Also featured this week is an in-depth explanation of the "1,000 Fan Theory" of a making a living from a core audience, and a discussion of my 10 favorite microphones.
Check it out at BobbyOInnerCircle.com.
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Saturday, August 16, 2014
Jay And Chandler From Music Geek Services On The Latest Inner Circle Podcast
Also featured this week is an in-depth explanation of the "1,000 Fan Theory" of a making a living from a core audience, and a discussion of my 10 favorite microphones.
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Get More Video Views With A Custom Video Thumbnail
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| Loading a custom thumbnail |
"When you upload a video, YouTube usually selects three screen grabs from which you can select the thumbnail. The problem is that it’s likely that none of these provide an image that instantly tells the potential viewer much about your video. A customized image can now be used as the thumbnail instead of the selections made by YouTube. Here’s what to do:
- Find the perfect still shot. Search through your original video (the one you had before you uploaded it to YouTube) until you find that one shot that perfectly describes what the video is all about. This might be an action shot, or it could be a close-up of a face or product, or it could be anything that grabs the viewer’s attention. Whatever it is, make sure that it’s relevant to the video. When you’ve found it, export it as a jpeg or PNG image.
- Add text. Use an image editor like Photoshop, GIMP or even Preview to add text to identify the video. Make sure that the text is large enough to read easily on a small screen found on a smartphone. The file size should be less than 2MB.
- Click on the Custom Thumbnail icon and upload. This can be found on the Info and Settings page, which is accessible from the first icon (the first one) at the bottom of the video viewer. Viewers will now see your custom thumbnail."
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Wednesday, August 13, 2014
What To Charge For A T-shirt
Here's the formula: After you’ve determined your cost per item (make sure you include all your costs including design, setup and shipping), the next thing is to determine the sales price of the item. One way is to just ball park the price at what you think it should sell for, which is fairly unscientific and subject to errors that can cost you money, or do it by a adding a certain percentage over your costs, which is called your markup.
Let’s say a t-shirt cost you $10. If you were to mark up it 50%, that would mean you would sell it for $10 plus a $5 markup, or $15.
10 x 50% = 5 10 + 5 = 15
Many businesses like to mark up a small item by at least 2 or 3 times, or 200 or 300% or even more. That means that an item like a guitar pick that costs 25 cents can easily be sold for $1 or even more, if the market will bear it. On an item that costs you more, like our $10 t-shirt, your market might not bear a 100% markup (although you find shirts that cost more than that all the time), so you’ll have to settle for a smaller percentage.
No matter what, don’t drop your markup below 20% though. You have to make something for your efforts, no matter how small, just to cover those contingent costs that seem to pop up later.
Although you may see T-shirts priced around between $30 and $40 at concerts for A-list artists, don't think that you can get away with the same price. The typical going rate is actually between $15 and $20, but check what you're competitors are charging first.
Here's the "Welcome" video from Selling Music Merchandise course that describes what it covers. Get 7 days of free Lynda.com access by clicking here.
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Tuesday, August 12, 2014
The Millennial's Choice For Social Networks
Millennials love their smartphones and they love their social networks. Here's an interesting Statista infographic derived from comScore and Mobile Metrix info that shows their most popular social networks while using their phones.
What's interesting is that Facebook is still the number 1 choice by far, followed by Instagram and Snapchat. Now you can see why Snapchat turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook last year.
What this chart tells artists, bands and musicians is that no matter how badly you feel treated on Facebook, don't give up on it yet. It can still be a powerful marketing tool if you know how to use it.
What's interesting is that Facebook is still the number 1 choice by far, followed by Instagram and Snapchat. Now you can see why Snapchat turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook last year.
What this chart tells artists, bands and musicians is that no matter how badly you feel treated on Facebook, don't give up on it yet. It can still be a powerful marketing tool if you know how to use it.
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Monday, August 11, 2014
A Basic Music Publishing Glossary
Remember that each song has two rights attached to it. The first is for the composition itself (both lyrics and music) and the second is for the recording of that song by the artist.
Composition - The song written by the songwriter(s).
Copyright - The ownership or control of an intellectual property like a song.
Label - The record label, who sign the artist and usually control the copyright of the master recordings. They are responsible for licensing and distributing the recordings, then paying a percentage (a royalty) of the money earned to the artist.
Master - The produced sound recording of a song.
Mechanical License - The license to reproduce and distribute the master recordings in a physical or digital format. CDs, vinyl records and digital downloads all require this license from the publisher of the composition in exchange for a royalty for each sale.
Public Performance License - The license to transmit the compositions to the public via live concerts, radio, television and streaming.
Performance Rights Organization (PRO) - The entity that collects public performance royalties for the songwriter. This includes ASCAP, BMI and SESAC in the US.
Publisher - An entity that controls the copyright of a songwriter's compositions. The publisher is responsible for collecting the royalties on the artist's behalf.
Soundexchange - The entity that collects performance royalties for artists and labels for non-interactive streaming such as Pandora.
Sound Recording Performance License - The license issued by Soundexchange that provides the right to transmit masters via non-interactive streaming.
Synchronization (Sync) License - The license required to add music to moving images, including film, television, DVDs and video games.
Publishing is a deep subject and there are many more terms to become familiar with if you really want to get a handle on how it all works. That said, if you're unclear of the concept, these terms are an excellent place to begin.
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Sunday, August 10, 2014
Owners Of More Than 25% of US Digital Masters Don't Get Paid
Audiam estimates this amount to be as much as $5 million a day and includes everything from download stores, streaming services, scan and match locker services, digitally delivered background music, ringtones, ringback tones, text message music clips, YouTube and other digital uses.
And it gets worse - 25% of all compositions on US digital services aren't licensed at all, so that money doesn't make it back to the composer or artist either. Then you have the situations where there's lots of unpaid or unallocated money just sitting in escrow, or even worse, paid to the wrong entities.
What's the one simple thing that you can do to alleviate this situation? Make sure that you always completely fill out any documentation (including metadata) on your song when uploading to a publisher, music distribution service or performance rights organization. Sloppy paperwork leads to more problems in getting paid than anything else in this digital age, although we'll cover a number of other reasons in some upcoming posts.
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Thursday, August 7, 2014
How The Music Industry Created Its Own Worst Nightmares
Once a sector committed to the bleeding edge, the recorded music business has gone from an industry adept at incorporating the latest technology into its products to one that’s become its own worst enemy by its refusal to adopt and adapt until its too late. Over the last 30 years, not only has the industry made a series of grim mistakes that has emboldened its competition, in some cases it has even created it.
For the better part of a hundred years the recorded music business had an impressive track record of staying on top of the freshest technology. From adopting the vinyl record to replace the fragile shellac discs that were its original core business, to welcoming the cassette and its new-found portability, to the random access and digital sound of the CD, the industry managed to rise to greater and greater sales heights with each successive tech breakthrough that it incorporated.
But a series of short-sighted mistakes starting in 1981 have turned the industry from the master of its own domain to one that’s now primarily reactionary, with each latest response putting it deeper and deeper in a hole as it loses control of its own destiny. Where once the industry controlled every aspect of its business, now it has ceded control of virtually all of it, but especially the distribution of its products.
This has occurred due to many factors, but historians will look back at three major turning points that altered the industry’s fate.
The Rise Of MTV
Up until 1980, recorded music was an ecosystem totally run by the major record labels. They were responsible for creating the product by finding and recording the artists, to manufacturing the product in its own manufacturing plants, to distributing the product to a series of retail stores, to promoting the product via print media and especially radio. The record label was at the center of each of these activities, none of which could progress without its approval. The money flowed and life was good.
But by 1980 the industry was in a major doldrum thanks to a backlash against the disco era and a general spending malaise. Luckily it was soon bailed out by new musical trends (punk and new wave), and an upstart cable television network called MTV.
Suddenly there was a new way to promote music and every label jumped in feet first as viewers and record buyers couldn’t get enough of watching videos by the artists they loved. Soon, a new stable of MTV-ready stars was created, the CD was introduced, and music consumers were buying more product than ever before, with MTV at the center of it all. Read more on Forbes.
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Wednesday, August 6, 2014
The "Happy Birthday" Song Could Cost Publisher Millions
For 120 years Warner/Chappell Publishing has been demanding payment for the use of the song "Happy Birthday," but a new documentary and lawsuit provides some strong evidence that the song has actually been in the public domain all this time. Such a ruling would mean that Warner/Chappell would be forced to not only forfeit the high licensing fees it now receives from it, but also potentially have to return hundreds of millions of dollars as well.
During the making of a documentary on the song, researchers have uncovered evidence that the song has actually been in the public domain at least since 1920, a claim that many copyright scholars have maintained for years.
"Happy Birthday To You" actually started its life as "Good Morning To All" which was published in 1883. The "happy birthday" lyrics appeared in 1901 with a note that the song was sung to the melody of "Good Morning To You" in an edition of the Inland Educator and Indiana School Journal. This was reiterated in a book in 1907, then published with notation in 1911. There were a variety of copyright claims since, but virtually all were held to be invalid or expired.
It seems that Warner/Chappell might hold a copyright on the original song (might being the operative word here), but not on "Happy Birthday To You," although the company has claimed copyright of the song even though the original copyright has long since run out. Now that a suit has been filed, it should be very interesting to see how the company responds.
While it won't shake anyone's world to have "Happy Birthday" back in the public domain, at least it will get rid of the substandard efforts to take its place in restaurants everywhere. You can read more detail, and see the complaint document here.
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Tuesday, August 5, 2014
5 Things Music Bloggers Hate Most
1. You get the blogger's name wrong. No one will take your email seriously if you misspelled their name.
2. You send a generic email blast. This is especially bad if you happen to CC all the other blogger's addresses for everyone to see. If you're going to do this, at least do a BCC (blind carbon copy, which means that no one other than you can see the addresses).
3. You place them on your mailing list without advising them first. Most email service providers prohibit this anyway, as they want everyone on your lists to voluntarily opt in. Music bloggers particularly hate this though, so don't do it unless they ask.
4. You turn on the SPAM machine. Music bloggers hate when you keep badgering them with the same info. It's OK to follow up or send a reminder, but if they don't respond after a couple of tries the chances are low that they're going to respond at all.
5. You don't read their blog before emailing. Bloggers hate it when you send them something that blatantly indicates that you've never seen their blog before. It's the ultimate turn-off, and will probably get you permanently banned from the site.
Want to know the way to a music bloggers heart? It's simple really. Contribute to their blog with regular comments that are not self-serving in the least. When you become a part of their community, you're much more likely to get a blogger's attention when you need it.
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Monday, August 4, 2014
3 Reasons Why An Artist Website Is So Important
"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? Both are unlikely, but something similar could happen, where suddenly you’re unable to access that large fan base that you've worked so hard to develop.
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."
To read additional excerpts from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and my other books, go to the excerpts section of bobbyowsinski.com.
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Sunday, August 3, 2014
How Streaming Hurts Digital Download Sales
While this blog has posted many times about the decrease of download sales as streaming music has taken off, this chart from Statista illustrates the trend very well.
In comparing the first half of this year with the first half of 2013, you can see that on-demand streaming (which means from a service like Spotify or Beats Music) is up about 50%. Add to that the increase of on-demand music through video services like YouTube, which is up another 35%, and you can readily see why digital album sales are down almost 15% and individual track sales are down 13%.
CD sales are down by more than 19% from the same period, but that most likely would have occurred even without audio streaming becoming as big as it is. CDs will stay around for a while, but the format has long since seen its peak.
The anomaly is still vinyl album sales, which are up a whopping 40% over the same time last year. While that seems like a lot, the revenue derived from that facet of the business is still a figurative drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the recorded music industry, but it's still nice to see.
In comparing the first half of this year with the first half of 2013, you can see that on-demand streaming (which means from a service like Spotify or Beats Music) is up about 50%. Add to that the increase of on-demand music through video services like YouTube, which is up another 35%, and you can readily see why digital album sales are down almost 15% and individual track sales are down 13%.
CD sales are down by more than 19% from the same period, but that most likely would have occurred even without audio streaming becoming as big as it is. CDs will stay around for a while, but the format has long since seen its peak.
The anomaly is still vinyl album sales, which are up a whopping 40% over the same time last year. While that seems like a lot, the revenue derived from that facet of the business is still a figurative drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the recorded music industry, but it's still nice to see.
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Thursday, July 31, 2014
What's Interesting About The Most Played Music Videos This Year
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| Shakira has 2 songs in the top 10 |
In terms of view numbers, Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" has racked up over 500 million views so far (and still counting), while Shakira has topped 350 million with "Can't Remember To Forget About You." Here's the top 10.
1. Katy Perry, "Dark Horse ft. Juicy J"
2. Shakira, "Can't Remember to Forget You ft. Rihanna"
3. Shakira, "La La La (Brazil 2014) ft. Carlinhos Brown"
4. "We Are One (Ole Ola) [The Official 2014 FIFA World Cup Song] (Olodum Mix)"
5. Enrique Iglesias, "Bailando (Español) ft. Descemer Bueno, Gente De Zona"
6. The Chainsmokers, "#SELFIE"
7. Iggy Azalea, "Fancy ft. Charli XCX"
8. Frozen Soundtrack, "Let It Go"
9. Jason Derulo, "Wiggle ft. Snoop Dogg"
10. Enrique Iglesias, "El Perdedor ft. Marco Antonio SolÃs"
YouTube views fluctuate a great deal, so these rankings could be completely upside down by year's end. That said, this is where the real valuations of popularity are, not on the Billboard charts.
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