10 Comments

1. I’ve done a few experiments in the past couple years with my musical projects.
   Strategy #1: I decided to play a live concert and broadcast it on the internet from my bedroom using MixLR.com. I used a professional set up, so it sounded to listeners like I was on stage. I went on Last.FM and reached out to people that were listening to my tunes. I didn’t feel like I was spamming them, especially if they had racked up a large playcount for my streaming songs.
   The idea for the show was that I would play 4 songs that no one (not even close friends) have heard before, and then after the show was over I would never play those songs again. I gave it a name: The Vanishing Act.
   I started targeting (tagging) fans that might enjoy the songs. For instance, one of the songs was a love song that could be slow-danced to, so I tagged a bunch of people on Facebook who were getting married soon, or had just gotten engaged. This included fans that had found me as well as my own network of friends.
   When I wrote a song about a local diner near the university I went to, I tagged the diner’s Facebook page as well as everyone that I knew who had been there. Guess who promoted and listened to the broadcast when I went live?
   Everyone who attended the show got a recording of the show, so there was an element of urgency. If you didn’t attend, you couldn’t get the songs, and since they would never be played again, it was likely that you would tune in if you really wanted to hear the songs.
   RESULT: I’ve done a few of these internet concerts before with songs that everyone already knows and they’ve gone well, but this was definitely my most successful effort in terms of getting people interested. A ton of people promoted the show through Facebook, and most of them were people who I had tagged while writing the songs.
   Strategy #2: I looked at the marketing strategy that many bloggers use to see how I could emulate it for my music. That strategy is to give away great content for free and also offer some kind of product (an ebook, consulting, a seminar) for a price.
   I thought maybe I could create a set of “premium songs,” but I would have a hard time trying to determine what should be considered premium quality, and it might affect how I write songs if I start thinking in terms of premium vs. regular quality songs.
   Instead, I made all of my albums free and started asking people if I could write songs for their weddings, funerals, big life events, etc. I’d take their story and make a song out of it that belonged to them 100%. Not a song they could just relate to, but one that is actually about them. Then I’d charge a premium price for doing these custom songs.
   RESULT: I don’t know if one could make a living this way, though there are others who do this sort of thing and charge much more than I do. But it really seems to work, especially if I mark the songs on my albums that were a result of my custom song service. People hear the songs I’ve written for weddings and want one that is their own. Everytime one of my songs hits the front page of TheSixtyOne, I get a flood of emails from people who are interested in having a song written for them (I talk about it on my T61 profile).
   Strategy #3: I created this stage show called Collision where I paired up my talented friends with other talented friends who had different mediums but the same way of thinking. We performed our creations at a theater on a Saturday night. The marketing strategy was simply to involve artists who already had a wide support network of their own fans. Then, I made sure that participation was fun and never stressful. This allowed the artists to really turn *my* show into *their* show.
   On top of this, in the weeks leading up to the show, I put together a weekly podcast where I would interview these artists about their creative process. The artists’ networks LOVED this because it gave them a chance to get a behind-the-scenes look at how one of their favorite artists works.
   RESULT: My goal was to sell 100 tickets to the show (full capacity) and we ended up selling out in advance with an extra 40 tickets sold at the door (the theater allowed standing room once all the seats were filled).
   I made sure to get EVERYONE’S email address during the ticket buying process or at the show and we released a professional recording of the songs for a name-your-price no minimum deal on Bandcamp. Only a small percentage of downloaders chose to get it for free. Most paid about $10, some paid more (this was mind blowing to me).
   Anyway, I guess the basic theme of this stuff is to engage fans and other artists in creative ways. Ways that go beyond just cross-promoting or saying hi. Hope this was useful.

2. do not feed these people your ideas. this is how steve rifkind was credited with the street team, meanwhile he paid for it from a kid with pizza and soda. say less.

3. Hi there!
   I oranised a combined music / comic / videoproject called „Zombies auf der Reeperbahn.“.
   A friend of mine drawed a comic by the same title, I wrote, recorded & produced the song by the same name with my band Razorheads and took care of the video production.
   For one part of the videoshoot, we needed a lot of people dressed up as zombies.
   This part of the filmshootings took place on the world famous Reeperbahn in St Pauli, the redlight part of Hamburg.
   We organised a zombie flashmob in the whorehouse district of Hamburg by virally spreading the word via social networks. This part of the shooting was done „guerilla-style.
   More than 150 undead fellas showed up there and are Razorheads fans ever since.
   The spontaneous interactions between the zombiemob & the Reeperbahn partycrowd worked out as great as expected.
   I handed out contactinformation to our websites for the people who took part.
   http://www.myspace.com/razorheads
   https://www.facebook.com/pages/Razorheads/146985322018528
   They will spread the video virally as soon as it´s finished.
   The release will take place in the near future, proof here:
   http://www.youtube.com/user/Flintproductions23#p/u/0/yuqLdnZ58hY
   Ahoy,
   Flint

4. Ziasami and Flint,
   Thanks for the great ideas!
   Keep ’em coming, people!

5. Here’s what the band dispatch did: Package your music up in a zip file and only label the mp3’s with the song names. Then name the zip file as some bigger bands music and upload it in a torrent file.
   in Dispatch’s case (in the napster & limewire days) they labeled their songs as being performed by jack johnson.
   people would find the songs having already heard everything Jack did and download them thinking they found some old bootleg or leaked material
   and what they got was amazing, catchy (acoustic) music of another kind.

6. I simply held online free Ustream shows, Spoke in mutliple languages on Facebook/Twitter etc (using a translator if unsure) Made sure I connected with my audience by engaging with them, asking them Idea’s or what they thought of my projects and ensuring I answered EVERY message they sent. Also making sure I post new material often, take requests for cover songs. I think once you build an element of trust with your audience and building a kind of friendship more than a business related (hey go get this) relationship, you have a much bigger chance. It’s like befriending a plumber, getting to know them and thinking ‘hey this guy is a nice guy, think I’ll give him a shot’.

7. I ran a contest for anyone who was a member on my Reverb Nation page. They had to send me their guess on how my last name was pronounced. I also asked them to tell their friends on Facebook to add me, and become fans on RN, and they could play along, too. My last name is Fernihough, and there isn’t even complete unanimity within our family tree on the proper pronunciation. Everyone who guessed it right got a free copy of my home made demo compilation. I ended up with 3 or 4 winners, but I nearly doubled my mailing list in the space of 3 weeks.
   It rhymes with “rodeo” in case you were wondering….
   FERN-e-o

8. BOB BAKER BOOK WINNERS:
   The two paperback book winners are:
   Zia Hassan
   Terry Fernihough
   Two ebook winners are:
   Tom Bertram
   Flint Productions
   PLEASE EMAIL YOUR MAILING ADDRESS TO bruce at skylineonline dot com

9. The issue with best bang for the buck, when left unqualified, is that it ends up costing you more, taking twice as long, and being a bear to deal with while it’s happening.

10. Nice cool marketing tactics, and one thing i like to mention they you write and end your post is really cool.

Comments are closed.