A Promotions Campaign for an Online Music Service Launch

 

Wow Matt I hear you’re getting ready to launch your new artist community.

 

That’s right. I’m launchin’ it good and proper!

I have to, my clients probably think I’ve bagged off with their cash and I’m hiding out in Zimbabwe til the heat dies down.

So you’re going to be doing a campaign, a launch campaign?

Sure. I’m pretty confident with my strategy so I’ll let you know how I ‘m going to be doing my launch campaign:

Firstly you got to remember the product I’ve created is strictly limited to 100 people so it’s kind of exclusive – y’know instead of just trying to sell heaps of little plastic discs you’ve got to think of new ways to bring value to people and what that’s worth.

With the new artist community I just wanted the value to be exceptional in addition to the fact it is still a scarce commodity and that’s the main marketing point – persuasive value.

That’s not to say I’m stupid enough to let the thing try and sell itself.

Wait. Consider this. What if you as a musician did what I’m doing and decided to charge $40 per month to complete access to your work?

 

 

Limiting it to 100 people would be silly wouldn’t it?

 

Maybe Charging $40 would be a bit steep?

 

I mean if you had 1000 people paying $10 p/month to download everything you have and continue to do, as well as getting to make chit chat with the illustrious artist . . . well I wouldn’t be complaining.

That’s only one way of making money from content!

Lets get back to my marketing plan:

Email: Emailing all the contacts I’ve built up and discussed online promotion with.

Yes it’s going to take a whole night to organise my email list but I’m pretty sure this will be a cracker just in itself. Contacting at least a couple of hundred people who I’ve discussed providing service for to tell them we have a new service available at $10 per week AND we’re bringing back the $100 p/month deal and it’s sweeter than ever.

Of course I know what I’m doing with this whole “creating value” thing so I’m just going to be inviting people to join for free at first.
So being that this is my main strategy you can see the value of having a large amount of email contacts who are identifiable as already having expressed a direct interest in my work and then respecting them enough to allow them to check it out at first without paying.

 

Blogging:

 

As I’ve already mentioned, expect plenty of posts like this, framing my new product.

If your product is good you should be able to talk about it and tell stories. Stories that engage, like this story I’m telling right now that sort of compares my online service launch to an online album launch campaign but its not an album is it because albums aren’t worth anything and no one wants them so you better figure out what it is that YOU’RE launching that people actually want to buy!

 

 

Myspace:

 

Yup we’ll give myspace a go. If there’s one audience still on myspace its other musicians. And I have a rule with myspace that I only do a campaign if I’m really promoting value.

 

Facebook, forums and online PR

 

Publicity is a dark art and I will be happy with some neat, short little posts around some of the relevant gather points online – a few facebook groups, forums, local music communities, that should do it.
I might consider an online press release or maybe I might save that for a second launch once I’m happy with the initial user testing.

I’m actually trying to keep it low key because I can see some people thinking I’m trying to act like a scammy guru selling my secrets or something when I’m just trying to develop a more effective system that addresses problems artists are having right now – cheaply – but I simply don’t have the capital to go . . . look! All done! $37 p/month, all your problems are solved!

 

Adwords

Adwords is . . a perfect system, as I’ve said, it’s the beginning of the future of advertising.

Often I have compared the power of digital promotion to the Death Star. Awesomely powerful, but only to be deployed in operations once every preparation has been made.

And a perfect system demands a perfect product. A perfect target.

It’s like this. Until we’ve learnt how to make 10 clicks into 1 sale, I don’t want you to pay $5 for 10 clicks. There’ll be plenty of time for pay per click, Google’s not going anywhere.

Video:

 

Gotta do a video. I’m a hypocrite if I cant just push record and tell people what I think I’m doing and I expect that’s something an artist should be able to do each week.

 

What I wont be doing:

poster campaign: There’s probably about a million committed music acts in the world.

Probably only about 50 walk around up town Auckland.

CD promo: I’d love to write a song for the launch and treat it like a faux single release. But I’ll be struggling just with a video.

Affiliate marketing: My goal is not to become some rich dude reaping in profits from my “system”, it’s actually because I believe I can create a system that puts the artist in control of their online promotion and revenue management, with all the support they need.

If I can make it work, or actually any way of making a new band famous that doesn’t involves a reality tv show I’m sure I’ll be fine for cash.

Mainstream media: Sure you gotta spend money to make money. But I’m not that stupid!

 

 

Kurb is an online promotion company specializing in digital music marketing and artist management.

Follow our blog at http://musicmarketingblog.info for cutting edge web promotion as we launch http://newmusicmarketing.com – the exclusive artist community putting artists in control of their online promotion and revenue management.

Within New Zealand we also provide low cost and hassle free CD DVD duplication and printing as well as poster design print and placement in Auckland.

kurbpromo@gmail.com

 

Long tail, flat tail, free tail: When will music be free?

The long tail is a term that describes the effect of a digital economy on the former impositions caused by actual physical retail stocks of products such as books, CD’s and DVD’s that gave a lot of hope to the little guys in a new online marketplace.

But just recently there’s been more discussion – a Harvard Business Review article suggests the long tail won’t deliver a “music middle class” as described by hypebot:

http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/2007/10/the-rise-of-the.html

from http://www.coolfer.com

Anderson’s theory of niche-over-mass culture is based upon the belief that the mere availability of niche products spells doom for hits. Given the choice, he argues throughout the book, people will make different purchases. Not only are CD sales down, he wrote, but customers are “losing their taste for the blockbuster hits.”

But consumers, Elberse has found, still opt for hits:

No matter how I slice and dice the customer base, customers give lower ratings to obscure titles. A balanced picture emerges of the impact of online channels on market demand: Hit products remain dominant, even among consumers who venture deep into the tail. Hit products are also liked better than obscure products. It is a myth that obscure books, films, and songs are treasured.

 

In the book, Anderson wrote that “we’re seeing a shift from mass culture to massively parallel culture,” or “millions of microcultures.” But that doesn’t appear to be the case. Mass culture is alive and well on the Internet. Consumers know the bad from the good. They know what’s popular and they will gravitate towards the hits. Niches will continue to exist, and heavy users will continue to dabble in niches, but the level playing field of digital distribution isn’t going to do away with mass culture.

 

 

from http://digitalaudioinsider.blogspot.com

Elberse touches on one of my pet themes — that the ease of online distribution for virtually any piece of recorded music is resulting in increasingly fierce competition for the attention (and dollars) of listeners — and provides some stats that spell out the improbability of meaningful digital sales for most “long tail” musicians:

 

“My research suggests that the tail is long and flat, and therefore that content providers will find it hard to profit much from it. It remains to be seen whether the new media environment will indeed make many previously unprofitable niche products profitable. Online channels lower the barriers to market entry for such products, and thus introduce the possibility of additional sales — but they also lead to a flood of products all competing for consumers’ attention. In my most recent correspondence with managers at Nielsen SoundScan, I learned that of the 3.9 million digital tracks sold in 2007 (the large majority for 99 cents each through Apple iTunes), an astonishing 24% sold only one copy, and 91% — 3.6 million tracks — sold fewer than 100 copies.”

 

 

But over http://www.mediafuturist.com

A post  quoting the Long Tail’s Chris Anderson on Prince’s little experiment with the daily mail is used to once again highlight – forget the flat tail, it’a all about the free tail!

 

“He says:  “A) Prince spurred ticket sales. Strictly speaking, the artist lost money on the deal. He charged the Daily Mail a licensing fee of 36 cents a disc rather than his customary $2. But he more than made up the difference in ticket sales. The Purple One sold out 21 shows at London’s 02 Arena in August, bringing him record concert revenue for the region. B) The Daily Mail boosted its brand. The freebie bumped up the newspaper’s circulation 20 percent that day. That brought in extra revenue, but not enough to cover expenses. Still, Daily Mail execs consider the giveaway a success. Managing editor Stephen Miron says the gimmick worked editorially and financially: “Because we’re pioneers, advertisers want to be with us…”

 

 

My own commentary is that we all know a single track is no longer worth 99c, I think it’s time for the acceptance that recorded music is inevitably moving toward free and that that should inform the discussions on what our best efforts to realise the value created by music and musicians will lie in the not too distant future.

My feelings are that we are in a era of great opportunity for artists and we should reflect on where else creating value online and with digital products, services and partnerships has been already proven to be significantly profitable for creators, and the “free tail” methods being used to do so.

 

Online Music Promotion Management: When Experiencing Technical Difficulties

 

Setting up the new artist community at http://newmusicmarketing.com and my new blog at http://musicmarketingblog.info has been slow going as – I’m sure you’re aware, my expertise is in marketing and promotion, I have passable web and graphic design skills, but not so much when it comes to administration and the back end.

 

The technicalities of building a solid platform for digital promotion and revenue is something I’ve spoken about before, because the harder it is for me, the harder it must certainly be for artists to do stuff like create and host a site, install and administer a blog platform, create a podcast and all the rest.

 

And it shouldn’t be that way, because artists need this stuff, and they need it to be easy! It’s hard enough worrying about the creative side and the marketing stuff on top of technical details!

 

In fact it really gets me hopping mad because this technical stuff must be air tight or very very bad things happen, and it happens to the best.

 

 

When radiohead released “In Rainbows” online. Media frenzy, 3 million hits on their website in one day. Went down like the Hindenburg because they weren’t ready for the traffic.

 

What about poor old Dubber from New Music Strategies. Didn’t pay his hosting bill on time so they shut him down and took his domain name hostage for about a week or so. http://newmusicstrategies.com. 2000+ subscribed readers and just given short shift, never mind the please and thank you’s!

 

 
SO – you’ve got to make sure the technicalities of running your website and blog and the platforms artists are using to carry out effective online communication and revenue generation are rock solid. That’s what I’m doing right now with a whole bunch of blogs, websites I’m responsible for and of course the new artist community as well and boy it hasn’t been easy!

Do you know what a host is? A server, A domain? That’s good. Bandwidth allocation, server speeds, security and backup . . . what about frickin DNS, MySQL databases and PHP code. Huh? Any takers? That’s what I thought.

It’s scary business. Now picture yourself in 2010.

 

You sell digital and physical products from your website

 

You sell advertising and lucrative relevant niche related affiliate offers from your website

 

 

 

Your fans interact with you and one another through the website

Music industry people with opportunities will be accessing your content and communicating with you through your website

You may even be doing futuristic stuff – automated gig booking, and smart data systems for gathering and distributing information for and about gigs and fans.

Fans may be interacting with your digital products to create their own customisable cd tracklists, cover art, merchandise, etc.

 So if your website starts to become directly or indirectly your main source of contact that leads to revenue generating activities – like mine or radioheads is – it’s more than an eeny weeny problem if well . . . there’s any kind of problem that cuts off the cash – like if the website goes kaput, gets hacked, or you just haven’t got the service in place to meet the technical needs of doing a decent amount of business on the net – the site doesn’t load quickly, audio and video content is choppy and worst of all, there’s problems using the retail interface when consumers purchase digital products.

Any website that asks you for your credit card or your paypal or whatever and then starts doing weird stuff and not loading up properly is not going to put your average fan at ease.

 

 

Remember, marketing is about solving other people’s problems, so I accept that’s what I have to do with the new artist community coming soon to

 

http://newmusicmarketing.com

 

 

create a easy hassle free service for artists who shouldn’t need to worry about having a website and a blog and whatever else they should need –so I’m looking forward to a time very soon when we’re going to have a person on board who’s just going to have it taken care of so our artists never have any problems no matter how many people are coming through their sites and blogs, or whatever they want to try.

That would be a great relief as I wait for progress on these current projects!!!

 

Understanding the role of technology is part of the uncertainty of the digital environment – knowing what has to be done, getting a fair deal – the difference between getting expert help when you need it and being overcharged.

But realistically, a professional artist just cant concern themselves with these details unless they have the appropriate contacts, they need a resource such as the http://www.newmusicmarketing.com artist community so they have an easily affordable service that is staged to cover all the support required online at each level of their professional career – Administration, Presentation as well as Marketing and promotion.

Kurb is an online promotion company specializing in digital music marketing and artist management.

Follow our blog at http://musicmarketingblog.info for cutting edge web promotion as we launch http://newmusicmarketing.com - the exclusive artist community putting artists in control of their online promotion and revenue management.  

Within New Zealand we also provide low cost and hassle free CD DVD duplication and printing as well as poster design print and placement in Auckland.

kurbpromo@gmail.com