Tag: marketing

Success in music: defining your personal strategy in four steps

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Finding your way to success can be confusing as an artist. Here’s what you should be focusing on.

At the Play & Produce conference in Ghent, Belgium, I joined a panel about digital revenue streams with Jef Martens (Basto / LazyJay), and Sebastien Lintz who does digital for Hardwell, artist management at Sorted, and is label manager at Revealed Recordings.

We discussed a lot of topics, some of which are covered in this article, but a lot of questions were left unanswered when we ran out of time.

So, for all those musicians that want to turn their craft into their livelihood, I wanted to create a basic resource to be able to refer to. This article goes over:

  • Making good music.
  • Getting your music in front of the right audiences.
  • Networking (!).
  • Retaining your fans & building community.
  • Monetization.

You’ll learn some new tricks to get better at what you’re doing, but more importantly: the below teaches you to develop your own strategy. Dive in!

Step zero: make really good music.

Before anything else, you need to make great music. This is part skill, part taste, and part understanding of trends. The best music is timeless, but before it becomes timeless, great music has to be timely.

As your skills develop, so will your ability to develop a consistent sound that’s unique to you. This is important, because it’s unlikely you’ll ever be ‘the best’ — simple mathematics. However, if you make a sound that stands out, you don’t need to be the best, you just have to make something remarkable.

Seems like an obvious step, but it often needs repeating. If you’re feeling lost or overwhelmed, know that the most important thing to work on is to develop your music and your skills. Everything develops from there.

Step one: getting your music heard.

Make a lot of music and release a lot of music. Make sure it’s easy to find, to stumble upon, to access, and to share.

There are a variety of tools that help you distribute your music to a lot of different places, like Labelgrid, or distributors like CD Baby and TuneCore. They help you to be everywhere your (future) fans might be.

In order to be discovered, make sure to put time into the artwork and accompanying description for your music. The description provides keywords for people to find your music, so don’t hold back on mentioning the names of bands that influence you, genres, etc.

Make it easy to share your music. Great music is inherently viral. Since YouTube is the most universal music player, you must have your music on there. Make sure the title has all the relevant information plus an indication about the type of music, to guarantee more clicks when people share it.

Regarding the artwork, you should understand that we live in the age of feeds. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram encourage us to scroll endlessly, because it means we’ll spend more time on their platforms.

Make sure your artwork is a scroll stopper.

It doesn’t have to be fancy, just effective.

7 Maine Coons Head Bopping

If your sound is good, people will share it (hence step zero).

From there, you need to find your audience.

(pro tip: get your music everywhere, but figure out what channels work best for you and double down on them. Doing a little bit of everything is a good way to not get traction anywhere. Make sure you actually enjoy using the channels you focus on, because if it’s not fun for you, you’re going to get exhausted and inconsistent eventually.)

Step one point five: finding your audience.

If you understand your music’s audience and where they hang out, or who else they listen to, you can start doing specific things to get your music into their ears, such as:

  • Remix other artists in your genre. Don’t ask for permission, but communicate to them once your remix is done. After all: their repost helps you reach their audience and chances are they’ll have a bigger audience than you. Play nice. And don’t put your remix on Spotify or other monetized places without permission. It’s less about the legal issues, and more that it’s just bad for human relations.
  • Connect with communities in your genre. On Reddit you can find loads of communities where producers are helping others to learn to master their art. You can also connect to communities around certain genres or prominent labels inside a genre. If Reddit’s not your thing, you can find groups like these on Facebook too.
  • Pitch your tracks to channels your audience follows. These may be blogs, YouTube channels, or internet radio stations. You can be more creative also: if there’s a popular video game streamer on Twitch that listens to a lot of music like yours, you could reach out to them, offer to make a personal theme song for them in exchange for a certain amount of airtime on their stream. Be creative.
  • The value of being (one of) the first. On our panel, Sebastien Lintz pointed out that being one of the first people on a platform can have big advantages. So keep your eye on new apps that pop up, get on there, try them out, see what happens. This is how you secure a first-mover advantage for a specific segment. Not convinced? Just look at what Vine and Musical.ly have enabled.

Step two: develop strong relations with people.

Success in music is usually a combination of music skills and people skills. When you see an overnight success, what you don’t see is the many years of preparation involved in that.

An artist may be young, but the team around them will know exactly who to talk to, who to ask for favours, the right people to work with, etc.

So, don’t be shy. Make sure you’re frequently in the same room as people who can help you. If you have a chance to pitch your music and get feedback, then go do it, even if you think you’re not ready. The feedback you’ll get will be valuable, but it’s also a good chance to get into the mind of label A&Rs, learn how they think, and you’ll know who they are if you run into them again.

These things happen in live settings, but sometimes people like Sebastien call for artists to submit music & have it publicly reviewed.

Other things you can do:

  • Speak to the DJs, promoters, organisers, etc. at local shows.
  • Go to conferences and set aside your shyness. Go chat with people, find out what they’re doing, and if there’s a panelist you find interesting, grab them for a chat. They’re there to speak to people and they’re interested in meeting you.

Basically: talk to people, and if it’s uncomfortable, then take a friend with you who’s good with that. The music business is a network business, so understand that you’re building relations that will last your entire career. Start early.

Step three: retaining your fans.

With the previous steps, you should have a way to get your music heard by people. Attention is fickle — so the big question here is not how to get people to listen to your music, but how do you get people to listen to your music again? And again, and again, and again.

You need to feed them to places where you can reach them again. It’s incredibly valuable, so if you’re annoyed with vloggers telling people to subscribe in every video: place yourself in their shoes. And do that!

Find the best ways to reach people. Facebook posts, once you scale your fanbase, may only have a 5% reach. Tweets are similar. It’s one of the reasons why I started a newsletter to talk about the future of music. For the last year, the open rate has been close to 50%. The typical artist newsletter has a 20–25% open rate.

Other methods to get your messages to your fans:

  • Download gates, like ToneDen, which allow fans to download your music in exchange for following your social accounts, incl. Spotify. Downloads as an incentive work well with certain audiences, but realize that ‘FREE DOWNLOAD’ in 2016 is nothing special.
  • Ads & remarketing. Sometimes it’s worth it to pay for ads. For instance, if you create a unified link for your release with a tool like Linkfire, you can integrate Google Analytics & AdSense. This way, you’ll get some data about the people that checked out your release and you’ll be able to target them on sites they visit, or when they Google something… Got a show in a town with a lot of fans? Set an ad that reveals your show the next time they Google for something fun to do on the weekend.

The basic jest of social profiles is this: be consistent, stay relevant, and frequent. Don’t abuse people’s permission to appear in their feeds or inbox, because they’ll unsubscribe or learn to ignore you. Good luck winning their attention back then.

You can also use ephemeral content, like Snapchat, to become part of fans’ habits.

Step three point five: building your fan community.

I love using the example of the fanbase as a house party. In my many years of awkward beers with strangers, I’ve learned there are roughly two types of house parties:

  • The type where you get let in, stand around a room with strangers, where nobody’s really entertained and just waiting for the host to come chat with them, and thinking of an excuse to bail ASAP. 💩
  • The type where the host lets you in, immediately introduces you to people you should talk to, suggesting topics you can discuss, and then at some point in the night you realize you haven’t even seen the host in an hour, because you’ve been having such a good time with their friends. 🔥

Building a community is a great way to get your fans to keep their attention on you, even after you leave the room. Not only that, but you now have the power to get back into the room, shut everyone up, and ask people to amplify what you have to say:

“Having a great time? Let’s get some more people in here! Text your friends. BYOB.”

Facebook Groups are an excellent way to do this. It also lets you mix fans that you’ve known for a long time (eg. friends), with first generation fans, and later fans.

Help keep the community active. Get people to talk about music, art, whatever you find interesting and is somehow a relevant connector. The music shared in the group doesn’t have to be just your music.

Step four: “shut up and take my money”

Having a connected fanbase allows you to intimately understand who the people that listen to your music are, what they care about, how their minds work, what they find cool, etc.

This allows you to better package the experiences you provide to them.

In music, the money is in the package. Whether it’s the live show, the download, merch or something else.. This means you can make the music you believe in, while also developing ways to make money off of it.

I usually hold up Yellow Claw as an example of a group that understands their fans really well and have developed multiple business models based on that understanding.

Basically, what it comes down to is this:

  • Great music shouldn’t have to be charity, so don’t put yourself in the position of having to beg fans to “please buy my album.”
  • Instead, think the other way around: what can I make for my fans that will make them thank me for giving them the opportunity to spend money on me?

No need to employ dark voodoo techniques. 👹 It’s just a matter of getting into the right frame of mind. Let’s call it the Kickstarter State of Mind.

Successful Kickstarters are a combination of:

  • A great product or idea (a metaphor for your music).
  • A charismatic call to action (a metaphor for your artist persona and brand).
  • Exciting rewards for contributing money.

Go spend some time on Kickstarter and see how price tiers work. Usually they cater to different types of audiences, or fans with differing levels of commitment. But they all have this in common:

People are super excited to be able to spend their money. Not for you — that’s just a nice bonus. But for themselves.

shut up and take my money

Recap

  • Step zero: make really great music. Keep working on your skills. This is by far the most important part. It’s the fuel for everything else. If nothing seems to be working, it may just be because your music is not good enough, or simply doesn’t stand out. Sorry.
  • Step one: getting your music heard. Get your music everywhere, take into account what your music looks like when people share, and double down on the channels that work best for you.
  • Step one point five: finding your audience. Use other people’s audience (OPA) by remixing, pitching curators, connecting to communities, and securing a first-mover advantage.
  • Step two: developing strong industry relations. Make no mistake: the music business is a business of human connections. Start early. Be nice & professional.
  • Step three: retaining your fans. Keep your fans’ attention by connecting them to your socials and finding other clever ways to reach them again.
  • Step three point five: building your fan community. Fans help keep each others’ attention on you and can help amplify your message. Be the host of the most fun house party they’ve ever attended.
  • Step four: “shut up and take my money”. Besides conventional revenue streams, you should be creating things that are so exciting for fans that they’ll thank you for the opportunity to spend their money.

Success in music: defining your personal strategy in four steps

Is it that simple?

Well, yes.

The hard part is that you need to put in a lot of hours. You have to be smart and relentless. Practice grit. You have to persevere, but also know when to cut your losses.

As long as you’re flying solo, take a look at job descriptions at labels or management agencies to understand how to strategically release music and build towards milestones.

Once you’re ready to build your team:
Work with people that inspire you. Don’t work with assholes.

And for fuck’s sake, keep your focus on your music.
Your music always comes first.

10 Lesser Known Tools for Making Music in your Browser

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

When the urge to get creative strikes, here’s how you can drop a beat fast.

It’s not only the internet’s websites and platforms that change. Under the hood, our browsers are getting more powerful, allowing for rich experiences without having to manually download apps.

Here are ten fun tools to drop beats right from your desktop browser.

 

Splice Beat Maker

https://splice.com/sounds/beatmaker

Splice Beat Maker

How it describes itself: Make and share beats in your browser.

How it works: Splice Sounds is a subscription service with a million loops, samples and presets for producers. Beat Maker allows people to dig into Splice’s library for free. You can check out beats created by established producers, remix those beats, or just start from scratch and program something yourself.

First impression: You can easily spend hours on this. What I find most remarkable about it is that this is a perfect example of marketing done right.

 

108

http://martinwecke.de/108/

108

How it describes itself: A minimal beat machine in the browser.

How it works: You see a dot moving around a circle and you can populate the circle with drum samples by using your keyboard. Each time the dot hits the sample, it plays it. It runs at 108 beats per minute, hence the name.

First impression: Easy if you want to mess around quickly put some drum pattern together. Unfortunately everything gets placed in a grid: this makes it hard to create something terrible, but also hard to play with timings and get really creative.

 

Blokdust

https://blokdust.com/

How it describes itself: BlokDust is a free to use web-based music, sound and instrument creation app.

How it works: The web app gives you a tool box to generate tones, feed them to effects, link them to interactive components like your computer’s keyboard or even a MIDI controller, and has different tools that lets you power up the events. Because of the latter, you can create self-playing devices that generate soundscapes (click here for an example that lets you interact through the bottom row of your keyboard).

First impression: Very cool, very powerful. Not only do they provide an extensive set of guides and tutorials, but the project is also open source and the developers invite people to learn from, fork, or contribute to the code.

 

Sample Stitch

http://samplestitch.com/

Sample Stitch

How it describes itself: Try re-constructing the samples of popular producers’ beats.

How it works: It takes the original samples used by 3 popular hiphop tracks and lets you recompose the beat using your keyboard.

First impression: Fun to play around with and try to build something cool. It’s good to read the stories at the bottom of the page, too. It gives a perspective about the amount of work hiphop producers put into digging for samples, picking the right ones and constructing beats out of them. One downside: at the moment of writing the share-function is busted.

 

Incredibox

http://www.incredibox.com/

Incredibox v4

How it describes itself: Incredibox is a musical app in which you can quickly and easily create a mix by running a band of beatboxers.

How it works: You start with one guy. When you give him an accessory like a hat or sunglasses, he’ll start beatboxing or singing. As soon as you dress someone up, another guy appears until finally the box is filled with 6 beatboxers working on your song.

First impression: This one’s truly for everyone. It’s so easy that it’s impossible to make anything that doesn’t sound good. There are 4 editions, I suggest you start with the newest ones. Each edition has special unlockable moments that you have to find by combining the right elements… so it’s a game, too!

 

Voice Spinner

https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Voice-Spinner

Voice Spinner

How it describes itself: Spin the spinner like a record player — slow, fast, forward, backward — to hear how it affects the sound.

How it works: Click the record icon in the middle. Say something, sing something, rhyme something. Then use the slider below to play it back in various ways.

First impression: Cute little tool to play around with. Especially fun to then play some music from another player and try to layer your vocal on top of it. Highlighting this, because it’s part of the Google Chrome Music Lab which has a dozen other music making tools for in your browser.

 

YUME

http://unseen-music.com/yume/

YUME

How it describes itself: YUME is an interactive musical exploration created to promote the new album from ambient artist Helios. Manipulate sound and explore a dream-like world.

How it works: You‘ll see a screen with diamond-shaped objects, or perhaps kites, that you can drag to manipulate the sound. As you play around with them, you can explore other areas in the audiovisual world, which will have other configurations.

First impression: The initial screen is a little bit confusing, but that ends up really encouraging exploration, which is the right way to bring people into these types of experiences.

 

Sampulator

http://sampulator.com/

Sampulator

How it describes itself: Music production made easy. Create beats in your browser.

How it works: Your entire keyboard gets turned into a sampling machine. It allows you to program drums, including some great 808 sounds, keys, vocal samples, and more. If you’re good, you can make fantastic beats like this.

First impression: This is right up my alley, because I love 808 driven beats and it has some samples common in the juke and jersey club genres that I often listen to. I like that you can play stuff live and then drag them around in the grid, in case your timing was off.

 

wavepot

http://wavepot.com/

wavepot

How it describes itself: The digital audio workstation of the web.

How it works: A better description would be: live programming music. If you’re a decent programmer, you can make some cool things with this. If you’re not, then just load up one of the examples and start editing numbers and variables and see what happens.

First impression: Reminds me of ‘algoraves’ where people live program music in front of audiences. I wasn’t able to get the sounds out of it that I wanted to, but the interface (or lack thereof, I guess) makes up for it.

 

Orbit Sampler

http://www.dreampipe.io/orbit/

Orbit Sampler

How it describes itself: Another browser-based music production app by DreamPipe.

How it works: Despite the lackluster description, it’s one of the more interesting tools. It lets you arrange your samples in circular sequences, which is sometimes argued to be a more intuitive way to visualize rhythms than the typical bar line.

First impression: Save it for the weekend or a late evening. It’s very powerful, but a bit hard to do something quick, because of the level of detail it offers. You can spend hours and hours on this.

 

Having fun? Drop some of your most creative work in the responses to this piece. No time to play and want to listen to music made by others? Click here for some great tools to discover something new.

The Value of Ephemeral Content: Becoming Part of Your Fans’ Routines

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

What some perceive as ephemeral content’s greatest weakness is actually its most powerful quality. In an online landscape where attention is most scarce, ephemerality is key. 🔑

 

Last week I had the pleasure of being on a panel with some brilliant minds at Amsterdam Dance Event. The topic: marketing music to millennials. Millennials born in the nineties have a starkly different online profile than eighties babies. For instance, for teens, Snapchat now beats Facebook and Instagram as their top social platform.

 

The popularity of ephemeral content has to do with a number of factors. One teen writes:

  • No social pressure, because the main metric is view count.
  • Ephemerality means you don’t need to overthink what you post.
  • You actually know who’s watching — if people have seen your post, their usernames are revealed.

The world these people have grown up in is different from that of older generations. Eighties babies used to think online was a bit more of a playground. I cringe looking back (and deleting) some of the photos and status updates I posted on Facebook back in 2007–2009. This generation is aware that information lives forever and their strategies for dealing with that include deleting their digital histories frequently.

 

So for many labels, artists, and managers the question is:

How do I develop a strategy around ephemeral content?

Your strategy will have to acknowledge a few core concepts:

  1. Attention, not money, is the scarcest good on the internet. And everyone’s competing for it.
  2. The online landscape is now a filtered landscape, with algorithms weighing content and deciding whether to show it to your audience, or not.
  3. In this reality, your most important question is: how do I win my fans’ attention again and again and again?

For that purpose, ephemerality is f*#ing amazing. If you content is only visible for a day at a time — your fans will have to make you part of their daily routine. Now your have your fans’ attention: every single day.

 

Habit is the key to winning people’s attention over and over. There’s a reason why I send out my music tech newsletter at exactly the same time every week. Some of my subscribers actually go get a cup of coffee and hit refresh on their inbox around the time my newsletter’s supposed to come in. Not only does that lead to good engagement and nice metrics, but it also gives a great connection between you and your followers — it’s a special feeling.

 

Once understood, ephemerality can be engineered. If Snapchat is not your thing, or if teens are not your main demographic, there are other ways to become part of people’s habit through ephemerality. The expiring nature of Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Release Radar is the reason why those features have been so successful and have deeply influenced the product’s direction.

 

A great example of a music company that has been engineering ephemerality for years, is the Main Course record label. They offer all of their releases for free on Soundcloud in the first week. Many labels do the opposite and try to drive sales first, but Main Course’s strategy makes sure fans check their page once a week. Imagine doing this on a page you actually owned, instead of on a social profile. You can establish a habit and then when fans come and check, you can nudge their attention to important things like gigs or crowdfunding campaigns.

 

What some perceive as ephemeral content’s greatest weakness, is actually its most powerful quality. Use its expiring nature to build habit, keep your fans’ attention on you, and lead them to where you need them.

 

Many thanks to my co-panelists Luke Hood (UKF / AEI), Amy Jayne (Hospital Records), Siofra McComb (The Other Hand), Shane Mansfield (Ticketscript), David Ireland (Magnetic Magazine), and Lucy Blair for putting it all together. You’ve inspired me to put these thoughts down.

 

If you’d like me to work with you on building habit loops — drop me an email: bas@musicxtechxfuture.com.