How Many Friends See Your Facebook Posts?

Robin Davey posted an interesting article on Hypebot yesterday called "Only 10% Of Your Friends See Your Facebook Posts, And Only 1% Like It." The underlying premise was that the number of Friends that respond via a "Like" is small, so as a result, Facebook posts are just marginally worth it.

Robin used the empirical evidence he received by a post on his  personal wall asking his friends to "Like" it, and received about a 10% response. He determined the 1% portion of the article by looking at the following (an excerpt from the post):

"The Black Keys have 800,000 fans and they get around 800 likes per post, although they did reach 7,000 when they said 'Lotsa Grammys".

Justin Bieber has 22,000,000 fans and gets between 25,000 and 50,000 likes per post.

Mumford and Sons have 1,300,000 fans and have recently pulled an impressive 17,000 likes on one post that simply said, "TOUR!!!"

But how impressive exactly is that?

Well the Black Keys, at 800 for the less popular posts, works out significantly below 1% of their fans choosing to like it, and just under 1% for their most popular post. Bieber's rampant fans achieve similar numbers. Mumford's impressive number is actually only just above 1%."

I think the flaw in this thinking is that if someone doesn't register a Like, then they're not actually reading the post at all. We all know that's not the case, and in fact many of us see and react to posts without actually registering a Like.

The reason why an artist should continue to post without worrying about getting Likes is the same reason why advertising works - it's all about the impressions. The more impressions, or views, the more likely the viewer will take some action, like download some music, go to a show or buy a T-shirt. 

As long as the information you post is valuable to the reader in some way, it's worth doing because you're reaching him in some way. In other words, it's nice to be "Liked," but it's not necessarily a sign of a successful post.

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The Internet In Numbers

Royal Pingdom recently posted everything you wanted to know about the Internet in the last year As always, the numbers are staggering, and each year they get more so. Here's a sample.

• 07 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
• 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.

• 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
• 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.

• 8.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010.
• 13.2 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2010.
• 8.6 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2010.
• 79.2 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 202 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2010).

• .97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
• 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.

• 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
• 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
• 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
• 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
• 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.

• 2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
• 35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Truly staggering. It's pretty easy to feel small.

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Will We Be Buying By iPhone Soon?

It's rumored that the upcoming iPhone 5 will employ a new technology called Near Field Communications, or NFC, that will let a mobile device owner wave their phone over a short range wireless receiver or tap the device to make a purchase. This technology is already widespread in Japan and used in Europe, but still hasn't broken through here in the States. But of course, if Apple adopts NFC, it's a whole new ball game.

Pay-by-cell phone, like subscription music, has been a dream of technologists and entrepreneurs alike for some time because of it's many advantages. Like what, you say?

How about an instant purchase without having to worry about the whole credit card process and the time it takes? Or all those purchases going automatically to just one bill - your cell phone bill? Or how about a jump start to the most sought-after transaction ever - micropayments? And as you'll see, it can be used for music discovery too.

Just like most improvements in our technological lives, convenience always triumphs over everything else, and an NFC enabled phone would certainly be the next step.

Interestingly enough, I first heard about NFC two years ago when I interviewed my friend Ken Rutkowski, the host of the World Tech Roundup at KenRadio.com and facilitator of the Media Entertainment Technology Alliance, for the Internet music guidebook Music 3.0. Ken hit it right on the nose about NFC, only his take was more about music discovery and sharing. Here's what he had to say.

"There’s a new technology in Asia that’s trickling down here called NFC, or Near Field Communication. It’s like Bluetooth in that it allows us to sync with other devices, but it’s more specific. 

If I walk into a room of 20 people, my device will know which of those 20 people I want to sync with and what areas of their device that I want to sync with. For example, say five of these people are trusted friends that have trusted libraries on their phones. When I walk into this group, my phone, through NFC, might intelligently connect to all my friends’ phones and download a playlist or certain types of content. It’s all invisible to me. So the next form of communication and technology is the personalization of my community while I’m with my community. 

Any time I’m with you I get to experience the music that you’re listening to, for example, without having to go download it off the Internet. When I get back after hanging out with you, I’ll see my phone blinking and realize that I just exchanged content with you. It’s a new type of discovery that you don’t have to manually engage. That makes meeting people one-on-one more important than having that distance that we have today. It’s more about “I want to discover, but I want to be with my friends when I’m discovering.” It’s hard to wrap your head around it, but I believe that it’s going to make people want to get together more."

As you can see, there are a lot of benefits that an NFC device can hold. iPhone 5, hurry up and get here soon.

Check out my website to read more excerpts from Music 3.0.

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The Marketing Of DeadClubs

I always love marketing ideas that find a product niche where there wasn't one before, where you hit yourself in the head and say, "Why didn't I think of that?" Well, here's a good one, and it's called "DeadClubs."

DeadClubs.com is a site that offers new T-shirts from popular clubs from around the country that have long been closed. It's a great idea because enough people remember those clubs that whenever anyone shows up with a seemingly vintage T-shirt in prime condition, it always sparks interest. It's an automatic conversation starter.

DeadClubs.com is a work obviously in progress, as many of the other aspects of it such as "Dead Vinyl" and "Dead Air" aren't populated yet, but you can see where they're going with it. I bet this becomes a thriving little business in no time.

So if you're an artist or band, how can you use a similar idea? How about a T-shirt connecting your band at a show at a revered but long gone local club (make sure you get permission first, though)? How about a tour T-shirt at all the favorite dead clubs (maybe you can ask DeadClubs for help)? Why stop at venues. How about an association with old radio stations, record stores, pizza parlors, etc. (again, it's important to ask for permission first)?

The idea is to have something other than a normal artist or band T-shirt; one that strikes some extra interest or controversy. Anything that starts up a conversation with your name in it is the goal.

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The Music Industry Is Not Dying

There's a lot of doom and gloom about the music business out there, and I've certainly been responsible for my little piece of it. But if anyone thinks the music business is really dying, they're absolutely wrong. It’s evolving, morphing, transmuting, adjusting, adapting, reconfiguring, transitioning and progressing; but it’s not in any danger of dying.

While it’s absolutely true that album sales are down 65% from 2000, that still means that 326 million where sold in 2010 in the US alone. That’s a lot of music being sold. 2010 also saw nearly 1.2 BILLION digital downloads sold. Again, a huge amount. Internet radio service Pandora has over 80 million registered users and 30 million active users a month, which is almost one in ten Americans. As of the beginning of 2010, more than 278,000 artists sell their music at CD Baby and over 5 million of their CDs have been sold online to customers. So there are a lot of people out there willing to part with their hard earned money for music.

Now comes the best reason to believe in the industry. As of last week, British singer Adele has sold over 1 million albums in the UK alone since her album 21 was released at the end of January, plus another 325k in the US (check out my Big Picture production blog for an analysis of her hit "Rolling In The Deep." People are willing to pay for quality music; they just haven't seen or heard enough of it in a while to get really excited with their pocketbooks in big numbers like they used to.

Remember, the music industry only dies when people stop listening. See any evidence of that lately?

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Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Bigger Is Better Online

Most visual items online are small, be it a video, a picture, or album artwork, and one of the things that can defeat the entire purpose of these items is if they're not made with that fact in mind. It's really difficult to get the point across in 320 pixels or less, but it can be done if you keep the following in mind.

1) When shooting videos, wide shots don't usually work unless your shooting items that are really large. Most of the time you need to shoot at least medium close-ups to get the point across.

2) The same goes for pictures. There's not much impact with a wide shot so you have to go in close. Take a look at the two shots below. Which one works better?

3) On album artwork, make sure the name of the artist or band is large enough. Always think about if you can identify the artist if the artwork was shrunk to 150 pixels. Remember, what works on a CD doesn't necessarily translate to a smaller version. Which one works better here?

It's very easy to overlook when shooting video or designing artwork, but it's really worth the effort in the end. The chances of your pictures, videos or artwork appearing in a reduced form are great, so best to prepare for it up front.

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Music Marketing With Gummy Skulls

I just love out-of-the-box marketing ideas, but this one may be the best of many already great ones this year. The Flaming Lips will soon self-release their as-yet-untitled, four-song 12 inch EP featuring Neon Indian, which is cool but nothing too outrageous in itself.

Soon thereafter, however, the band will begin to sell gummy skulls - yes, that's replicas of a human skull made out of gummy. As FL leader Wayne Coyne explains, "It's a life-sized human skull completely made out of edible gummy bear stuff. It also has a gummy brain inside of it and, inside of that there's a USB flash drive that has three new songs on it. It's pretty outrageous."

OK, the gummy skull is a novelty, but what I really find cool about this is that they're releasing their music on a flash drive. The great part about distributing music this way is you can not only have your music available in MP3 and AAC format, but also as a higher resolution Wave or AIFF file as well. I don't know if FL are going that far, but I sure hope so. They've gone to this much trouble already, they might as well go all the way.

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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.

A Plan To Help Retailers Stock More CDs

Record labels have a synergistic relationship with retailers that can't be denied. In the US, 50% of their revenue still comes from the sale of about 300 million CDs, which is a big amount by any stretch of the imagination. But with the major big box retailers of Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target carrying fewer and fewer CDs in their inventory, it's even less likely that a consumer can find exactly what they want when they want it. This creates a fast downward spiral of decreasing CD sales that we're experiencing now.

Now I don't think there's anyone who believes that CDs sales are going to increase under any circumstances, but there are people that still buy them, and it might be possible to slow that spiral down. But how?

According to an article in the Financial Times, the UK retailer Tesco is trying to get the major labels there to implement a novel idea that might give the retailer some relief so it's it's able to stock more CD inventory. Instead of paying $11 to $13 dollars up front for a CD (in the US it's more like $8 to $9), they're asking to pay just 80 cents up front, with the remainder paid after the sale. The idea is that this amount will cover the actual manufacturing cost of the disc only, although that doesn't even touch the royalties, overhead, production costs and more.

A trial is now being made with Robbie Williams, and Tesco claims that sales are up 40%. That doesn't tell us much however, since the only way the program would make a difference is if more different CDs were stocked than before to give consumers more choice.

In any event, it's a step in the right direction. Record stores are vitally important to the music business, and it's important that they get any help they can from any place they can. Let's hope something similar takes place in the US.

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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.

The "Pay What You Can" Music Label

I always thought that Radiohead had the best idea when they asked their fans to pay whatever they wanted for their 2007 online release of In Rainbows. By all reports, In Rainbows ended up being far more successful than the band ever believed it could be, and didn't dent their traditional CD sales one bit when they released it about six months later.

This, I believe, is a great model for an artist or band just starting out. Ask your fans to pay whatever they want for online downloads. Ask them to pay whatever they want for CDs at your gig. They might surprise you with how generous they are, and even if they don't pay anything, it still means there's more of your product out in the marketplace. Remember, your music is your marketing in Music 3.0!

That being said, a new music label out of Detroit has popped up called BeeHive Recording, where people can pay whatever they want for the releases of artists on their roster. While this might work for an individual artist or band, I'm not quite sure how viable it is for a record label. Still, you have to hand it to them for at least trying something different.

Here's a video about what they're doing. I don't know where Steven of BeeHive gets his figures about what an artist gets paid from a traditional record contract, because they're just flat-out wrong (way too low). Even so, let that part of it go and listen to the rest.

The site has 600 site members and between 3,500 and 4,000 downloads have occurred so far.


Beehive Recording Company from Alec on Vimeo.

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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.

Who Controls The Music Business

Here's an excerpt from the Music 3.0 guidebook that illustrates who controls the infrastructure of what's left of the old music business. At least to some degree, this structure will always remain to some degree, especially at the superstar level, but the times they are a changin' and that influence is waning by the day.
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Although it may not be readily apparent, Wall Street and Madison Avenue indirectly control the remaining M2.5 music industry through their tremendous influence on the financial bottom line of record labels, record stores, concert promotion, radio, and television. If you’re owned by a publicly traded conglomerate (as all major labels, major concert promoters, and radio and television stations are), then you’re in the business of selling stock, not servicing the consumer. What that means is that nothing matters more than quarterly earnings. To keep those earnings as high as possible, Wall Street turns to Madison Avenue to devise the best marketing strategy for keeping the profits high. Madison Avenue (in the form of the major advertising agencies) can bring in the big ad dollars, but only under certain content conditions (like programming that is tailored around the advertising), and the process repeats itself over and over. The advertising industry (Madison Avenue), not the music industry, therefore drives the music cycle in the United States. 

In Music 2.5, it’s all about passing focus-group tests, which have separated listeners into the distinct demographic groups that advertisers are then able to tell stock analysts they have micromarketed their products to. As a result, radio, television, and live performances are no longer about aggregating and entertaining large audiences, but rather just a group of market niches. The bright side to this fact is that there’s one heck of an opportunity opening up for folks who don’t get hung up on trying to sell advertising.

Wall Street and Madison Avenue have tried to redefine what music means to people, but most people are voting with their wallets by refusing to buy any new recordings. The view of the vast majority of consumers is that very few new recordings are worth buying compared to those released a couple decades ago, and this has become the dilemma of the industry. You have to sell product to survive, but it’s impossible to develop that product while trying to please your corporate masters. It might work when selling soap or clothing or any other consumer product, but a creative endeavor like music just doesn’t work that way. It’s too personal, both to the artist and the consumer, to be a mass-market product.

Control In Music 2.5

Wall Street and Madison Avenue control the media

Record labels need to keep stock price and quarterly profits high

Radio and television only play what appeals to advertisers

Consumers divided into demographic groups

Music becomes devalued

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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.

An Artist Subscription Model That Works

Recently Jill Havercamp wrote an interesting article over at Music Think Tank called "6 Case Studies On Successful Online Music Marketing." Although all of the examples are good (some I've written about here before), one jumped out at me.

Matthew Ebel runs a subscription site for his super fans that he says provides him 26% of his income - all from just 40 fans! His packages range from $5/month to $15/month, but he has annual options that go for as much as $499, and that one's sold out.

So what do you get as a subscriber?
   * Members-only parties
   * VIP seating at shows
   * Access to new music as soon as he creates it
   * New live concert recordings every month
   * Sessions with individual tracks for remixing
   * Behind-the-scene sketches, drafts, and ideas, and more.

Now 40 fans isn't a huge number, and 26% of his income may or may not amount to much, but I think that just the fact that Matthew was willing to try subscription validates that this model is viable even for an artist without a huge amount of national attention. Most artist's would normally be afraid of subscription because you really need dedicated fans to make it work, and it takes a lot of work to make the subscription worthwhile to keep the fans happy.

Good work, Matthew. You're a great example of what can happen for an artist in Music 3.0.

You can view Matthew's site here and view his subscription page 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.

Stones Sell Their Catalog Online In Hi-Res

Considering that hi-definition downloads was just something I touched on in a recent post, it's interesting to see that the Rolling Stones are offering their entire catalog of 27 albums digitally online for the first time. What's different is that the albums will be available in full 176.4 or 88.2kHz/24 bit uncompressed form at HDtracks.

The price for these downloads are a premium $19.95 for the 88.2k version, and 29.95 for the 176.4k version, which is quite a jump from the normal $9.99 that you pay for an MP3/AAC download on iTunes or Amazon MP3. HDtracks is no startup in that it already has 5,400 albums and 100,000 customers, but the Stones will be the biggest act in their stable so far.

This is all well and good and it will be an interesting experiment to see just what the sales and revenue will be from this venture, but until a current major artist signs on, we probably really won't know what the appetite is for hi-res tracks. The problem is that not that many artists today actually record at extended sample rates like 88.2, 96, 176.4 or 192k. For artists that recorded their work on analog tape, transfer to any of these digital formats is easy, but that format all but went away about a decade ago.

While it's true that a small contingent of artists still record on tape, it's a dying breed. Tape costs are high, and machine maintenance is higher, which is a limitation to the so-called "audiophile" downloads. But even 44.1kHz/16bit CD quality would be a vast improvement than what we're now used to online. With bandwidth and storage costs going lower all the time, this just might be an idea who's time will soon come.

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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.