How Social Users Listen

Recently Lab42 did a survey of music listeners to try to track their music listening and sharing habits via social media. Here's what they found:

Asked when they listened to music:

• 56% said while cooking
• 36% said at work
• 32% said when falling asleep
• 29% said while studying

• 45% said they listen to music at least 10 hours a week

• 70% pay to download music
• 60% download free music
• 13% don't download music

• 73% belonged to a social music site like Pandora or Spotify.

• 20% pay for a premium service on the social music site.

• 86% used the free version for 6 months before upgrading.

• 78% use the "private session" feature so people can't see their music selections.

• Yet 94% listened to a song because they saw a friend listening to it.

The survey just goes to show that slowly but surely, people are altering their listening patterns to streaming instead of downloads, although not as quickly as we're led to believe by the press.

-----------------------------------

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.

2012 Worldwide Digital Music Sales Up

After a couple of very flat years in digital sales that really had the music industry massively scared, it looks like 2012 will once again show an increase, perhaps even a substantial one. According to research analysts Strategy Analytics, 2012 should look like this when it ends:

• streaming revenues up 40% to $1.2 billion.
• downloads up about 8.5% to $4.3 billion.
• total digital music sales including mobile up 18% to $9.5 billion
• digital music increases to 39% of all music sales

The interesting thing is that there's still a lot of physical product being consumed, if digital is only 39% of the total music sales. If that holds true, that means that the total world-wide recorded music sales should come in at somewhere around $25 billion, which is a lot better than it's been for years.

On November 1st I'm going to be at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey to give the keynote address at the ATMM Conference. My theme for the talk is "The Music Industry Is NOT Dying." These figures illustrate the point completely.

-----------------------------------

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.

10 Great Music Marketing Ideas

Here's a post from a couple years back that bears repeating. It's about the 10 music marketing ideas from the marketing chapter of the Music 3.0 Internet Music guidebook. It’s easier to sell your music if you add extra value to it, so it helps to think outside the box when it comes to distributing your music. Thanks to Bruce Houghton of the great music blog Hypebot for numbers 7 through 10.
--------------
"1) Develop a package - This could mean anything from a CD and a vinyl album, to a digital download and album with all alternative mixes, to a boxed set of CD’s or anything in-between (Trent Reznor’s Ghosts I-IV is a great example). The idea is to go beyond just the typical CD and digital offerings.

2) Sequential numbering - Numbering a physical product (for example; "#5 of 1000") gives it the feeling of exclusivity. The product becomes a special edition and a must-have for the true fan.

3) Tie it to merchandise - Offer a physical product that contains the code for a free download of your album. Mos Def was so successful with the T-shirt release of The Ecstatic that Billboard magazine even began counting it as a music release on their charts. Other artists have sold their music via codes on such items as golf balls, bandanas and even canned food!

4) Release a “double-sided” digital single - Rhino Record's digital releases celebrating 60 years of the 45 RPM single set a fine example for this format. For between $1.49 and $1.99, Rhino provided the original hit song, its B side (the flip side of the vinyl record) and the original artwork. You can do the same by providing two songs for price of one - an A and a B side.

5) Release on an old alternative format - We’ve seen some artists (The Decemberists Hazards of Love come to mind) release a vinyl-only physical product to great success. Cheap Trick did it on the old 8-track format from the 60’s, and some bands have even recently released on cassette tape. Releasing on a older format can be good as a publicity tool (as long as everyone else isn’t doing it) and who knows, maybe you can start a trend?

6) Release on a new alternative format - A new alternative format that’s getting some traction is flash memory, or the common USB memory stick. Once again, Trent Reznor met with great viral success by planting unmarked memory sticks in bathrooms at Nine Inch Nail’s concerts, and Sony even released the 25th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s Thriller on the format. Everybody uses these things so you’re bound to get at least a look, which you can’t always say about other formats.

7) Three Sides - Offer a song in an early studio version, the final mix, and then captured live.

8) Radical Mixes - Offer two or three very different mixes of the same song, perhaps even done by the fans.

9) Two Sides of (Your City) - Two different bands each contribute a track to a series chronicling your local scene.

10) “Artist X” Introduces _____ - Add a track by your favorite new artist/band along with one of yours. This is similar to a gig trade-out with another band that many bands use as a way to play in new venues. The idea is that the band you feature will also feature you on their release as well."

-----------------------------------

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.

It Pays To Have A Lawyer

Continuing on with the theme from yesterday about how important having a music attorney look over your agreements is, here's an excerpt from the Ken Scott memoir Abbey Road To Ziggy Stardust that illustrates the point.

Ken relates a story of how the group Kansas lost millions of dollars from signing something without having it looked over, then compounded the mistake.
-----------------------

"Another topic of conversation that came up during my time with Kansas is something that maybe should be talked about as a warning to new acts reading this book. Musicians signing record deals these days have a lot more knowledge about the business than they used to, but this story is still worth bringing up - just in case. Kerry (Livgren, the main songwriter of Kansas) and I were talking one day and he was telling me about when they signed their recording contract. It came up in the conversation that they had signed away their publishing, then he told me the story about how it actually happened. 

It seems that the band was playing at a small club in Georgia somewhere and the contract from Kirshner Records was delivered there for them to sign. As all bands who are signing their first record deal do, they wanted to immediately get their John Hancocks on there, lest it disappear and they be relegated to playing clubs forever. Every place that had a “Sign Here” clip, they signed. Finally they came to a bit at the back of the agreement that they hadn’t seen before that had all these clips on it, and they thought, “Oh, I guess we have to sign these as well,” and they all signed it and immediately sent everything back the next day. It turns out that the little bit at the end that they hadn’t seen before was all about their publishing.

I said to Kerry, “Did you go over it with an attorney?” 

“Of course not. We were in a club,” came his reply. 

“In which case, the contract is illegal,” I told him. 

“What do you mean?” he asked. 

“You’ll find in modern day contracts that there’s a clause that states that if you haven’t gone through it with an attorney, the contract means nothing.” 

“Yeah, come on. You’ve got to be joking.” 

“I’m deadly serious.”

“Well, you’re wrong. If that had been the case we would’ve been told about that ages ago,” he adamantly replied. 

“I can only tell you what I know,” I told him, not willing to argue. 

“I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.”

“Fine, but do me one favor. Next time you see your attorney, ask him about it,” I exclaimed. The subject was then dropped and we went back to work.

It turns out that a couple of days later the band had a big band meeting with their attorney on some other business. When they finally got to the studio, Kerry immediately came up to me and said, “I owe you an apology. I asked our attorney, and he said that you were absolutely correct. We could have gotten all of our publishing back.”

“Could” was the operative word here. It turns out that when the band became successful, they renegotiated their record deal using their attorney. Because they didn’t know about the law, they didn’t tell the lawyer about it, so he never acted on it. Since the attorney was now involved, they couldn’t go back on something from the previous contract. The wound up losing millions of dollars as a result.

This is one of the things that happens when people get into the business and have absolutely no idea what it’s all about. There are all of these legal loopholes that not many people know about, and they end up losing a lot of money because of it. On the other hand, there are those people that make money from those same loopholes as well."

As you can see, it should be mandatory for a musician to run any agreement by an attorney before signing. It could save you millions. You can read more excerpts from Abbey Road To Ziggy Stardust and my other books at bobbyowsinski.com.

-----------------------------------

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 Instances Where You Need A Music Attorney

As usual, CD Baby's DIY Musician blog has a lot of great info, this time on the 5 instances when you should hire a music attorney. You can read the entire article for yourself, but I'll paraphrase it here along with some of my own comments.

Let me say up front that although hiring your brother-in-law who does real estate law is better than not having an lawyer, a music attorney has specific expertise that pertains to the music business. He or she can easily spot when a deal is unfair or not exactly in your favor, so the extra hassle in seeking one out is worth it.

Here are the 5 instances where you really need an attorney from the music business:

1. Before you sign your band agreement. There are a lot of things that you need to hash out, including who owns the name, how any money is distributed, who owns the gear and recordings, how does a member get fired, and the grim stuff like what happens if a member dies or becomes incapacitated.

2. Before you sign with a publisher. A lot of smaller publishers like to have a lot of songwriters signed so their catalog looks bigger, but a music attorney can usually see through that and make sure that your getting what you deserve. Keep in mind that publishing agreements can be very complicated, so they really do require a pro.

3. Before signing with a manager. Managers love to say, "Let's do this without an attorney to save some money," but that's never a good idea. A bad manager deal can keep you paying him for years after you stop working together.

4. Before signing a record deal. It goes without saying that record deals are complicated and getting more so every year. While having an attorney may not get you a better deal if you're a baby band, you may get a few concessions that will be really helpful down the line that will more than make up the cost of your own attorney. Plus, even if you're getting screwed on some point, its at least good to know up front that it's happening.

5. Before signing a licensing deal for one of your songs. The reason why you want an attorney to look the agreement over is that if you're not careful, the song might be used in many more ways that you thought, all without paying you any additional money.

As you can see, it's very much worth while to have a music industry pro watch your back. As the old saying goes, "A pro is expensive, but an amateur costs a fortune."

-----------------------------------

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.

Trent Reznor Returns To The Big Label Fold

While we're constantly inundated with opinions that the major labels are on their last legs, that's simply not the case. Though we may yet see another step in the evolution of the majors soon, there's always going to be a place for at least a few of them. Case in point, the return to the major label fold by the poster boy for DIY, Trent Reznor.

Reznor described the reason for his newly minted agreement with Sony Music recently with David Byrne:

"In the last tour, we're playing Prague, we're walking around and playing that night at Prague.  But I see flyers up for Radiohead playing the same place we're playing, but six months from now.  And I walk into the record shop, and there isn't a section that says Nine Inch Nails.  And there's no kind of presence that we're even there.   

And I start to realize, the last few years all we've done... you know Mr. Twitter Bigshot with my bunch of followers right, but it's preaching to that choir of people that are important, but it's that camp.  The world's become so fragmented, you can tune into what you like, and a lot of things don't break though that, or cross over. 

And we're literally putting our records out on our own, and not using the labels.  And I don't know what the cool record shop in Prague is, and I don't know the good blog that comes out of there that I can give some attention to.  And I don't really want to do that, but there's a part of me that can't stop, so I get obsessed and I start thinking about marketing and I think, 'there's other people I can hire that can market this stuff, but no one else can write the songs I can write.' 

The great part of self-releasing has been controlling your own destiny.  Nobody having any approval.  Finishing a song at midnight and putting it out the next day.  Getting fans excited with no leak, because you have the only copy, and you uploaded it and you hit publish.  And wow, that's fun, it felt great particularly after a long career in the weirdness of labels. 

But to answer your question, it was to have a team of people that are better at that than I am, worldwide.  That felt like it was worth slicing the pie up, monetarily, but our main agenda of the moment was to make people aware of it in the right context versus a little more money we might or might not make.  And that's what it came down to, and so far, it's been pleasantly pleasant, actually having people that know what they're talking about and having a team, that's nice."

The above sounds more like Reznor was more tired of the DIY thing than anything else, and that's fair enough, but the fact of the matter is that the major labels are the only ones that have the infrastructure capable of either elevating an artist to, or maintaining superstardom. If an artist is going to break world-wide, that's still the way to go.

Now I don't want to come off as an apologist for the major labels because I'm far from it. I believe that until you're at a point in your career when you have some leverage, it's best to stay away from a label and do as much as you can yourself. Signing too early does an artist no good. But if you have a measure of success, that means that you can certainly be in a position for not only a better deal, but more attention from the label as well.

Not only that, after doing so much of the grunt work yourself, you're so much better at determining if the label is doing a good job or not, and helping them to do the best they can. It can be a win-win under the right circumstances.

-----------------------------------

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.

Flyer Creation Made Easy

Let's face it, a lot of us are graphically challenged. Sometimes we can't even imagine what a graphic should look like, let alone create it. That's why a new service called Flyer Lizard can be so useful, as it allows you to quickly and easily create digital flyers and gig posters, then distribute them through social media or print them.

Flyer Lizard allows you to upload your own flyer if you only want to use their distribution services, but otherwise they have a nice image editor that makes it pretty easy to create your own professional-looking flyer right away. Then you can share it on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, among others. You can even add QR codes.

Flyer Lizard is free, but you do have to pay a small fee for most background images if you choose to use them. Check out the video below that explains it all.

-----------------------------------

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 For A Great Newsletter

A great email campaign can sometimes be the difference between popularity and obscurity. Here are 10 tips that can help your campaign be as successful as it needs to be.

1. Help subscribers remember who you are. Send the first message quickly and continue to stay in touch on a regular basis.

2. Don't send too many emails. You should tell them up front exactly how often you're going to email, and keep to it. If they unsubscribe, offer to reduce the frequency.

3. Keep your emails interesting. If your subscriber gets bored you'll lose them. Sprinkle in some user-generated content, contests, surveys and questions to keep the interest level high.

4. Don't make it all about selling or promoting. Being too aggressive is a good way to force people off the list. Make sure you include some useful or fun information along with any promotion.

5. Be sure to test your email first. Broken links, bad formatting, broken images or blank landing pages are a good way for people to lose interest. Test, test again and retest before you send.

6. Be sure it's formated for mobile. More and more people are accessing their email via their mobile device, and nothing could be worse for a newsletter than if it looks bad there. Be sure to design your newsletter with mobile in mind.

7. Be sure it's quick to load. In this day of instant gratification, we not only want, but are used to seeing everything load up quickly. If you make someone wait even a couple of seconds they're more likely to just hit the delete key instead. If your newsletter is loading slowly, consider breaking it up into smaller bits and saving some of the info for the next one.

Remember that content is king when it comes to newsletters. If you have something that's really dynamite then your subscribers are likely to overlook one or two of the above items, but the more of these that occur, the less likely you'll keep that person as a subscriber.

-----------------------------------

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.

Facebook's 140 Billion Friends And How To Leverage Them

Facebook reached a milestone a few weeks ago when it blew past a billion active accounts, an astonishing number any way you look at it. That said, a number that's often overlooked is one that perhaps more accurately measures the breath of the network - 140.3 billion.

What does 140.3 billion represent? That's the number of total friendships on Facebook. It means that every active member has 140.3 Facebook friends. What's astonishing about that number is that it's close to Dunbar's Number of 150, which is what social anthropologists use to signify the number of persistent face-to-face relationships that the average person usually has.

Obviously Facebook number is an average, because you all know people who have way more than 140 Facebook friends, but the point is that if you just look a single step away from your 140 average friends to their 140 average friends, then you're at 19,600 connections, which is quite a large network. Now image that you have the maximum number of friends on you personal page, which is 5,000. That means that you're one step away from 700,000 people. That's quite a network!

OK, so how do you leverage the friends you have? Facebook has now started a new program that will keep one of your posts at the top of your friends Newsfeed (just click on the Promote button on your post as in the picture on the left). This is perfect if you're announcing a new product, record release or a gig. The downside is that it'll cost you $7 each time you do it, so it can get expensive fast.

Yes, this is another way that FB is trying to monetize their user base, but it's not so far off from what other networks already do. People can buy trending topics on Twitter and users can pin Tumblr posts to the tops of follower's dashboards for $5, so FB is just upping the ante a little.

The bottom line is that there's a big network out there on Facebook, and it's there for the leveraging.

-----------------------------------

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.

Lyric Sites Now A Target For Music Publishers

Several years ago music publishers, looking for new revenue streams, began to pursue lyric websites for violation of copyright for hosting the lyrics to popular songs without permission. One of the biggest wins in the publishers favor recently came at the expense of LiveUniverse.com and its owner Brad Greenspan, who were recently hit with a $6.6 million default judgement for not paying a license fee.

The judge arrived at the amount by charging $12,500 for each of the 528 songs whose lyrics LiveUniverse was accused of infringing from Peermusic, Warner Chappell Music and Bug Music. Some of the songs included "China Girl" by David Bowie, "Old Time Rock n' Roll" by Bob Seger, "Moondance" by Van Morrison and "Georgia On My Mind" performed by Ray Charles.

The irony is that Greenspan could have made a license deal with the publishers for much less than the judgement, but basically chose to try to stick it in everyone's face by not showing for depositions and hearing, not following the court's instructions, and going through a long line of attorneys that slowed the entire process down to a crawl. It wasn't like he didn't have the resources either, having been an original investor in MySpace and cashing out when it was purchased for $580 million by News Corp in 2005.

The fact is that there are a lot of lyric sites out there that offer lyrics legally. Lyric aggregator LyricFind has licensed lyrics.com, lyricsmode.com, lyricsfreak.com, songmeanings.net, lyricsty.com, leoslyrics.com, lyricsbay.com, lyrics.net, lyricsfly.com, musicsonglyrics.com, lyricsoverload.com, and many more.

The fact of the matter is that these sites make big bucks on advertising and they should share a part of the wealth with the originators of the music that made it all possible. If you make money on someone else's creation, you have to share; simple as that.

-----------------------------------

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.

Two New Print Ad Technologies That Will Blow Your Mind

It seems to be common knowledge that print is dying these days as magazines, books and newspapers decline in sales. Here are a couple of new technologies now being tried out in print advertising that definitely announce that print isn't dead just yet.

The first was a small thin video playback engine placed in 1000 copies of the current issue of Entertainment Magazine. I'm told that it costs 55 cents per unit, and was used only as a test to gauge the reception. Very cool.



The next one will appear in the the Oct. 15th issue of Sports Illustrated and is something that Lexus developed in-house called CinePrint that's hailed as an "interactive" advert. I'm not so sure about the interactivity, but it sure looks amazing.



I'm not so sure that I'd buy the magazine just for this kind of tech, but I'd certainly pay attention to the advert. If anyone has any inside info on either of these, please let me know.

-----------------------------------

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.

Japan Gets Draconian On Piracy

If you're living in Japan and illegally download a file, you can now face up to 2 years in prison and a fine up to $25,000, thanks to a change in a law that was passed in 2010. But it's those who illegally upload a copyright infringing file that really have to worry, as the punishment is now a maximum of 10 years in prison and $125k fine. In theory, this punishment can be enforced over a single pirated file.

You can bet the music industry in countries around the world will be looking closely at how this law pans out. On one hand it seems incredibly harsh, and on the other, something so extreme might be the only way to stem the tide of illegal downloads, especially on the upload side.

If you listen to the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), Japanese consumers illegally downloaded 4.36 billion music files illegally in 2010, while legally buying 440 million. The sounds suspiciously like the 10 to 1 ratio that the US RIAA has been using for some time (although sometimes they resort to an even higher 20 to 1 ratio). And as we all know, the RIAA's strategy of suing their own customers was a total failure as it didn't work and only resorted in very bad publicity for the industry.

But that was a civil matter, and while it carried some significant financial pain, there was no risk of going to jail. By changing this to a criminal matter, there is a different mindset involved as long as consumers are aware of the risk.

The question will be how the Japanese population will respond once its first 15 year old is sent to jail.

-----------------------------------

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.