marketing around a unique concept, using your blog and web 2.0

To me the idea of hooks – ideas, concepts, unique selling points – are an essential part of drawing in your initial audience.

So my blog is starting to move off the mark – and I recognised the pattern from all reports that the first 6 lonely months are something you’ve just go to get through – BUT now I’ve started to build a platform I can put forward my own unique concepts.

And artists with a strong blog can interact with their fans in this way and experiment with ideas that are super freaky cool and get everyone talking.

I’m really keen to start talking about this 50/50 thing.

It’s pretty simple: An act brings a bunch of recordings to me, hopefully enough for an album. Kurb takes the songs, we build the products and the campaign, we bring half the money we take back to the artist.

The artist never puts up a cent. But we take half of every income stream available from the recording. Forever.

Pretty straightforward. I will only be offering this to Auckland based acts initially. Hamilton/Whangarei/Tauranga maybe.

See because of my blog it doesn’t matter if it actually happens because the ideas are out there. And if someone half decent comes along and says okay Kurb, we’ll give you half the cash if you put our album out for us, then I can say sure, but I want to write about some of what I’m doing on my blog, so I can illustrate what digital promotion is bringing to artist management.

I want everyone in Auckland’s saying . . . talking about Kurb’s new label, the one where you can put an album out for free, get half the money and not stump up a cent.

Oh it’s way long tail.
There’s this chick on the music think tank from Ariel publicity it said this about her:

After 10 years of supporting mostly indie artists (1100 of them) she took the company 100% digital and renamed it Cyber PR, slashed her rates to 1/10 of what she used to charge and quadrupled her client base – and has been having a blast ever since! She is the author of ‘Boost Your Music Career in 10 Steps’ and runs workshops and seminars on music promotion.

let me get this straight she:

took the company 100% digital and renamed it Cyber PR, slashed her rates to 1/10 of what she used to charge and quadrupled her client base.

After thinking about the 50/50 thing I kinda thought there was something in that.

As I said in my last blog – artists have no money, and to be honest, though I’m a lot cheaper than a publicist, you cant just throw a few hundred dollars at me and expect earth moving results! It doesn’t work that way.

But think about it. With Kurb 50/50 we’ve got the promotion – you don’t even have to work that hard if you’ve got talent!

But thats the point of this post: it doesn’t matter if it works or not. At Kurb we’re innovating. And if we’re innovating and peole are talking about the ideas arising from that then we’re making progress.

Kurb is a New Zealand based media promotions company providing a regular blog on digital promotion, marketing digital content and creating revenue from new media online.

• Artist Management
• Online Music Promotion
• Auckland Posters – Design and Print
• DVD Duplication
• Cheap Graphic Design
• DVD copying
• Music Marketing Blog
  
• Youtube Promotions

http://www.kurb.co.nz
http://www.myspace.com/kurbpromo
http://www.youtube.com/user/kurbpromo -
http://kurbpromotion.wordpress.com
http://kurbpromotion.blogspot.com
http://www.squidoo.com/kurb

digital artist management: final news/update bonus round

Few rumblings on the tech side. Apparently some big progress has been made on the myspace promotion front. It does mean me spending money on new software platforms that sound a bit too good to be true but we’ll see how it goes.

– but really – myspace will still only ever be a shadow of it’s former self. The life is gone so you really need to know what you’re doing to get the best out of it. Lucky myspace has retained it’s brand as a music destination.

So for those starting out – you gotta start somewhere and myspace is as good a place as any.

But right now I’m looking at my competitors in a really web 2.0 kinda way and thinking, god why don’t I just outsource all of my day to day spam kind of stuff so I can focus more on the bigger picture – y’know, the hard question right now – of BREAKING AN ACT.

What’s breaking? You heard the man! 1000 true fans!

DO the math like Trent Reznor did last week! 2,500 x 300 = doing pretty okay!

OKAY.

now that I’ve done my little update and familiarised myself with the frontline of music 2.0 promotion (see: bonus level power up 3)

I’ve been brushing up on my search engine skills with a few new tools and I got back into some serious research concerning the direction I’m going with that has created a little bit of interest in my blog – your website being more important than your album, because the attention you can create on your website will be easier to make money off – “monetize” than copies of your digital content.

See, I got my break in music promotion from hanging out online with some bad people. I got all my software and all the tricks I’ve learnt since from very bad spammers, the types that yknow use myspace tricks to try and get you to join dating sites.

I was just hanging around them to learn stuff I could use to promote bands. I didn’t really follow to deeply into exactly how they made their money but I knew it was about adsense pay per click and more importantly affiliate marketing – your ad brings a buyer to a landing or sale page, and you get paid a generous commission.

But learning how easy it’d all been made . . . and is continually being made more so . . . The possibilities are getting me excited. What you can do with the attention economy . . .

It goes way beyond problogging and simply having google ads on your website and blog!

By next year once I’ve really got into understanding how to operate ad supported platforms I’m going to be talking about more than 2c a hit.

I’m talking about turning 1000 true fans into $1000 on a regular basis.

Do you think a true fan would sign up for some crappy free ringtone or dating site – FREE – if they knew once a thousand people had signed up and you’d collected over $US1000 in affiliate pay outs, you were going to give a new song away free?

Ad supported revenue just offers so many possibilities for creating revenue in a whole new way than any artists or manager could imagine.

And that’s the horse I’m backing, that’s where I’m throwing in my lot, that’s the way I’m playing my hand.

I make CD’s, that’s my main income. I ain’t gonna stop making them. I’m going to be talking to clients one on one about licensing. We’ll be looking at merchandising, I probably still won’t touch gigs unless I’m needed for promotion.

But ad supported revenue – working with someone like me with knowledge of the digital environment – by 2009 will be the best way for musicians to attempt to earn a full time living from doing what they love.

But how will new acts get the momentum, get the fanbase and traffic to a point where they can make money off it if they cant pay someone like me to work with them for up to a year before seeing returns???

Well now that my promotion power up series of reports is OVER and my car is ready to pick up from the garage . . . we can get onto that!