of live performances?
- If we offered high-quality recordings of our shows, would you purchase them?
- Are you willing to purchase an album from us?
- Have you joined our mailing list?
- Would you prefer personal updates or free music from our bi-weekly newsletter?
- If we offered t-shirts, hoodies, hats and posters, which would you purchase?
- Would you be interested in seeing behind the scenes footage of our tour or recording sessions? If so, which would be more interest you?

Interaction alone may not convert some fans (it's still that one song that will knock their socks off), but it's a start. Read the entire article here.

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iTunes 90 Second Preview Troubles

Even for the 800 pound music distribution gorilla in the room that is iTunes, sorting out agreements with record labels is not easy. It seems that Apple's recent October 20th press event was really to announce that Apple had negotiated 90 second previews for all the songs in the iTunes library. The only trouble was, they only did half the negotiating.

While Apple successfully negotiated with the major labels for 90 second preview clips, they forgot that publishers actually have a say in things as well, which meant that the announcement had to dropped at the last minute until that could be sorted out. Since Apple always has multiple products per press event, they were able to change the focus of the event at the last minute so that no one was the wiser.

But the music world is more than the major labels, and Apple didn't do any negotiating with the various indie labels either, instead preferring to simply "inform" them of the change. Unfortunately, the world of digital music isn't that easy, and the indies now have to go back to their artists and third-party publishers to amend their agreements from 30 to 90 second previews, a process that could take a lot longer than anyone would have initially thought.

I think that 90 second previews are great, since the best part of a song is sometimes not contained within the 30 seconds available previously. That being said, this seemingly simple change is a great example of the complexity of the modern music business. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

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Best Time Of Day For Facebook Posts

If you just attended my AES session on Social Media For Musicians And Engineers or read my Music 3.0 Internet Music Guidebook, you know that I'm big on social marketing via Facebook and Twitter. While you might be writing the best, engaging posts, they do you no good if there's no one reading, so the question then becomes, "When is the best time of day to post to Facebook?"

Now comes a study from the social media company Vitrue that looked closely at the viewing habits of Facebook channels of selected companies and brands. The study was conducted over a period of 3 months and looked at more than 1500 brand streams, 1.64 million posts, and 7.56 million comments. Shares and "likes" were not included in the study. Here's some of what they found.

• Usage is highest at 11AM, 3PM, and 8PM ET.

• The biggest spike occurs at 3PM ET on weekdays.

• Wednesday at 3PM is the busiest period of the week.

• Fans are less active on Sunday.

• Post that occur in the morning tend to perform almost 40% better in terms of user engagement than those in the afternoon.

• The top of the hour (:00 to :15 minutes) sees more interaction than other parts of the hour.

• In what seems to be a contradiction, 65% of users only access Facebook when they're not at home or at school, which means in the evening.

Remember that these are the findings of a three month period and by no means definitive, but it's a good place to start when setting up your Facebook posts.

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Soon EMI Will Be No More

We're seeing the last days of the venerable record label giant EMI pass right before our very eyes. Very soon, the music industry will be left with 3 major record labels (Sony, Universal and Warners) as EMI winds down in a slow, painful death by sell-off.

A short recap on how EMI got to this point. The label was purchased by the hedge fund Terra Firma a few years ago thanks to a big loan from CitiBank. The problem was that Terra Firma bought them at the very worst time, just at the time when the price was highest before the recession hit, and paid way perhaps twice as much as the company was worth.

Before you know it, Terra Firma couldn't make the payments, so they resorted to good old fashioned lawyering to try to get them off the hook. They sued Citi for supposedly "tricking them into borrowing more than they needed" to pay for the company. This is like asking to borrow a $1000 to buy a guitar but the bank telling you "I think it's worth more than that, so here's $4000 instead." The banks have been loose with their money in the past, but in a huge deal like Terra Firma/EMI, they do a thing called "due diligence," which means that they check things out in detail before they lend the dough.

Last week, Terra Firma lost their lawsuit, which means that EMI and all their assets will soon become the property of CitiBank. Citi doesn't want to own a record label and publishing company (thankfully) and wants the dough instead, so that means that it will probably soon break up EMI and sell the parts.

EMI owns some of the worlds most valuable copyrights (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Bob Seger to name a few) and it will be interesting to see if those rights will revert back to the artists or be available to be sold, so expect some additional court battles. In the meantime, look for the assets like the historical Abbey Road and the Capitol Tower to be sold as well (who knows what will happen to them), as a great piece of history dies with EMI.

Of all the labels to go, I think that EMI is the one that hurts the most. It's legacy as one of the industry giants and a home of music legends stands tall, but like Columbia Records before it, will soon be forgotten.

Thanks to everyone who made my two sessions (Social Media For Musicians And Engineers) and book signings at AES in San Francisco over the weekend a success!

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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 Tier Rewards Of A Crowdfunding Campaign

The great Hypebot blog recently posted a nice interview with Yancey Strickler, the co-founder of Kickstarter, which is one of the leading crowdfunding platforms used by artists and bands today. While Yancey described many of the elements that work for a crowdfunding campaign, one of the best pieces of the article was about funding tier rewards. A funding tier is a level of investment, like $25, $50, $100 and $500 dollars.

One of the most important elements of a crowdfunding campaign has to do with the rewards that an investor receives for putting money into the project. Just getting credit and money back usually isn't enough, and Yancey had these suggestions (I've messaged the text a little for clarity) to make the campaign a bit more enticing.

1) The Basic Reward - If nothing else, the investor should receive a copy of the CD or a free download.

2) Limited Editions - For either the first 100 investors or the next higher tier, the investor receives a deluxe edition that's individually numbered and personally signed.

3) Share The Story - The next tier investor would receive something even more exclusive, like Polaroids (these certainly are a limited and rare item) from the studio, used guitar strings or drum heads, the coffee cup used by the artist, or some other personal item.

4) The Creative Experience - Bring the investor into the process itself by asking for his or her opinion on which version of a song or photo to release, bring them into the studio for background vocals or handclaps, or just invite them to sit in on a recording, photo session or video. The idea is to give an investor at the highest level a once-in-a-lifetime thrill.

None of these cost very much, yet they could mean the difference between someone investing or not, or investing in a more costly tier.

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Dead Drops - File Sharing Without P2P

Although it still seems pretty safe for people to illegally share files regardless of the many lawsuits by the RIAA, an artist in New York City has discovered a way to continue the practice of file sharing even if all online pirating could be shut down tomorrow.

Aram Bartholl has started a project called Dead Drops that utilize the same methods that spies use to share their info - by embedding USB sticks in walls and curbs across the city. Essentially what you have is a good old fashioned sneaker-net system that would be impossible for anyone to shut down in the event that all online piracy was neutralized.

There's not much chance that will ever happen, but it just goes to show how simplicity and the real world can sometimes top the virtual one.

I don't know if Dead Drops was inspired by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, but it sure sounds a lot like something he's done in the past. Trent has been known to leave unmarked USB sticks in the bathrooms at concerts with either new material, or directions to a secret show. It was a great viral maneuver that also bypassed a widespread technology for a more physical localized one.

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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.

Come To My AES Sessions And Book Signing

I'll be presenting a couple of sessions at the upcoming AES convention in San Francisco on November 5th and 6th entitled "Social Media For Musicians And Engineers - Part 1 and 2."  

Here are the session descriptions:

Social Media For Musicians And Engineers - Part 1

For the first time in history, an artist or band can directly communicate, market and sell directly to their fans without the need of a record label. This presentation describes the basic elements needed for a successful online social presence, as well as the latest strategies for music and video releases, online promotion and sales, and interaction with fans and clients.

Topics covered include:

The meaning of Music 3.0

Why a website is the center of your social media universe

The elements of a successful site

The new release schedule

Your mailing list - old tech, new importance

The social media world is larger than you think

Measurement techniques

Social Media For Musicians And Engineers - Part 2

MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are important elements for developing a fanbase, but without the proper strategy they can prove ineffective and take so much time that there's no time left for creating. This presentation shows artists, bands, musicians and audio professionals the best techniques to utilize social media as a promotional tool without it taking 20 hours a day.

Topics covered include:

Social Media management strategies

Optimizing your YouTube presence

The secrets of viral videos

The online video world is larger than you think

Search Engine Optimization basics

Using Facebook and Twitter for marketing

The secret behind successful tweets

Is MySpace dead?

What’s next?

If you're attending AES, please join me for the sessions and book signing afterwards.

The Pirates Fight Back

In what looks to be an escalation in the RIAA's (the recording industry's trade group) war on piracy, the pirates are now fighting back. Possibly because of the injunction that the RIAA won last week against the illegal file-sharing service Limewire, RIAA.com was hacked on Friday and taken off the air. The site returned on Friday night and has been on the air since.

A group calling itself "Anonymous" claimed responsibility for the act and announced "Operation Payback" intended as a means of making life as difficult for the trade group as it's made on the music industry's customers that it sued.

Operation Payback seems to be no more than a nuisance to the RIAA, but they're trying to make it as painful as possible. Anonymous started by publishing personal details of RIAA head Mitch Bainwol and his wife, then published office phone and fax numbers in the hopes of causing enough of a disruption as to take the industry group's mind off of the pirates.

I'd venture to say that the RIAA has never gone up against someone willing to fight dirty before. The developments should make for an interesting story to follow over the next few months.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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Move Over P2P

Peer-to-peer file sharing used to be the bane of the music industry (it still is) and the largest component of Internet bandwidth. Now comes word that online video has surpassed P2P file sharing as the largest generator of global broadband traffic, according to Cisco's Visual Networking Usage Report.

Online video now represents 26% of all traffic, just ahead of the 25% P2P traffic, which was down significantly from last year. Peak hours for video viewing are between 9PM and midnight worldwide.

Believe it or not, more than a third of the Top 50 sites by volume are now video sites, and contrary to popular belief, none of the top 50 are adult sites.

What does this mean? Record labels would be a lot better off helping their acts promote their videos than chasing down illegal downloaders.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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Taylor Swift's New Sales Strategy

Taylor Swift is using an interesting sales strategy for her new album, "Speak Now." You can download all 14 songs from Amazon for only $3.99, while the CD is available for the now standard $9.99.

Then if you head on over to iTunes, the download price is $13.99 for all the entire album, or $1.29 per track. It will be very interesting to see the breakout of which distributor actually sells more product.

That being said, it's probably not so much about the pricing strategy as it is about Swift's popularity, since the album is expected to sell more than 1 million units it's first week out. That would be a record for a country album, and a most rare sales occurrence these days.

Despite all the gloom and doom around the music industry, this performance proves that there's still an audience willing to purchase music if it's a product they like.

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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.

MicroPayments - The Artist's Future?

For quite a while now, technologists have been predicting that the online world would eventually revolve around what's known as "micropayments," which is the ability to charge very low fees (as low as a few cents) for online services.

While this may seem like a no brainer, micropayments are a lot harder than they seem not so much from a technology standpoint, but from a financial one. Every financial transaction costs money. There's a service fee involved that mostly comes from the financial institution doing business with the vendor. The problem has been that the transactional cost has been high enough from the likes of Visa, Mastercard, et al, that it's been nearly impossible to have prices of less than a dollar for any purchase online.

You might think that iTunes has been charging $0.99 for 7 years now with no problem, but Apple (and Amazon for that matter) is so large that it can absorb the financial trading costs without an intermediary. For everyone else, you need a bank or a credit card company to securely collect your funds.

All that may be gradually changing though, as PayPal (which is owned by Ebay) recently announced a new micropayment structure for purchases under $12, which charges 5% of the transaction costs plus 5 cents. This means that a purchase of a dollar has a transactional cost of just $.10 instead of the normal cost of about $.33. As a result, it may actually become profitable for more companies to do business in around that $1 area.

Although this is a step in the right direction, it's still doesn't go far enough. The real Holy Grail comes when transactions as low as 1 cent become doable. Why? Because then it will be possible to charge for things that we get for free now. Who wouldn't pay a couple of cents to hear the streaming song or get a download of an interesting artist? Want to see that hot video? It might cost you a nickel, but it's a small enough investment that you'd pay it without a second thought.

Consumers will be more likely to pay this seemingly insignificant amount, and that can amount to at least some income for an artist. And what if the purchase was automatically charged to your cell phone bill (also part of the Holy Grail solution)? You may hardly notice if it were a couple of bucks higher at the end of the month, but an artist would certainly feel better about himself with at least a little money coming in.

So watch this topic closely. This tiny bit of money is more significant than it seems.

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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.