How Billy Van Went From 2,000 To 100,000 Fans [CASE STUDY]

This case study was prepared by Michael Fiebach, CEO of Fame House, who helped grow a relatively unknown Billy Van to a worldwide fan base utilizing BitTorrent, Grooveshark, Topspin and MusicMetric.

In December of last year, Fame House launched a new idea in music. Collaborating with electronic musician Pretty Lights and BitTorrent, we released an innovative, free BitTorrent Bundle: a multimedia experience designed to bring fans closer to the artist. We encouraged the sharing of free music. The effort resulted in over 6 million downloads, a 700% increase in traffic to the artist’s site, mentions in Lefsetz and Forbes, and over a hundred thousand new and dedicated Pretty Lights fans. Where do we go from there?

Breaking Through the Noise: Launching a Career in the Attention Economy

The Fame House team put our heads together to conceptualize something interesting to do with the BitTorrent team and their technology, as a next step. Our initial conversations revolved around some next-level ideas for ways to utilize the BitTorrent software for a new Pretty Lights release. Those ideas will be put into action, but they are still being worked on and built while the new Pretty Lights album is being prepped.

Then we discussed ways we could utilize BitTorrent for the legendary DJ Shadow. Waves were certainly made with that campaign - making Shadow the first ever artist to directly monetize from file sharing. Now that Counting Crows and others have jumped on board with BitTorrent since our inital Pretty Lights launch, we needed to figure out how to prove the value of file sharing in a new and different way. The next logical progression was to show how file sharing could launch an artist’s career.

In steps Billy Van, a 21-year old from Indiana who produces high-quality music and video content. Billy had a nice buzz going on YouTube when we discovered him (one of his videos had reached 150K views), but he had just around 2,000 Facebook Likes and had only just started to see some real growth online. We thought this was perfect. People love this guy’s music, but not enough people had heard it yet.

A taste of his original work:

From 2,000 Fans To Nearly 100,000

Billy’s sound is contemporary electronic music, but it has a nice twist to it. He does everything from original production to remixes, mash-ups, and as shown above, some highly creative fusions of remix/mash-ups and live covers. This is incredibly creative content that is different than other music and video content out there—perfect for moving the needle with file sharers.

We decided to bundle some of Billy’s instrumental tracks as a BitTorrent featured media bundle. As with Pretty Lights (and Counting Crows thereafter), BitTorrent and uTorrent featured the bundle on their homepages and featured content pages, but more importantly, they bundled the music into an opt-in offering in their install path so that anyone who downloaded or updated the BitTorrent software within the window of this promotion received an opt-in to download the Billy Van music for free. They also included a new add-on: featuring a link to Like Billy on Facebook, that auto-populated the landing page after the download of the torrent began.

Billy's Featured Torrent page:

The effects of this promotion?

Almost 5 million downloads in one month:

The campaign lasted an additional two weeks and ended up totaling 7 million downloads. There was a prominent link to Billy’s website and other sites on the BitTorrent landing page, and this ushered in a great deal of traffic to Billy’s assets. We used Topspin to give away additional free downloads from Billy’s website in exchange for email addresses. This, in combination with the email collection on the featured torrent, took Billy’s email list from a few hundred people to over 60,000.

It is well known that users of BitTorrent are serious music fans. This is shown through Topspin’s “Influencer Score”, which ranks the strength of a user’s social network. Billy has a healthy amount of fans with a high influencer score.

Topspin Sharealytics for the email-for-media widget used on Billy’s site during the promotion:

Not Just Visitors… Listeners

Effect on website traffic in general was astronomical:

People were browsing Billy’s site more than ever, and staying for extended periods of time to listen:

From Indiana to the World

Some of the web analytics:

Nearly all were new visitors:

Analyitcs

Google Searches for Billy skyrocketed:

How did this affect his social media following?

Likes went from just above 2,000 to over 10,000 in two months. He now has almost 12,000 Facebook fans. These are new fans from all over the world:

Billy's "reach" on Facebook:

Marketers and managers are now concerned about how many people are “Talking About This…”

The ratio at one point was almost 2:1 (5,000 Likes, and 2,500 “Talking About This”), which is exceptionally high. This has returned to more “normal” rates, but don’t think we don’t have tricks up our sleeves for getting the “Talking About This” metrics up there again…

Better Connected, More Engaged Fans

Some of the data figures from MusicMetric:

Facebook comments were above and beyond:

... and it goes on from there.

Billy reached #1 on Pirate Bay's Top 100 Audio:

(click image to enlarge)

A promotion with Grooveshark greatly contributed to the spikes, perhaps most notably on YouTube. We partnered Billy with Grooveshark to feature his music on their homepage, and within their radio station, targeting the promotion to fans of specific electronic and pop acts that we thought would like Billy.

Highlights of the Grooveshark campaign:

Over 140,000 YouTube views
Over 10,000 clicks (1 click for every 23 impressions served)
Over 8,000 clicks through to http://billyvandubstep.com
Over 40,000 streams that lasted over 30 seconds
Billy's songs were added to over 2,000 user playlists
Over 250 listener feedback comments

YouTube spikes:

Again, traffic from all over the world:

Subscribers spiked as well:

Comments were overwhelmingly positive:

Useful insights from Grooveshark’s interesting new open analytics tool, Beluga:

We achieved extraordinary reach, against a hard-to-reach target:

What Did This All Do?

Well, Billy now has a career as an artist, much quicker than he would have had this promotion not occurred.

And how did this translate into the real world?

Billy is now getting more frequent well-paid remixing and production work, and he is working on his debut full-length release. See his recently commissioned work with LegitMix.

There has also already been some label interest. He just went on a small four-show east coast tour, playing some great venues, and he has just been confirmed for a prominent opening slot on a 19-show west coast tour in the Fall (more details coming ASAP at http://billyvandubstep.com ).

To re-quote Bob Lefsetz, we are living in an attention economy. Artists, managers, marketers, brands, and labels need to break through the noise to achieve monetization in the current state of the industry. The music business is wide open for disruption. Creative marketing for exceptional content is king. The money will come when the attention is there.

Go and disrupt.

-Michael Fiebach, CEO & Founder of Fame House

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Have a case study of your own that you'd like to share?