8 Steps To Discovering Your Brand

We all have a brand, but most of us just don't know what it is. Branding yourself, your music, your band or your product is extremely important if you want to become a success in the music business however, so it's important that we discover what our brand is - and the sooner the better.

Here's an excerpt from my Social Media Promotion For Musicians book that provides 8 steps that you can use to look inside yourself, your music, or your business to begin to discover your brand.

"1. What name are you using? Am I using a business name or product/service name that’s most comfortable to me now? Can I name the service I provide something other than a generic name? Is the name easy to say and remember?

2. What makes my business or product stand out from everyone else? What do I do? How would I like to be perceived? If you’re a service business, list your core specialties, then narrow it down to 3, then narrow it to 1. If you have a product, list its benefits, then narrow it down to 3, then narrow it to 1.

3. Who do I wish to serve? How do I do it? Describe the people that you currently do business with or are your customers. Describe the people you would like to do business with, or the customers you’d like to attract.

4. What is the current image of the business or product? How do my current customers describe it? Ask a variety of people, then extract the commonalities.

5. What’s my customer service like? How do people feel when they work or interact with me? How do they feel if they come to me with a problem with a product or service that my businesses has provided?

6. What does my business stand for? Is there a cause I really believe in? What are my values? What really matters to me? What would I never do?

7. What’s the look of the business? What colors represent the business? Is there a certain type of clothing that represents the business?  Does the business name or product suggest an image?

8. Is there a current brand that I identify with? Why?"

If you can answer these questions, you're well on your way to not only discovering your brand, but developing it into a powerhouse as well.

You can read more from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and my other books on the excerpt section of bobbyowsinski.com.

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Metal The Most Popular Genre On Spotify

It's easy to think that pop music is the most popular genre in the world, especially if you listen to radio a lot, but that's not the case - at least according to Spotify.

It turns out that globally, metal is at least in the top 10 genres and is usually in the top 5. The genre also has the most listener loyalty, with pop a distant second, followed by folk, country and hip-hop.

The genres most popular artists include Metallica, Slayer, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Sepultura, Pantera, Cradle of Filth and Anthrax.

Of course, this is no surprise to metal fans, but the major labels should take note. There are some hard core fans there that still buy physical product.

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The Social Video World Is Changing

Until recently, YouTube had the market cornered on video both by users and brands. If you wanted the greatest interaction with your fans, that's where you'd go.

That's all changed recently since Facebook has put such a huge emphasis on video. As a result, a number of surprising facts about social video have come into play thanks to data from Socialbakers. Here's what they found.

• The top 1,000 profiles on both YouTube and Facebook are uploading 4X the number of videos on Facebook now. Many big brands have even stopped posting on YouTube altogether in favor of Facebook. That said, there are still brands and large media publishers that still enjoy big gains from posting on YouTube.

• In terms of interactions, Facebook videos perform much better than other platforms. Organic fan reach is 3X higher than YouTube. They're also shared a lot more. 

• Instagram is still mostly a picture platform, but it's being used more and more by brands for short videos. The problem is that most people still don't relate to videos on the platform, and would prefer to get their videos from elsewhere.

• YouTube videos are still the most commonly shared on Twitter.

The takeaway is that YouTube is losing market share to other platforms, and what that means is you should also consider other platforms besides YouTube for your videos. Don't abandon YouTube though, because it's still a powerhouse.

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Shazam Adds Visual Recognition

Shazam answered the age-old question of "What's the name of that song?", but soon the app will be able to do much more.

The company has now added a visual recognition element to the app, which means that you'll be able to point your phone at a poster, print media, or some merch to unlock some additional online content.

Yes, QR codes already do much the same thing, but they're clunky, sometimes difficult to read, and pretty ugly. This new element allows a company to register the artwork with Shazam, and the artwork then acts as a built-in QR code itself when triggered by the phone's camera.

Walt Disney Company, Harper Collins, and Target have already signed on to the service, but the company is in talks with the major record labels and the promoters of several large festivals.

QR codes held so much promise but were ultimately underused. Perhaps Shazam has finally found the key to visual recognition.

The new logo is built around a camera icon, as seen on the left.

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Producers, Mixers and Engineers Might Get Royalties

A new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives has been introduced to give producers, engineers and mixers a mandatory piece of the royalty pie. The Allocation For Music Producer Act, or AMP Act (H.R. 1457) is designed to correct an injustice that continues to carry on for all producers and engineers except the elite.

It's been standard since the late 60s for producers to get a royalty on the records they produce, but they had to negotiate their own deal with either the record label or the act they were working for. Engineers rarely had a deal for royalty points, and when they did it was for a substantially smaller amount than the producer.

The AMP act would create a statutory right for producers and engineers to receive royalties from digital sales and streaming. This would be handled through Sound Exchange.

Producers have increasingly found it difficult to get paid in recent years, since their royalty stream was based on physical sales and usually not on digital. As a result, they've had to exist on the advances they received, which have shrunk since budgets are generally much smaller than in the past, except in the case of superstar acts.

Sound Exchange collects from radio-like streaming services like Pandora, SiriusXM and cable TV and splits the revenue 3 ways; 50% to the copyright holder, 45% for the artist, and 5% for non-featured musicians like studio musicians.

The AMP Act proposes that 2% be set aside for the producer and engineer, and that will come out of the artist's 45%.

So many producers and engineers have been responsible for making some major hits what they are, yet there are many cases of them not even being credited, let alone paid for the success of their work. The AMP Act hopefully will finally make it happen.

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The Most Popular Drugs At American Festivals

Music festivals are cool for all sorts of reasons but apparently one of them relates to drug intake. A study that monitored social media postings from festivals found that a surprising number of them have to do with drug use.

The following infographic comes from DrugAbuse.com, so it's probably biased, but it's still interesting to see how different the drug of choice is depending upon the festival. By the way, the website looked at over 3 million Instagram postings across the 15 largest festivals to determine the numbers. Still, consider the source as you peruse the following graphic.

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Spotify Still Gaining Steam

It's easy to look at the upcoming streaming music launches from Apple and Google and think that they'll automatically take the lions share of that end of the business, but that underestimates just how important Spotify is the current music industry.

Spotify is now responsible for 10% of the industry's total revenue as of the first quarter of 2015, if you can believe their Director of Economics Will Page. That's a number that few thought would ever be reached, at least from Spotify.

Considering that according to the IFPI, all streaming services combined equaled about 10.2% last year, that means that the company is a juggernaut in the space. Of course, it also means that the 10.2% mark has grown considerably in just 3 months.

Last year subscription music brought in about $1.5 billion, and Spotify accounted for about half that. According to Page, it also accounted for more than 90% of subscription music growth last year.

Granted, these numbers are coming from Spotify, so they're most likely biased, but it does show that the service has a real hold on the market that might be tougher to dislodge than any of the potential upstarts realize, regardless of how deep their pockets might be.

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What's A Music Stream Worth?

You might wonder how the music industry determines how much a stream from a major service like Spotify or Pandora is determined. Unfortunately, that's a wildly moving target so no one can exactly say, and here's why.

• The different tiers pay differently. A free tier has a different royalty rate from a paid tier.

• Interactive vs non-interactive streams. Spotify is an interactive service because the user can select the song she wants to hear so it pays more than Pandora, which is a radio-like service and is therefore non-interactive.

• Different countries pay different rates. The US pays a different rate than the UK, which pays a different rate from Sweden, which pays a different rate from Korea, etc.

Because there's no way to determine the exact amount that a stream pays out, the industry has come up with something called a "stream equivalent album (SEA for short)." The way this works is that 1,500 streams at an average of $0.005 (a half-cent) each equals $7.50, which is the wholesale price for a CD. Therefore, 1,500 streams = one album.

Billboard began using this figure last year to help determine chart position, and the music industry has adopted it as a general sales metric.

That said, that 1,500 figure is subject to change. It was 2,000 streams in 2013, so it may be different next year as well.

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BMI Wins A Royalty Fight With Pandora

As you probably know, BMI and ASCAP have been fighting with Pandora for quite a while over the performance royalty rate that Pandora pays.

The streaming service was paying 1.75% of it's total revenue to the performance rights organizations (PROs), which all of the organizations deemed an unacceptably low rate.

ASCAP managed to renegotiate that rate up to 1.85% in December, but now BMI has won an improvement on that up to 2.5% in the latest court ruling. BMI actually asked for 3.825% initially, but was only granted the lower number.

This was an interesting development for a couple of reasons. Songwriters and publishers will get paid more, which is always a good thing. But the fact was that BMI was forced into this since many large publishers like Sony/ATV, Universal Music Publishing, and BMG Publishing pulled out of BMI and renegotiated their own deals with Pandora. They also settled at the 2.5% mark.

The 2.5% rate is about a 33% increase, so songwriters and publishers can rejoice in that fact, but it's only for non-interactive part of the streaming business. Unfortunately more money is being collected on the interactive part of the business from services like Spotify, but that money flows through the record labels first instead of a PRO or publisher before it gets to the songwriter. Until that changes, songwriters will continue to get the short end of the royalty stick.

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The Death Of The 1 Hit Wonder

For almost a hundred years Billboard has been producing music charts, and artists that have a single hit then drop into oblivion have always played a major part in them. These "1 hit wonders" either come and go (like Keith's "98.6" in 1967) or hit the oldies circuit (Nena with "99 Luft Ballons" in 1983), but every year the charts are littered with them.

Except that there are fewer and fewer 1 hit wonders every year.

An analysis of the last 50 years of Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart by Priconomics found that in recent years the number of artists with a hit has declined to an all-time low.

Why? For one thing, songs now stay on the charts longer than at any time in history. Before 1985 it was uncommon for a song to stay on the charts for more than 50 weeks but now it happens regularly, like Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" at 54 weeks and counting. Now a Katy Perry song is likely to stay on the charts nearly 3 times longer than the average Beatles hit from the 60s.

Obviously, the music industry would rather there be more hits as it would be better for business and possibly build more careers. Radio, unfortunately, doesn't see it that way.

Radio needs listener attention to keep its ratings, so it's to their benefit to play songs that everyone knows for as long as it can.

That said, the music business is putting much more energy into promoting established artists than trying break someone new, which perpetuates the cycle.

Regardless, there are fewer new hits to listen to every month, and we're all the worse for it. Just image how boring oldies radio will be 20 years from now.

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How Much Money Does A Hit Generate From Spotfy?

If you listen to many artists complain about Spotify, you'd think that they're making almost no money at all from the service. That's probably true for artists that don't get many plays per month (and when it comes to streaming, a million is not that many), but for others with a real hit on their hands it can be substantial.

Spotify has a nice page that explains how it pays royalties, and on it there's a chart that shows the payout of 5 different "hits." Of course, the definition of a hit is different for different types of acts. For instance, a hit for an indie band is gauged far differently than a hit a mainstream artist.

As you can see, a global hit album actually returns quite a bit in monthly income at $425,000. In fact, even a huge single can pay out at least as much or more, with a good example being the Marc Ronson/Bruno Mars hit "Uptown Funk" doing twice that amount.

One of the good points of streaming is that unlike a sale where the customer buys the album or song just once, in this case the customer may stream it month after month, thereby generating continued income.

But the problem for the artist isn't how much is generated in royalties - it's how much actually trickles down after the record label takes their cut, and this has been the problem all along. 

If a hit has generated $400,000, the typical artist would probably only see $80,000 (on a 20% deal). Of course, if the artist still owes the label money from recording or advances, that figure could be considerably less than that.

As you can see, there's a lot of money being generated in music streaming, it's just not actually making it to the artist. In other words, same as it ever was.

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Artists Use Uber To Release New Music

It seems that the car service Uber is becoming more than a taxi. It's also a way to deliver and even break new music to fans.

Britney Spears released her new single "Pretty Girls" on May 3rd using Uber as the "vehicle" to get the word out. She jumped on Twitter and Facebook during the day telling fans that they could be the first to hear the song in in Los Angeles and wanted to take a brief joy ride to have a listen.

At midnight Uber customized SUVs were available free for up to 30 minutes to those that registered, who could then hear the song before anyone else.

Fans were told to open up the Uber app on their phone between 3 and 9PM, then enter the promo code PRETTYGIRLS in the promotions section to unlock the Britney vehicle option. Winners were on a first come, first serviced basis and were also then eligible to win a prize of 2 tickets to a Britney concert.

Whether you like Ms. Spears and her music or not, you have to admit that this promotion is pretty good out-of-the-box thinking. It combines a nice combination of new and old technology to do what promotion departments have been doing for a very long time - breaking a song.

That being said, the song wasn't exactly a smash, reaching only #29 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, proving that even a good promotion can't make a hit if the song isn't killer to begin with.

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