BitTorrent Traffic Lowest In 10 Years

You haven't heard much from either the film or music industry about piracy lately, and that's because piracy is far less of a problem that it's been in some time. For music, that's because of the rise of streaming services, while for video, it's mostly due to NetFlix and YouTube.

While the decline of piracy was somewhat empirical until now, a new report from Sandvine shows that BitTorrent traffic has fallen to 7% of all Internet traffic, down 20% in the past 6 months alone. To put it into perspective, 10 years ago BitTorrent traffic accounted for 60% of total network traffic.

Meanwhile, video traffic is high, with NetFlix and YouTube accounting for 50% of today's Internet traffic.

Consumers embrace technology that make things more convenient for them. In music, subscribing to a streaming service or watching YouTube is far easier than pirating. With video, see your favorite movie or program on NetFlix or YouTube is easier than stealing it. In both cases, having access has a lot more benefits than owning.

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How Music Management Rollups Could Affect Music Tech’s Future

We’re living in a very interesting time in the music business. Unlike when the industry was caught off-guard by the MP3 revolution, the powers that be are totally on top of the one that’s happening now - streaming music - and they’re being proactive about dealing with it. Interestingly enough, they’re way ahead of the curve this time, even before the majority of the public. Let’s look at how this is playing out.

The first step in trying to take control of the situation came when the major labels pushed Spotify for an equity stake as part of the licensing deal that let it enter the US market. The labels weren’t about to lose control again like they did with iTunes a decade earlier, so this was a condition for the deal. Now with Spotify’s biggest competitor Deezer about to enter the US, you wonder whether the labels are asking for the same agreement. My guess is that they won’t get it this time, since they’re not in the same position of strength that they were even a year ago, as more deep pocketed competitors are already in the marketplace where there was no way the labels could get equity (like with the recently introduced iTunes Radio) and new ones are about to be introduced (like YouTube Music which had it’s deal in place before Spotify’s). 

A bigger problem for the record labels is that they’re no longer the pinnacle of power in the music business - managers are. Modern music management now includes many of the former duties of a record label, like marketing and promotion, as part of its core offering to an artist. And with artists now capable of ably recording their own masters without a huge financial outlay, the banking services of a label are no longer needed either.

That’s why some of the recent deals involving managers are interesting, because it can put them and their artists into a more leveraged position with the various music tech services. There are three very recent examples. Read more on Forbes.

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How Spotify Helps A Song Become A Hit

The other day Spotify director of economic development Will Page showed some data about how the service can be front and center in helping a song become a hit, using Lorde's "Royals" as an example.

The gist of the example is that playlists are one of the primary reasons that a song takes off on Spotify. When people add a song to a playlist they create, it's almost the same as word-of-mouth in that other people check out the song and potentially add it to their lists as well.

As with so many hits these days, that can help a song get a groundswell, but it takes a celebrity or someone with high visibility to add it to their playlist for the song to explode. In the case of "Royals" it was Spotify's Sean Parker who added it to his Hipster International list which pushed the song to hit status almost overnight.

The interesting thing here is that this is really no different from hit making on radio going back to the 50s. If a DJ started playing a song in a major or secondary city, the song would begin to break out as other DJs would add it to their playlists because it was suddenly got hot.

The fact of the matter is that it still requires some sort of a unexpected break for a song to become a hit, it's just that the break now may come online instead of over the air.

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Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

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

Lady Gaga’s Management Blues

It’s been reported that Lady Gaga, a performer seemingly at the height of her powers, has fired her longtime manager Troy Carter in a move that has many in the industry scratching their heads. Carter and his management company Atom Factory have been in charge of Gaga’s career since 2007 and are largely responsible for putting her in position to become the superstar that she is, and even more importantly, being able to financially take advantage of it.

There’s been no reason given for the split, but an artist/manager divorce usually comes down to one of three reasons; the artist isn’t making enough money, the artist is being asked to do something he or she feels compromises some artistic or personal integrity in order to make more money, or the artist feels slighted because the manager takes on a new client. 

Gaga’s making plenty of money (she reportedly made $80 million last year alone, topping Forbes list of most powerful musicians), so that’s an unlikely scenario. The other major star in Atom Factory stable is John Legend, but he isn’t a new signing, so that’s an unlikely conflict. 

That said, Carter does have a new label venture with Capitol Music Group with two new acts, Basic Vacation and The Ceremonies, the later who will have an EP released on November 19th. The label (Atom Factory Music) is said to be a hybrid record label in that it uses Capitol more for their radio promotion, with the rest of the marketing occurring in-house, which would take more attention than in a normal artist-manager-label relationship. This could be another thing that competed for the superstar’s attention. Read more on Forbes.

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Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

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

8 Steps To Developing Your Brand

Everyone has a brand, but one of the problems that most musicians, artists, bands, songwriters, engineers and producers have is that they don't understand exactly what their brand is. It's difficult to stand out from the crowd unless you have a really good idea of your brand and know how to develop it.

Here's an excerpt from Social Media Promotion For Musicians: The Manual For Marketing Yourself, Your Band And Your Music Online, that describes the 8 steps to develop your brand.

"While the music that you play or create is totally up to you and outside the realm of this book, what we can deal with is the second part of the brand - your image. Here are some steps to take to refine your brand.

1. Make sure your brand image accurately portrays your music and personality. If you’re a biker band, you probably don’t want a website that’s all pink and flowery. On the other hand, the pink works great for Katy Perry. Likewise, if you’re an EDM artist you wouldn’t want your site to show the woods and trees, although that could work well for an alt rock band from Minnesota or someone doing music for meditation. 

2. Keep it honest and simple. Don’t try to be who you’re not, it’s too hard to pull off. You are who you are and people will either love you for it or they won’t. While you can concoct a backstory where you were taught a new form of music by aliens, then honed your technique in the jungles of Brazil, that just sets your brand up to fail if you really can’t live up to the image that’s been painted. Best to keep things simple and be honest about who and what you are and where you came from. If people like what you do and can relate to you, that will shine through and your fans will not only find it interesting enough, but will be totally fascinated as well.

3. Differentiate yourself. While it might seem tempting to proclaim that you’re just like Coldplay, that doesn’t immediately make you their equal in the eyes of the public. The fact of the matter is, there already is a Coldplay, why does the world need another one? It’s their brand, not yours. The only way that a brand can be successful is to differentiate itself from the competition. A great example is the seminal punk band The Ramones, who decided that all their songs would be as short as possible and played without solos. There must be something that makes you unique in even a small way. If you can’t find it, it may be time to go back to the drawing board.

4. Keep the look consistent. Consistency of product and image are the key to branding. That’s why you need to use the same logo and fonts and have the same general look and feel across all your promo for it to be effective. That includes your website, press kit, blog, newsletter and all social media.

5. Create a remarkable logo. This is a requirement if you’re planning to promote your brand. You need this for your website, social sites, merchandise, press kit, promo and on your stage during gigs. In short, it has to be part of everything you do. You may start promoting yourself without it, but it’s a big plus if you already have a logo. It separates you from the newbies. Just as an example, here are a few unmistakable musician’s logos in Figure 3.1.

If you’re a musician without a band, a producer, songwriter or engineer, it doesn’t mean that you must also have a logo as well (although it would be better), but at the very least, use the same font for your name on your blog, website, newsletter and anywhere else it might appear.

6. Great photos are a necessity. You need first class photos for posters, merch, website, social networks, press kits, and a lot more if you want to build your brand. This is as important as the logo - you need a great photo in order to begin any kind of promotion. Have you ever seen a Facebook page or website of a major artist without an artist or band photo?

7. Give away samples. Learn this phrase well as it will be repeated throughout this book. 

Your music is your marketing.

That means that you can’t look at your music as your product. It may bring in some money eventually but not all that much in the grand scheme of things. Remember that 90 to 95% of the money that a major artist earns is not from recorded music. It’s from concerts, merchandise, publishing and licensing. 

TIP: Don’t be afraid to give your music away. It’s your best marketing tool and the best way to build your brand.

8. Cool is never declared. You cannot proclaim how new and unique you are. If such a statement is in fact true, people will find out soon enough and tell the world. You can use quotes from other people, but telling the world that you think you’re cool does not make it so.

These are not the only steps that you can take, but they’ll take you a long way to creating a brand image that works for you."

You can download a free chapter of Social Media Promotion For Musicians or read additional excerpts at bobbyowsinski.com.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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 Search Engine For Radio

Have you ever listened to the radio and wished that the station would play a song that you can't wait to hear? You had to wait until either the song was played, or search for another station where the song might be playing and risk missing it on the original channel. Of course, if you're near a computer you can dial that song up in a second on any number of streaming services or YouTube, but if radio is your thing, that meant that you were stuck with the way we've listened for nearly a century. But that's changed now with the a new service called Radio Search Engine.

Radio Search Engine, the brainchild of Michael Robertson (who's also responsible for DAR.fm and way back, MP3.com), allows you to search for a song or artist, and the service will find a station that's currently playing it. It gives you a list of popular songs that are playing, and poses suggestions of other songs and stations after the search engine has found your query. You can think of it sort of like Google for radio.

Radio Search Engine works pretty well but it's not perfect, probably because it depends upon song metadata. If the metadata is incorrect or incomplete, a song could be playing but RSE won't find. That's not RSE's fault, but it's something that does come up. Then there's the fact that, as stated before, you can use one of the many streaming services to do the same thing.

One area where Radio Search Engine can help an artist is by searching to see what songs are being played on radio and where. While there are other ways to measure airplay, there's nothing like hearing it yourself as the ultimate aircheck. Check out the video below on how it works.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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.

Three Reasons Why The CD Is Still Important

Everybody knows that the CD has died, replaced by a digital world where files and streams are the main methods of music delivery. The only problem with that statement is that the CD is not yet deceased by a long shot, and it’s still a real tool in the belt of artists and bands everywhere. Sure, it’s rapidly diminishing in importance, but important it still is. I know that most of you reading this don’t believe me, so let me give you three reasons as proof. 

Reason #1: Last year there were 211 million CDs sold in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. While this number is down 78% from the format’s peak in 2000, it still amounted to around $2.5 billion in revenue, or about 35% of the income of the entire industry in the US. If you think that there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth in the business now (although it’s far more quiet than it’s been in the recent past), you’d hear some real wailing in record label boardrooms everywhere if the format were to disappear into the ether tomorrow.

Now 211 million of anything is a lot of units, but keep in mind that these are only the sales that the RIAA could count through their traditional distribution channels. This doesn’t account for all the CDs sold independently by artists at gigs, shows, church services, or online, and who knows how many other outlets.  And keep in mind that CDs are a high-margin item that makes not only more revenue per sale but more profit as well. An artist or band selling a few units per night might not seem like much, but this is occurring by the the thousands daily, which adds up to real money that’s not on the books anywhere and never will be. Read more on Forbes.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

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

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

3 Questions To Ask Before You Send Your Newsletter

An email newsletter is critical to the financial well-being of any artist, as it's responsible for informing your hard-core fans of what you're doing, where you're doing it , and who you're doing it with. It can be the best marketing tool you have, or it can be a complete turn-off to your audience if you're not careful. Here's an excerpt from the Social Media Promotion For Musicians book that poses 3 essential questions you should ask yourself before you hit send on your next newsletter.

"There’s a lot of thought that goes into creating a newsletter. If your title doesn’t attract attention, the email may not get opened. If the content is weak, the next one might not get opened, or worse yet, the person could unsubscribe. You could have a great offer that no one acts on because it’s presented poorly or visually buried. Let’s take a look at the elements of a great newsletter.

Sending out a newsletter for the sake of sending one out isn’t a good strategy. There has to be a good reason for you to communicate with your subscribers. Don’t forget, they gave you permission to contact them in the first place. It’s up to you not to soil that agreement. Before you decide to send any newsletter, ask yourself these three questions:

• What is this email about? Are you informing your subscribers about the latest news? Are you trying to promote something? Is this an announcement of some kind? Decide what your email is about, then keep that as your central focus.

• Why do my subscribers care? Is this something they would be sorry about missing? Is it something they want to participate in? What’s in it for them?

• What do they do about it? Do you want them to pass something along? Buy something? Come to a show? Stay informed about your life? Whatever it is, be sure to ask them to do it.

If you can answer these questions, then you know you're ready to send your newsletter or any other email."

You can download a free chapter of Social Media Promotion For Musicians, or read additional excerpts from it and my other books on the excerpt section of bobbyowsinski.com.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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.

Social Media Courses On Lynda.com

If your not hip to lynda.com yet, you should be, since it's one of the best learning resources out there for any software or app you can think of. The production standards are incredibly high, and they really hold their authors to a high standard, which is immediately evident in the video courses. As a result, you can learn a lot about almost any subject, and learn it fast.

I've been a part of the lynda family for a few years now with a number of courses on the audio side of things (recording, mixing, mastering, mastering for iTunes, acoustics), but now I'm pleased to announce a new series of social media video courses, specially designed for musicians, artists, bands, engineers, producers, songwriters, music execs, and anyone in the music industry.

These video courses are based around the Social Media Promotion For Musicians book, and give you an insight to everything that you need to market yourself, your band and your music online. The courses include:

Social Media Basics for Musicians and Bands 

Facebook for Musicians and Bands 

Twitter for Musicians and Bands 

YouTube for Musicians and Bands  

Website Management for Musicians and Bands (A sample video is below) 

Mailing List Management for Musicians and Bands 

Blogging Strategies for Musicians and Bands 

Google+  for Musicians and Bands 

Bookmarking Sites for Musicians and Bands 

Pinterest for Musicians and Bands

There's a lot to learn in each course, but you can click here to get 7 days of free unlimited access to lynda.com. Check the courses, and lynda.com out. You'll be glad you did.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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 YouTube Music Awards Misses It’s Chance

As you may have read in my previous musings on the subject, the YouTube Music Awards (or the YTMA’s as it’s now being called) seemed like an ideal event to represent the best of the new music business. Or should have been. Here’s what we got during Sunday night’s extravaganza instead.

1. A show that was poorly viewed. The show was viewed by only 220,000 viewers at its peak, which is embarrassing for a platform the size of YouTube. The fact is that most of the performers alone could have done better numbers without the network’s help, which means that YouTube did a woeful job getting the word out.

Now think about that for a second - YouTube, which is the most powerful platform for discovering new music online, and which is owned by Google, arguably the most powerful of all Internet companies, could only generate 220,000 viewers! Even 10 times that amount would have been embarrassing. Just for comparison, the MTV VMA’s had a viewership of 10.1 million this year.

The interesting thing was that the YouTube Music Awards got a lot of coverage from the mainstream press, which clearly didn’t address the market that the show was aimed at. Shouldn’t a company so steeped in modern mass communication know better?

That said, the show did have a fair amount of social action, with over 300,000 tweets over the three hours before during and after the show. The problem here is that the tweet dropped off drastically when the show went live, which could have been from the fact that most viewers were watching on a phone or tablet, and it’s difficult to tweet and watch at the same time when you only have one screen. Read more on Forbes.

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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 and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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

3 Tips To Make The Most Of Spotify

There's been a lot of discussion over the financial value of Spotify for artists, and while that subject alone is worth a number of columns (I've written a book about it, in fact), the fact is that you can make money on the platform. How much money naturally depends upon the number of plays a song gets, and if there are others (like a record label) getting a split of the revenue.

Since it all comes down to how much you songs are getting played, here are a few tips on how to maximize your plays.

1. Include your Spotify destination in all communications with your fans. That includes newsletters, websites, blogs, posts and emails. The more people that know where to find your music, the better.

2. Create Spotify playlists. Playlists are a great way to help fans discover your music. You can post some that consist of only your songs, but it's better to mix in other songs from other similar artists or artists you like.

3. Release your music to all platforms at the same time. It makes no sense to give an exclusive to iTunes or another platform (even though they didn't ask for it) for a period of time before it's available on Spotify. Having your music available on both at the same time will reinforce your numbers on both platforms.

Remember, your music is your marketing! The more people that hear it, the better it is for any artist or band as it increases the demand for your catalog, show tickets and merch. Don't hold back your music from subscription platforms because the income is small right now. If people like what they hear, you'll find it will increase soon.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

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 Losing The Critical Teen Demographic

Facebook still says it's growing, but it's beginning to lose the critical teen demographic, at least in the US, according to Piper Jaffray and shown below in an infographic from Statista.

Facebook is also beginning to see attrition with bands and brands as well, since it's more difficult than ever to reach your entire audience without paying (the average post only reaches about 16%). With fewer teens paying attention, there's less and less of a reason for an artist, band or musician to be on the network. You won't see a mass exodus from the service yet, but watch out in the future!


You will find more statistics at Statista

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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.