Who Says You Need Only One YouTube Channel?

Many artists and bands don't spend nearly enough time tending to their YouTube channel as they should, but even the ones that do may find that having only one channels isn't enough.

For example, a new study by Pixability shows that the top 100 global brands have a total of 1,378 individual channels with over 258,000 videos posted, and they attracted 9.5 billion views. 56 of those brands have 10 or more channels. The only one of the top 100 brands that didn't have a YouTube channel was financial giant Morgan Stanley (I guess their customers don't have time to spend online).

Which brands have the most channels? It might surprise you.
3M          43
Disney    41
Nike        41
IBM        41
Google    40
Samsung 34
Sony        34
Philips     34
Oracle     34
IKEA      33

Who produces the most videos? That might surprise you too.
MTV - 23,000+
Thomson/Reuters - 23,000+
Disney - 15,000+
Google - 12,000+
Samsung - 12,000+
Sony - 10,000+
Intel - 8,000+
Seimans -7,000+
Nokia - 6,000+
Cisco - 6,000+

Who are the top social video marketers? Try Adidas, Apple. Samsung and Sony, all tied at number 1.

What are the conclusions of the study?

• Having more targeted channels gets more views, but only if you regularly post on them. A targeted channel for a band might mean one that's dedicated to unplugged performances, or one that only has live performances, or one that's dedicated to the personalities of the band.

• The more videos you make, the better. And they can be different lengths and have different quality levels.

• The more you use social media to announce your videos, the more views you'll get.

You can see the slide show for yourself (there's a lot more data there) at Slideshare.

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How Much Did Psy Really Make?

Everyone seems to be weighing in on how much K-Pop star Psy made with his global hit "Gagnam Style." According to numerous accounts, the 1.23 billion views earned a total of around $8 million on YouTube, in which Psy received $4 mil. But other sources seem to dispute this and say the overall take is much lower.

Indeed, you hear estimates that vary from $.05 all the up to $.65 per view, but NPR estimates that Psy's take was more like 4 cents per view. The fact of the matter is, any kind of digital stream monetization always seems to be a moving target so it's difficult to tell for sure, and just when you think you have a handle on it, everything changes yet again.

Then add to the fact that most videos don't start out using advertising, and only begin to employ it if it appears to be a viral hit. This can mean that quite a few million views go by the wayside earning zero because it took so long switch to the advertising model.

I don't know about you, but I personally hate ads on YouTube and will do anything to avoid them, especially the 30 second ones. 5 seconds I'll give you, but not much beyond that. Yet, I can't blame anyone for trying to monetize their art and create a new revenue stream.

All that said, you'd expect that over a billion views would generate well over the $8 million figure that's been thrown around. The real fact of the matter is that however much was generated, it's inconsequential to the overal income of Psy. Consider the billion views a huge marketing bonus, since Psy registered big dollars from worldwide concerts and television appearances. As always, your music is not your product - it's your marketing.

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New Year's Social Media Resolutions

Here we are at 2013. If you're an artist or in a band, here are 5 social media marketing resolutions for the year that are the basis of the Music 3.0 strategy.

1. I will update my (our) website and make it the center of my online universe. Your website is important because it's the only thing you have total control over and you can rely on 100 percent. Facebook, Tumblr and other social networks provide far less control and can change their terms of service at any time, but your website is always securely yours.

2. I will release music regularly. Instead of releasing an album, release a song every month to six weeks instead. Each release is a separate event that you can promote, therefore you have multiple promotional opportunities. An album gives you only one.

3. I will create more videos. Most people discover new music on YouTube than any other place other than radio. Make a video for your songs as soon as you can. Don't wait to make proper videos, which take a lot of time. Just put the lyrics up over the music until a proper video is available. You see lyric-only videos all over YouTube that have millions of views, and that can happen to you too.

4. I will develop a mailing list and send a newsletter at least once every 90 days. Other than your website, your mailing list is the next most important part of your online presence. It's the best way to personally reach out to your fans.

5. I will post and tweet more regularly. Being regular and consistent is important, but provide more than constant sales pitches. Offer behind the scenes information, trivia, or links to other interesting info around the net. Keep your fans entertained.

This is a quick outline of an artist's modern marketing strategy, and obviously there are a number of additional points and a lot more to talk about. That's what well be doing on the Music 3.0 blog every day in 2013.

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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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Marketing To Your "Tribe"

An artist has 2 categories of fans - casual fans that may like you or your type of music but don't love you, and really passionate fans that love everything you do. Some call these your "true fans," "superfans," or "uberfans." Marketing guru Seth Godin calls them your "tribe."

Here's a brief excerpt about marketing to your tribe from my book, Music 3.0 - A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age.

"Be extremely careful about how you market to your tribe. Chances are your tribe wants everything you have to offer, but they don’t want to be hyped on it. Make an announcement about a new release or a piece of swag, but don’t oversell it. Tribe members don’t need to know that you think your new music is the greatest thing you ever did and it’s better than the Foo Fighters last release. They’ll decide for themselves and then sell it for you in their own conversations if they like it.

The way to market to your tribe is by simply presenting your product to them. Just make them aware that it’s available, and they’ll do the rest. You can take it a bit further by offering them information about the product - the more exclusive, the better.

Instead of a sales pitch:

• Give them a behind the scenes story about the making of the product.

• Tell them where the idea for it came.

• Tell them about all the people involved, especially other tribe members.

• Provide interviews with others involved in the project.

• Give them all the trivia involved in the project, no matter how small. True fans will eat it up. If it’s a new song, tell them where it was recorded, who the engineer and producer were, how many tracks were needed, how long the mix took, how many mixes you did, how the final mix compared to the rough mix, and all of the hundred other fine details that go into producing a song. If you just produced a new T-shirt, describe where the design came from, why you chose the manufacturer, what the shirt is made of, why you chose the color, etc. Get the idea?

Giving them insight that no ones else has makes them feel special, will keep them loyal, and will show mere fans and lurkers the benefits of tribal participation."

You can read more excerpts from the Music 3.0 Internet music survival guide and other books on the Bobby Owsinski website.

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The Shattered Hit Record Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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

4 Common Facebook Marketing Mistakes

It's true that Facebook has a huge upside potential for marketing, but there can also be a downside as well if it's not done properly. Mashable recently posted a great article about the 10 biggest Facebook marketing mistakes, and here are the ones that I thought were most pertinent to musicians, artists and bands, since they could have serious consequences on your marketing effort.

1. Using An Illegal Cover Photo. The first thing is to use a picture that's pertinent to who you are right now. Don't use a baby picture, a picture of Darth Vader or a famous celebrity. Visitors may think you're trying to cover something up. Also, Facebook has a number of guidelines as for your cover photo as well, like:

• no price or purchase information in the photo (like "50% off")

• a call to action to like, comment or share with your friends

• contact info like web, email or mailing address (there are better places to put this rather than in the cover photo).

2. Breaking Contest Guidelines. Facebook is very sensitive to contests and wants you to closely abide by their rules. Here's what you should know:

• Contests asking for submissions or votes via comments or liking are prohibited.

• All contests or giveaways must be administered within Apps On Facebook.com

• You can't notify contest winners through Facebook on wall posts, messages, chat or the like.

Kind of puts a damper on things, right? Fear not, there are a number of 3rd party providers that can help you run a Facebook promotion, like Wildfire and Offerpop, but they'll cost you. Before you decide on any contest, read the Facebook promotion guidelines first.

3. Overposting. Yes, it's true, you can post too much. Facebook suggests that one or two posts a day get the most response, and there's some evidence that posting any more (sometimes even twice a day) begins to become counterproductive.

4. Too Much Text. Once again, it's possible to be too chatty, and that can produce negative results. Facebook suggests that somewhere between 100 and 250 characters (which equals a line or two of text) gets 60% more likes, comments and shares. Researcher Buddy Media has found that posts of 80 characters or less have 27% higher engagement rates.

You can read the rest of the mistakes in the Mashable article, but start by following these easy ones, since they can make a big difference in the outcome of your Facebook promotion.

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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.

Why Fan Data Matters

It's difficult to read a tech-related story these days without a reference to user data, meta data or the latest "Big Data" (large data sets controlled by mostly large companies), but there are a number of good reasons why this has become a major concern for businesses, and artists and bands, everywhere.

Even politics. You're going to see your user data in action in the upcoming presidential election in a major fashion because, in fact, it's been in use by political campaigns since 2004 as a major way to get out the vote and add donors. And it works. In the private sector, more and more companies and non-profits are taking that data seriously and so should you. Here's why.

The future of marketing is micro-targeting.

The more you know about your fans, the easier it will be to send them only the information that they care about. Why inform a fan in St. Louis that you're doing a gig in Boston? There might be a time that you'd make that information available, but a few days before the show, you just want to concentrate locally, and micro-targeting allows you to do that. What if you have a piece of merch that's aimed at your female fans in cold weather territories? Do you think the dudes care much about it? Do you think you female fans in Florida and Texas care much about it? Micro-targeting allows you to adjust your campaign accordingly.

And it makes measurement easier too. With a more precise user sample, it's much easier to tell if and how a campaign is actually working. If you shotgun a post to 3000 fans and 15 respond, it looks like only .5% responded, but if that same campaign was more precisely aimed at only 30 of those fans and you found that 12 responded, that's a whopping 40%. In the first example with a .5% response, you'd think that your campaign had a serious flaw in it. In the more targeted second example, we can see that the same campaign worked smashingly well. It all depends on targeting the right fans in the first place.

The old advertising days of "50% of advertising works. We just don't know which 50%," may soon be over, thanks to micro-targeting and better measurement techniques. In upcoming posts I'll discuss which data is the most important, and techniques on how to collect it, so you can start micro-targeting right now.

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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.

7 Tips From The Advertising Giants

Heidi Cohen wrote this great post a couple of weeks ago regarding some marketing tips from the giants of advertising. These gurus have all passed, but their collective wisdom lives on. Even though much of it is from another time and a different world, it still holds true today.

Tip #1

• "Advertising ought to work by telling you what it is you want to tell, you should understand what you want us to do, what you want us to think, where you want us to shop." — Jay Chiat: founder of the Chiat/Day Agency, known for it's Apple Computer and Energizer Bunny campaigns.

• Tip #2

  "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself."  — Peter F. Drucker: one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of business management theory and practice.

• Tip #3

  "[Brands] establish contact with the subconscious of the consumer below the word level. They do this with visual symbols instead of words … They communicate faster. They are more direct. There is no work, no mental effort. Their sole purpose is to create images and moods." — Rosser Reeves: a pioneer in television commercials with campaigns for Bic pens, Minute Maid orange juice, M&M candies, and Colgate toothpaste, and supposedly the model for the Don Draper character in Mad Men.

• Tip #4

  "The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising." — David Ogilvy: founder of the giant Ogilvy and Mathers Advertising Agency and said to be the "godfather of modern advertising."

• Tip #5

  "Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you’re saying it like it’s never been said before." — William Bernbach: co-founder of the DDB Agency, with notable campaigns like We Try Harder for Avis Car Rental, Mikey for Life Cereal, You Don't Have to be Jewish to Love Levy's for Levy's Rye Bread, and It's so simple for Polaroid.

• Tip #6

  "Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief. — Leo Burnett: the advertising executive who created the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man, Toucan Sam, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the 7up "Spot", and Tony the Tiger, and named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

• Tip #7
  

  "Any seeming deception in a statement is costly, not only in the expense of the advertising but in the detrimental effect produced upon the customer, who believes she has been misled." — John Wanamaker: one of the creators of the department store, and considered by some to be the father of modern advertising and a pioneer in marketing.

  These 7 men made their clients and shareholders wealthy years ago, and would do so today in our Music 3.0 world. Their insight is timeless.
  
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  Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

  
  

  Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.