Free Social Media Basics Video Course

Learn how to promote your music online with my lynda.com video course Social Media Basics for Musician and Bands. Watch it free through February 7 when you “like” the lynda.com Facebook page:

1) Visit the lynda.com Facebook page: www.facebook.com/lynda

2) Click on the “AUDIO free course” image at the top of the page

3) Click Like at the top of the page

4) Enter your email address to keep up with lynda.com news

5) Click Watch course now

6) Share this free course with your Facebook friends—and enjoy!

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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.

Grammy Performances: Hits And Misses

I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but I come to praise the Grammy Awards Show, not bury it. It’s easy to criticize the Grammys, and I’ve done my share in the past, but if you take into consideration what this show is trying to accomplish, it’s amazing that it comes off pleasing anyone, let alone the vast majority of viewers. Can you imagine trying to present a show with such a wide constituency of musical genres, many of which are diametrically opposed? Long-time producer Ken Ehrlich does a great job of walking that tightrope every year. 

Still, there are always hits and misses and this year’s production is no exception. Let’s look at them.

The Hits

Image Dragons and Kendrick Lamar rocked the house and were a perfect combination together. Perhaps they put on the best performance of the night.

Daft Punk with Pharrell Williams (a big winner on the night), Nile Rogers and Stevie Wonder were also a good match, but what were the Daft Punk robots doing while the band was playing? It sure would have made me feel better about them getting so many awards if I saw either one of them playing an actual instrument.

Sara Barielles and Carole King were magic together, as both were in top form. Of course, Carole is a pro and she elevates everyone around her, as she did in this case as well.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Trombone Shorty and Madonna worked as well. One of the things I like most about Macklemore is that I can understand what he’s rapping, which goes a long way towards enjoying the genre.

Paul McCartney was his usual great self with Ringo looking a little lost on the drums. As a friend once commented, “It’s like watching Beethoven.” That said, perhaps the best part of the performance was the bow that he and Ringo took at the end. 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.

Spotify Now Sells Your Merch

In another bid to outflank the hype from the newly launched Beats Music, Spotify announced that it will now sell allow musicians and bands to sell merchandise on their Spotify profile page. Not only that, they won't charge a fee for it either.

Artists will be able to display images of T-shirts, vinyl, concert tickets stickers or anything else that they sell, which will then link back to the site where the merch is available for sale.

This is actually a joint venture between Topspin and Spotify, so it means that you need a Topspin ArtistLink account to begin showing your merch first. ArtistLink is free, and you can sign up here.

Since this move doesn't cost you anything, I'd say it's a no-brainer, especially if you're an indie act.

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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.

Justin Bieber: A Career Cautionary Career Tale

By now most adults are sick of hearing about the shenanigans of teen star Justin Bieber, who’s managed to stay in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. From wild visits to strip clubs to recklessly driving his Ferrari to egging his neighbors house to police raids on his mansion, the Biebs has been front and center on the gossip pages of tabloids and blog sites everywhere.

While Bieber might consider his behavior as a simple ascension into manhood (most adult males have had their share of teenage “events” that they would rather forget), it seems that he’s failed to consider what it’s doing to his career along the way. Yes, he’s doing a great job of crushing it into tiny pieces, as the putrid box office take of around $6 million of his recent film Believe shows. Considering that his last film Never Say Never grossed about $73 million in the US alone just two years ago, and he’s released a series of recent songs that never even charted, it looks like his career has hit the skids seemingly overnight.

Maybe he thinks that morphing into a bad boy will keep his maturing audience interested. Maybe he’s rebelling against the wishes of his family and management (and what kid doesn’t rail against authority). Maybe he’s just totally unaware that his actions have consequences. None of that matters. What he’s managed to do is take an enormous following and make them indifferent at best and disgusted at worst. Before too long, he’ll be a has-been trying to make a buck playing the oldies club circuit.

And that’s the cautionary tale here. Fans are hard to come by. They, of course, have to love your music first and foremost, but they also have to identify with you in some way, which is one of the basic pillars of branding. You or your actions (or both) also have to be likeable, which few of his once legion of fans find these days. Once you’ve broken your brand, it’s a huge uphill battle to build it back up, as Bieber will soon find out. 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.

Moby's Latest Is Top Bundles Seller

Usually when you think about BitTorrent you think of piracy, but the service has been working hard over the last year to go legit with its Bundles offering. A bundle is a collection of free content files like an album, with a gateway to paid premium content as well.

Bundles are beginning to gain traction, with over 60 million downloads in 2013 and an impressive number of big name artists signing on. As you can see from the chart on the left, Moby topped the chart with almost 9 million shares, but other major artists like Kaskade, Linkin Park, Public Enemy and Madonna were also included.

The secret behind Bundle's success is that they're included with every uTorrent or BitTorrent application, so the numbers can add up quickly.

Bundles are still flying under the radar, so you might not hear much about them at the moment, but with numbers like the chart provides, it won't be long until this becomes a staple release format of artists everywhere.

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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.

Beats Music Punches, Spotify Counters: Let The Streaming Wars Begin

Beats Music is being launched today to much fanfare and rightfully so. Using “music curation” as its main calling card, it’s a different take on a theme used by other competitive services. Whether the public views that as a good enough reason to shell out their $9.95 a month, we’ll soon see.

In the meantime, Spotify is attempting to steal Beats Music thunder at every turn, announcing that it will now provide unlimited free mobile streaming (with ads) on the same day that Beats Music announced its launch last week. Now comes the official day of the launch and Spotify is at it again, this time announcing that it’s considering a new feature that programs upcoming music to your heartbeat. It doesn’t matter if it actually introduces this feature or not, it’s a juicy enough story to be front and center in the news, and that’s what the company really wants.

Welcome to the streaming wars, where the potential pie is so large that each seemingly small move by the companies involved can have extreme strategic importance. You think retailers beat each other up? You ain’t seen nothing yet (to borrow a phrase from Messrs. Bachman and Turner). Prepare for the major back and forth bashing to come.

Streaming music is actually divided into two categories; the radio-like non-interactive, and those that are on-demand. Pandora and iTunes Radio fall into the first category, where the user is unable to access specific songs, only playlists that are fine-tuned by a proprietary algorithm to match the tastes of the listener. On-demand services include Spotify and Beats Music, where a song or album can be called up as the feeling hits you.

Most of the on-demand services actually blur the lines between non-interactive and true on-demand, as they also make suggestions or provide playlists, and even provide access to online radio stations as well. Beats Music takes the playlist idea a step further by having them provided by well-known music celebs, niche leaders, or vaunted “people in the know,” although iTunes Radio does something similar with its themed and  featured “stations.” 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.

How Soundscan Works

Many artists, bands and musicians have heard of Nielsen SoundsScan, but they're not sure how it impacts their musical lives. The fact of the matter is that if you want to be included in Billboard's charts, then you need to know about SoundScan because its at the basis of how their charts, and many others, work.

In the early days of the record business, the charts were mostly derived from a phone survey of record stores and radio stations to determine what people where buying or listening to. Obviously, this survey could be easily gamed and regularly was by a variety of methods. This changed with the introduction of SoundScan in 1991, when the company began to track sales through the inventory barcodes that each record, cassette and CD had printed on it for inventory control. As a result, a more or less accurate count of actual sales could be counted.

I say more or less because the system wasn't perfect. The data was originally collected from about 14,000 retailers, but many smaller stores chose not to be included in the survey because it required a Point-of-Sale inventory system and electronic access to SoundScan, which could be expensive at the time (it's less so today, but still too much for many of the 2,500 retailers left).

In an effort to somehow include the sales of the non-reporting stores, SoundScan introduced a weighting system where a single sale at a large chain store in a major area like Chicago could be counted as multiple sales. A sale a certain stores could be counted for as many as 10 or as few as 2, while a small mom & pop retailer's sale would be counted only as 1.

SoundScan was always careful about revealing which stores where weighted, but many record labels made intelligent guesses about which were large weighted stores and found ways to inflate their sales and therefore, the chart position of an album, which kind of defeats the purpose of SoundScan in the first place.

That said, SoundScan is still in use today, which is why it's essential that any physical product that you release has a barcode on it. You can purchase one from Tunecore or CD Baby, if you're using them to release your product, or use any of the online barcode generators like this one.

The Billboard charts use the input from SoundScan less these days, as they now also value digital sales and social media as well as radio airplay when determining airplay. That said, if you want a chance at the charts, make sure you include that barcode so SoundScan knows you exist.

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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 New World Of Label Services

It all started with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Instead of signing a typical record deal with a major label, they opted instead to pay Warner Bros promo department to work "Thrift Shop" to radio, taking advantage of one of the attractive strengths that major labels still have to an indie artist. Thanks to Warner's muscle in this area, the song went on to be a world-wide hit, turning the team from modest success story to superstars.

Previously, in order to receive all the marketing and distribution clout of a label you had to sign a recording agreement with them that entitled you a split of the net revenue of between 12 and 15%. Today with an artist able to do so much of the work himself, it's no longer necessary or desirable to sign such a deal. There still are some services that only a major label does well (like CD distribution and radio promotion) that are desirable, and now all the majors have developed their own "label services" divisions to make those services available to indie artists.

For instance, Sony Music provides label services through its Red Associated Labels, Warner Music Group through its ADA unit and Universal Music has it's Caroline division (which handles Peter Gabriel and Korn). Plus BMG transitioned totally to label services when it sold its record label to Sony in 2008 and now handles Back Street Boys, Bryan Ferry and Anastacia, among others. Plus there's Kobalt (Pet Shop Boys and Prince) and in the UK, Cooking Vinyl (Madness and Amanda Palmer), as large indies getting into the arena.

While a brand new artist might not be able to afford these services, any artist with a small measure of success probably can, and should. Label services are a fast rising revenue generator for the industry, and truly a symbol of the new music business. It's a win-win situation for the artist and the label. The artist stays independent and gains the clout of the label, and the label gets added revenue without having to bankroll a new artist.

If you ever wanted to see the face of Music 3.0, this is it.

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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.

Is Verizon's Victory A Streaming Music Killer?

Until yesterday I was hopeful about the future of the music business. Today not so much. All the indicators and predictions showed the growth of music streaming to not only offset the decrease in download sales, but even some long lost CD sales as well. There was actually hope for a recovery, and a real chance to see some much needed growth. Now the future is uncertain.

That's all because of Verizon’s court victory in the U.S. Court of Appeals against the Federal Communication Commission’s so-called Net Neutrality law, which required Internet Service Providers to treat all Internet traffic equally. That seems innocent enough on its surface, but without that law in place, ISPs can now charge extra for either high-bandwidth or speedier delivery. This affects streaming media companies like Netfilx that specialize in video (especially), but can also affect just about every streaming music provider as well.

Streaming music is an extremely low margin business to begin with. Between paying huge licensing fee advances to the music labels, there’s the cost of paying the copyright holder and publisher, as well as bandwidth, storage, and marketing costs. None of the major players make money right now, as they all jockey for position as they hope the future economy of scale will bring a large enough market to break into the black. Sure there’s advertising and subscription income right now, but that’s still slowly creeping up to the break-even point.

As a result, companies like Pandora and Spotify that are just hanging on hoping that the costs stay static while the user base grows. That’s all well and good, since the majority of music consumers are still virgin territory, having not experienced streaming or not yet made a choice of a preferred service. New services like Beats Music (set to launch next week), YouTube Music (set to launch “soon”), and Slacker (set the enter the US market “soon”) see the space wide open, while Pandora and Spotify have big leads in market share at the moment, but we’re still early in the game. 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.

How Not Having A Website Can Cost Your Band Money

Many artists and bands don't believe that they need a website any longer and choose to rely on social media for their entire online presence. This can prove to be a fatal strategy, as outlined by this excerpt from my Social Media Promotion For Musicians book. In this excerpt you'll see 3 scenarios where not having a website cost a band or artist fans, sales and even a career.

"Unfortunately, a website many times gets overlooked as an integral piece of your digital promotional life because there are so many other places that you can use as your online focal point. Having a Facebook page or Tumblr blog, or relying on another social network as your online central focus has a number of potential flaws, not the least is control of your message. Let’s look at three scenarios where relying on a social media site as your main contact point can prove disastrous.

• Scenario #1: Our first scenario is a real-life example of a band I’ll hypothetically call “The Unknowns,” since one of the band members asked me not to reveal their true name. During the heyday of MySpace around 2004 the band was hot and eventually developed a following of over 900,000. This led to a number of record labels becoming interested (remember that they sign you for your audience, not your music), with the band eventually signing a big deal with one of the largest major labels at the time. The label immediately told the band to suspend their MySpace account because “we can do all that better in-house than you can.” In typical record company fashion, the label ultimately did very little for the band’s online presence. They did create a new slicker label-managed MySpace account, but they were not able to transfer any of the band’s previous followers, thus leaving them with a presence that was far less than they had before they were signed. Of course, when The Unknown’s album was released they had no way to alert those 900,000 followers since they didn’t have any of their email addresses, and they didn’t even have a website where their fans could go in order to discover the latest news about them. Needless to say, the album bombed and the band was dropped from the label. They never recovered that massive fan base that they had before they were signed.

The moral of the story is that if they had redirected those fans from their MySpace account to their website in order to harvest at least some of the email addresses, things might’ve turned out a lot differently, since they could have alerted their fans when the album was released. And that’s the problem with relying on an external site that you don’t control as your focal point online.

It's too easy for today's artist who only dabbles in social networking to get complacent and comfortable with the abilities of a single social network, but that can spell disaster for maintaining your fan base if you're not careful. As those artists who formerly depended upon MySpace now know, what's hot today can be ice cold tomorrow. But other negative scenarios also exist that can be far worse than the network falling out of favor.

This scenario was recently played out again early 2013 in a slightly different manner when MySpace relaunched an updated version of their site. Every single artist lost all of their followers, and every MySpace user lost their previous settings, and any affiliation with the artists they were following. All users had to reregister again, and all artists, regardless of how popular they were (even owner Justin Timberlake), started all over again with zero followers!

• Scenario #2: Let's say that you've cultivated a huge following on Facebook. What would happen if Facebook was purchased by EXXON (highly unlikely, but let’s pretend), who decides that all it wants is the underlying technology of the network, and shuts the rest down? If you didn't capture the email addresses of all your followers, you'd lose them to the nothingness of cyberspace. Don't laugh - a scenario like this could happen, but most likely on another smaller network.

• Scenario #3: What would happen if Facebook (I'm picking on them because they're the big dog on the social block) changes its terms of service, and now charges you $.25 for every fan past 100? If you're lucky enough to have 8,000 fans, it's going to cost you $2,000 to continue. Or what if they decided to limit everyone's fan connections to 100? Actually, something similar now happens in that you’re unable to access that large fan base that you've worked so hard to develop unless you pay.

The point of all of the above scenarios is that when you depend on a social network for your online presence, you’re ceding control to an unknown, unseen force that can change it’s will at any time with no regard to your online well-being. That's why it's imperative that you don’t count on a single social network for your total online presence or even your social media presence. If you rely on an external network, sooner or later you're going to get burnt. It's the nature of the Internet to constantly change, and it's too early to get a feel for the life span of even of the largest sites and networks. 

Just to illustrate the volatile nature of social networks, in 2005 MySpace was the most visited social network online with 100 million users. A mere five years later and it had dropped below 25 million, yet has recently doubled that number and is growing again. What this means is that you must pick and choose the social networks that you participate in wisely, and always engage in a number of networks in case one suddenly falls out of favor.

You can read additional excerpts from Social Media Promotion For Musicians 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.

The Best Way To Boost Your Album Sales

It's a sad commentary when the best way to boost you iTunes sales if you're already famous is to pass away. This is what happened to the Everly Brothers catalog after the passing of Phil Everly recently.

Everly Brothers albums were up a whopping 455% last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and their individual songs were up 696%.

Now to put that into perspective, that meant that only 5,000 albums total were purchased!

The biggest seller being "The Very Best of the Everly Brothers," which moved 2,000 copies. It actually made #8 on the Country Catalog Albums chart with this number. Their top selling single was "All I Have To Do Is Dream," which was up by 490%, but that just meant 4,000 total downloads.

This is just another point that sales are not what they used to be, and probably won't be in the future.

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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 Music Industry Moves Kicking and Screaming Into A Streaming World

One thing about the music industry is that it likes to be comfortable. Life was so easy for about 50 years as the way business was conducted hardly ever changed. The label found an act, made a record, sold it to retail and promoted it through radio. Publishers and songwriters went to the mailbox and collected their checks. Boy, are those days over.

Just about the time the industry was getting used to digital downloads as the center of its financial universe, the business model is changing once again as streaming becomes the consumption method of choice for music lovers everywhere. The genie’s out of the bottle, the cows are out the barn, and the music files are off the hard drive.

Nielsen SoundScan’s numbers for 2013 now show that streaming was up 32 percent, while digital download sales were down about 6 percent. Folks, from this point on this disparity will continue to grow, and by leaps and bounds I might add, and you can take that to the bank.

Once again, let’s state the obvious - people prefer convenience when it comes to technology, and streaming is so much more convenient than any other type of music consumption method that there’s no contest. You’re going to see streaming explode for real in 2014, and those SoundScan numbers are going to look tiny when we look back this time next year. 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.