At all times, you need to remember one thing: your fan base = your source of income. In other words, you need your fan base in order to have a career.
It goes without saying that in order to sustain your career, you need to sustain your relationship with your fan base, and that relationship should be deep and broad. You should be interacting with your fan base in many different ways, and equally, you should be looking to derive income from your fan base from a range of different products.
This chapter looks at how to build—and sustain—a community around you in order to have a successful music career.
Before we jump in, one quick point. You can’t necessarily pigeonhole every activity under a specific heading—sometimes, indeed often, one action will have several results. Let me give you an example: Say you create a video and post it on YouTube. This could achieve several ends:
First, it could generate income for you.
Second, it may generate income for someone else who embeds it on his or her site and sells advertising around it.
Third, it is a potentially excellent piece of marketing.
Fourth, it might be a catalyst to help you communicate and interact with your fan base.
You get the idea... Accordingly, there is some overlap between the topics discussed in this part and the next, and please don’t think that just because something has one purpose, it can’t have a benefit in other areas.
The key route to sustained success is through marshaling a large fan base and using the attention and the spending power of the fan base. Any artist with a large fan base can:
Generate income by selling products to the fan base.
Generate income by directing the fan base’s interest. (This sounds cryptic—in straightforward terms, what I mean here is selling advertising.)
Negotiate with third parties (such as major record companies) from a position of strength (due to the spending power of the fan base it can bring with it).
There will never be a situation in which you as an artist do not need a fan base (of some sort).
The fan base is also the best sales force and ambassador for any artist, as well as being a harsh critic when an act fouls up. If an artist abuses the trust of his fan base, then the relationship with his fan base is over. This could even mean the end of the artist’s career.
And while we’re talking about the possible end of an artist’s career, before we go any further, I want to quickly talk about the use of the word “exploit” (and its variants).
You may be quite uncomfortable with the use of the word—I am sure you don’t want to do anything as ruthless as exploiting your fellow human beings. It’s good to be uncomfortable with this concept; it shows you are a caring human being who hasn’t lost your integrity.
As you know, the word “exploit” has two main interpretations:
To benefit unjustly or unfairly from a situation.
To make full use of and derive benefit from.
I am using the term in the second interpretation; in other words, I’m talking about how you can make full use of your fan base and derive a benefit from that use. The benefit you will derive will be more than just financial.
I could use a different term. However, I have chosen to use the word “exploit” to remind you that there is the possibility for you to overstep a line. To my mind, the key in exploiting the fan base is to remember that you are in a relationship, that each party in the relationship needs to benefit, and that the benefit needs to be roughly equal for each side. As Figure 2.1 shows, each party expects something from the relationship—that’s why I talk about exploiting with integrity.
For an artist, the fan base is everything. Among other things, a fan base will bring you:
In short, nothing else really matters apart from the fan base.
Let’s look at these benefits in turn.
The central chunk of your income (see Figure 2.2) to support your career will come from your fan base. They will do the things that bring you money, such as buy CDs/ DVDs/downloads and merchandise, as well as come to your gigs.
© Scott Hancock | Dreamstime.com
Figure 2.2. It’s all about money. You need it; other people have it. You need to find a way to encourage them to give it to you.
There are other potential sources of income out there (for instance, from television or sponsorship). These other sources are particularly significant if you don’t have a fan base or if you don’t have a significant fan base. However, without a fan base, you are beholden to other people (such as music supervisors) to decide to use your work (and so generate income).
Even if you already make your income from other sources (for instance, you may already compose music for video games), there is no reason not to start to develop your own fan base. It will give you several advantages:
You will be able to sell your services more easily, provided you can demonstrate to potential employers that they will sell more of their product by using your services. (You need to use a “hire me, and I bring a following” type of argument.)
You will be able to capitalize on your reputation for creating music when you start selling your product. So, for instance, if you release your music, you will be able to market it with the line “from the creator of the music for [whatever your game was].”
Far more importantly, you will develop an independent source (or sources) of income. You will be reliant on your own efforts for the income you generate, rather than relying on your paycheck as an employee.
In short, the fan base is the source of income for a musician. Although there are other sources of income, as a general rule of thumb, no fan base equates to no money. An unhappy fan base or one that feels exploited (in the bad sense of the word) will lead to a severe reduction in income.
I will discuss the many sources of income later in the book.
If you’re in the music business (whether as a manager, a record company, a gig promoter, a journalist, or whoever), who are you going to take more seriously—an artist who performs a gig in a bar every month or so, or an artist who has sold 1,000,000 CDs? Having a fan base converts potential into fact. In other words, once you have a fan base, you are a credible person (or group of people) to deal with.
Record companies only want to sign you for what can be sold. If no one is going to buy your recordings, then you won’t get signed. If you already have an audience, then you are a proven quantity. This principle applies for any business relationship you may have.
A step forward from having credibility is having power and influence. Credibility will get you through the door and bring you to the negotiating table. Power and influence mean that you can cut the deals that you want to cut on your terms.
When you speak on behalf of your fans (or, more to the point, when you speak on behalf of their wallets), you can start to shape your business.
Imagine a gig at which no one turns up. Imagine a gig at which people turn up but stay in their seats and clap very politely after each song (or don’t even clap).
Now imagine a gig at which the audience turns up, sings along with the songs, shouts out for their favorites, goes wild at the end of each song, demands an encore, and then crowds around the stage door after the show is over.
Which would you prefer? I think Figure 2.3 has the answer.
One of the best ways to grow your fan base is through word of mouth. Your fan base will work as a combination of your sales force and your ambassador.
Your fans will reach more potential fans than you ever can. More to the point, potential new fans are more likely to listen to the opinion of a trusted friend than they are to listen to the words of an advertisement that appears to be trying to sell a dodgy product.
One way to get radio and TV coverage is for people to call and ask for your song to be played. A good fan base will do this for you, creating a lot of buzz about your newest releases without incurring any costs for you.
Another way to get publicity is to get on the charts. If nothing else, this will get you heard on the chart shows.
The band Marillion took a novel approach to get their single “You’re Gone” onto the charts. They asked their fans to buy the single during a specific week (and encouraged fans to buy more than one copy). The fans did, and the single entered the charts at number 7, Marillion’s highest chart placing for nearly 20 years.
This created quite a buzz about the single. First, Marillion were back on the charts for the first time in many years. Second, there was the story of how the band marshaled their fans to get their chart placing.
We’ve looked at some of the things a fan base can do for you. Let’s now look at the other side of the coin: What can you do for your fans?
Remember that we’re trying to create a relationship with the fan base. We want a loyal fan base who will purchase our product (and not just once) and who will act as our ambassadors to increase the size of our product-buying fan base.
We want to exploit (in a good way) the resource that is the fan base. To do this, you need to have a deep understanding of what your fans expect in return for what they give you. Think of a marriage in which each partner brings something different to the relationship. The same principle can be applied to the relationship (or hopefully marriage) between artist and fan.
One thing that might help to focus your mind on the fan base is to think of these individuals as your clients who purchase your services. Most service providers will have a contract with their clients, setting out the rights and responsibilities, as well as the legitimate expectations of both parties and the measures of success. Although you will never have such a formal relationship with your clients (your fan base), take a moment or two to think about the terms that could be included in a contract with your fans.
What legitimate/reasonable expectations could your fan base have? These are many and varied and will depend on the nature of your act. However, there are likely to be some common themes, which probably include:
Great music, whether live or recorded. There is never any excuse for giving a poor performance or releasing a bad track.
New products to buy. Fans want new things to buy. One CD every 10 years isn’t going to be good enough. They want regular recordings (without compromising the quality of your output). They want live DVDs. They want T-shirts so they can show the rest of the world that they love your music and share your values.
Regular products to consume. As well as things to buy, fans will also expect to see activity on your part. For instance, they will want to read interviews by you and see videos of your performances, and they will expect you to tell them when (and where) these interviews/videos and so on are available.
A relationship. Fans want to have a relationship with the artists they follow. They want to feel that they can “touch” (in a metaphorical sense, and sometimes in a real sense) the acts they follow. In short, they want contact with real human beings. This can be achieved in many ways:
Often, just reading or seeing an interview will give a fan a sense of the human beings who make the music that moves them.
Technology affords many opportunities to interact. For instance, you can send your fan base an occasional email. However, there are many better options for keeping in touch through social media. (For instance, Twitter and Facebook give you the opportunity to keep in touch and to interact on a regular basis while also building a sense of community.)
Acknowledgement and respect. Fans expect to be thanked for their efforts. Fans expect to be thanked in CD notes, when they hear you interviewed, and at gigs for turning up and for their warm reception. In fact, any time they hear you communicate, fans expect to be acknowledged. If ever you mention that your fans are less than intelligent or have poor taste in music and so on, it is probably the end of your career.
Cool and kudos. Fans do not want to be associated with artists who have (in their view) dangerous beliefs (and I’m not just talking about edgy views). More than that, they want you to take a lead on certain issues. What constitutes dangerous issues and the issues for which you should take a lead is very subjective in both cases and will very much depend on the audience you are targeting.
For instance, if you are targeting a teenage male audience, they may be unlikely to want to hear about politics, but they may want to hear about girls, and indeed, they may be impressed by tales of your “conquests.” By contrast, if you are targeting the housewife market (housewife being used as a generic description, not in a pejorative sense), then your audience may expect you to align yourself with worthy causes, such as breast cancer research, in addition to creating great music.
In short, your individual fans want to feel better about themselves, and they want other people to feel good about them and respect them, due to the fan’s relationship with you. You don’t necessarily need to make people look cool by their association with you, but it certainly doesn’t do any harm.
That being said, there are limits to what a fan can expect, and I think the vast majority of fans will respect these limits. (You will only rarely come across a stalker.) For instance, I don’t think that your fan base needs to know where you live (beyond your city of residence), and your family’s privacy (especially that of any children) should always be of the highest priority.
Communication should be an integral part of your web presence, so I will come back to this issue in the next chapter. However, for the moment, I want to look at your fans’ expectations about communication. In particular, I want to talk about how you can communicate and the nature of that communication.
Over the last few years, with the rise of social media, there has been a radical shift in the way artists and their audience can communicate. It is now possible for an artist to communicate directly with her fans, for fans to communicate directly with artists, and for a dialogue to be undertaken.
Although the options to communicate through social media are great, they don’t necessarily make all of the old ways of communicating obsolete. (Remember, not everyone is on Facebook, even if it feels as if they are.) However, what social media has done is brought into sharp focus something that should have been obvious: Communication is a two-way process—it is not something that you “do” to your grateful fan base.
Whichever ways you choose to communicate, there is one key point to remember: Communication is not what you say; it is what the other person (that is, your fans) understands.
It would be simple to, say, open a Twitter account and open a Facebook account (or an account with another current hot social network) and leave things at that.
However, as I’ve already mentioned, not everyone has access to the social networks. Equally, you might choose to communicate through one, while your fan base uses another network. It’s very easy to see Facebook as the answer—and at the time of this writing (mid 2011), Facebook is all-pervasive—however, there are other options. Many people regard Orkut (orkut.com; see Figure 2.4), Google’s social network, as a failed social network. In reality, this “failure” has more than 50 million users and is hugely popular in India and Brazil.
You may be relaxed about ignoring 50 million people—and indeed, if these people aren’t interested in your music, you should ignore them—but if a large proportion of your fans are using a certain way to communicate, you should join them.
You cannot make communication a fully two-way dialogue unless you communicate individually with each fan on a one-on-one basis. However, with new social media—in particular, Twitter and Facebook—you can get close to that. But not everyone is happy communicating that way, and not everyone has access to these services, so you need to make your communications feel like a two-way dialogue.
Perhaps the most sensible way to make communication a two-way dialogue is to respond to questions that come to you, and it is easy to respond to questions through the social networks. However, it’s even easier to miss a question thrown through the social networks.
You should make sure you have systems in place (in other words, people given specific responsibility for tracking any conversations about you) so that you pick up on any discussions about you and can join in.
By equal measure, just because a question is asked in a specific manner, that doesn’t mean you have to answer in the same manner (although it does make a lot of sense to). Let me give you an example: Say you had to cancel a gig. Hopefully, you would have communicated the reasons for this, but let’s say someone tweets asking for more information.
Now, of course you can respond on Twitter to such a question, but I’m guessing that giving an answer that explains the issue fully in 140 characters or fewer might be tough. A better option could be to record a brief video answering the question, which you could then upload onto YouTube (putting a link to the video on Twitter).
You should, of course, anticipate certain questions. If the lead singer quits your band, then people are going to want to know why, what he is doing next, whether the band is going to split, whether there will be a replacement, whether the replacement will be as good as the previous incumbent, and so on. You should be ready to answer these sorts of questions before the news becomes public. Better still, you should anticipate these questions and answer them as part of making the announcement.
Technology offers many new ways to communicate. However, some of the older methods are still good choices. Very often, how you choose to communicate will depend on the message you need to impart and the nature of how your fan base likes to receive messages. Also, simplicity will often drive your chosen tools.
To cut to the conclusion of this discussion, I recommend that you communicate in different forms. Each member of your audience will want to receive communications in a different manner. There is the potential to miss sections of your audience by communicating solely in one manner.
Let’s look at your main choices.
Today, the obvious way to communicate and interact with your fan base is through the social networks. At the time of this writing, the two powerhouse social networks are:
Twitter (twitter.com)
Facebook (facebook.com)
Twitter allows you to send messages of up to 140 characters. Want to know what that limit looks like? OK, this paragraph has 140 characters.
As you can see, Twitter messages are really short. You can therefore afford to send messages frequently, and there is no expectation of detail. Facebook does not have an express limit, but it encourages short messages (more like a paragraph than like Twitter’s sentence).
With both services you can send messages, link to other material (for instance, photos or videos), and read messages from other people. You can access the services through an internet browser, but the real power comes when you access the service through a mobile device (to you and me, that’s a phone, such as an iPhone, an Android-based phone, or another smartphone; see Figure 2.5). Once you’re mobile, then you can give a real-time commentary about what you’re doing, and you can respond immediately to any communications to you.
Figure 2.5. TweetDeck, a combined Twitter and Facebook client that runs on a range of platforms, including iPhone/iPod Touch (shown), iPad, Android, Mac, PC, and internet browser. A client such as TweetDeck allows you to send and read messages, track your mentions, and send/receive direct messages (all from your phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop).
Conventional thinking holds that video is expensive and requires professional input. Common sense says that is rubbish, and that video is a great way of communicating.
In many ways, video is the ideal way to communicate with your fan base, since you can quite literally talk directly to your audience.
There are many really good but very cheap video cameras readily available. Sure, you can use the camera on your phone, but why do that when for a few hundred bucks you can get really good results. For instance, the Zoom Q3HD (see Figure 2.6) is a really handy video camera.
So why the Zoom?
In short, it’s a straightforward, easy camera, and it’s very cheap (currently £189/$299). The quality is good—video quality is HD 1080, and the microphones are great (which you need for recording audio)—and you can also perform basic edits.
With this camera or a similar model, you can record a quick video—maybe a short message or a quick song (for instance, a live performance or an acoustic version of a track)—you can edit the recording to cut off the start and end, and you can upload the video to YouTube. This can be completed within minutes and does not require the involvement of video/audio professionals, nor do you need a studio, so you could, for instance, record a video while you are on the road.
Now, of course, you would get better results by handing the project over to professionals and using gear that costs thousands of dollars, but then you would lose the direct and immediate communication with your fan base (as well as having to wait weeks for other people to complete their work).
In many ways, SMS (text) messages have lost their immediacy due to Twitter (and to an extent, to the other social networks). As well as being “of the moment,” there are certain practical advantages to Twitter (and the other social networks):
Cost. This is the biggest advantage. Twitter does not charge to send messages or receive messages.
Viral spread. Messages can be passed on to a user’s group of contacts. So, for instance, in Twitter, all a user has to do is hit the re-tweet button in her client, and your message will be shared with her contacts.
Platform independence. You don’t need a cell phone to join Twitter; you could, for instance, access your Twitter stream on a desktop computer.
However, SMS messages still have many advantages over Twitter. For instance:
People tend to read every SMS message they receive, but they may not apply the same diligence to their Twitter stream, where messages can get lost in the deluge.
Not everybody is on Twitter.
You can choose who should receive your message when you send an SMS—if you are relying on Twitter, that presupposes that the person to whom the message is being sent is following you.
SMS (text) messages are great if you have a message that is short and urgent, and where the information only has value for a very limited time. For instance, if you have spare tickets for a gig, then you might want to send an SMS message to let fans know about the opportunity (and you would probably want to tweet the information and disseminate through other social networks).
By contrast, if you want to send out a long newsletter with photos, then an SMS/Twitter message is unlikely to be appropriate, irrespective of the nature of your audience.
From a practical perspective, SMS messaging is often easier to manage when you have a smaller list of recipients.
Email is a great way of communicating:
It’s simple.
It’s fast.
You can send one message to many people.
You can send a short message or a long message.
Often people pay more attention to email messages (or take them more seriously—they are less likely to be overlooked than a tweet, for instance).
You can send attachments (such as photos or a form to fill in to apply for tickets).
You can include links to internet sites (for instance, “Click here to see pictures of our gig last night”).
However, email is not a panacea and does present many challenges. In addition, with the rise of social media, it has something of an “old” feel about it. Email definitely has a place—and personally, I like it as a tool—but always think whether it would be better to communicate through the social networks before you send out a mass email campaign.
From a logistical perspective, one of the first challenges with email is keeping addresses up to date. People frequently change their email addresses—they change schools or colleges, they get new jobs, they change internet service providers, or they close an email address because it has been receiving too much spam. To ensure that your message gets through, you need to find a way to ensure that your list of email addresses is kept up to date.
Spam (that is, unsolicited commercial email) is a huge problem for all of us. It clogs our email boxes, and for legitimate mass-email senders (such as a musician trying to keep in touch with his fan base), it presents the problem of how to send multiple emails without them looking like spam. One thing you can do to prevent your emails from looking like spam is to simplify the message. Many spam messages include graphics as attachments (which may be a cover for viruses). If you send a message in plain text (perhaps you could link to graphics on your website), you will find you are less likely to have your message stopped.
There is another reason not to attach graphics: People don’t like them, especially if they have a dial-up internet connection (in other words, not a broadband/ADSL/DSL connection). If you send an unsolicited email that takes 10 minutes to download, you will not be popular.
I’ve already mentioned graphics in the context of spam. Let me now add a few thoughts about the presentation of your email in general. As an electronic medium, you have great flexibility over how you present your email. You can use colors, graphics, different-size fonts, pop-ups, and any number of devices to grab the reader’s attention.
Don’t.
If your message isn’t strong enough to stand on its own, then rewrite the message (or wait until you have something important to say). The beauty of email is that you have the reader’s undivided attention; you don’t need to stand out from the crowd. Adding lots of flashing lights is just going to distract the reader and annoy her. Now, please don’t misconstrue what I’m suggesting here—I’m not implying that you shouldn’t make your message look as attractive as possible. I’m simply suggesting that you should get the message right first and then add in the design elements.
You can do a few things to help the reader:
Put in a sensible subject line so the reader can identify that the email is from you and what it’s about.
Write in short paragraphs. Long paragraphs are always difficult to read—it is even harder to read long paragraphs when the text is displayed on a computer screen.
If the message is longer than a few paragraphs, add headings to break up the text and to show where one subject ends and another one starts.
Make it short. Get to the point quickly and then go away. People are busy and don’t want to listen to your self-indulgent drivel. If you’ve got more to say, then refer the reader to your website (or anywhere else where further information might be available). On the whole, people like short emails but are happy to spend hours browsing websites and “finding” information for themselves.
I’ve talked a lot about technological options, but please don’t forget the more traditional mail services. Although they are not “free” like email and the social networks or cheap like SMS messages, they are in many ways more personal and more effective. Many people still like receiving letters (that aren’t bills) and enjoy receiving tangible goods through the mail.
The real advantage of the mail is that you can send things. For instance, you can send a newsletter, posters, or a DVD. There are several downsides to this, though. First, the goods that you are sending cost money. Second, postage costs—it isn’t free. Third, it takes time to address and stuff envelopes (which again may incur costs if you have to hire someone to complete this task).
The purpose of communication is several-fold, but primarily you are trying to:
Promote something that you are selling.
Foster the relationship between you and your fan base.
Just communicating for the heck of it means you are generating noise. However, any communication must be seen within the context of the medium you are using to communicate. If you are dropping an email just to say hi, then you are probably wasting your fans’ time, but if you tweet to say that you’ve just woken up and the sun is shining, then some people may be interested. But do be cautious—irrespective of the medium, too many “pointless” messages (as perceived by the individual followers), and you’ll start to alienate people.
As a general principle, you should communicate when you’ve got something to say. You’ve got something to say when there is something happening in the future that will interest your fan base: If you have just spent six months in the studio and your new single will be out next month, then that is something to say.
Equally, when you communicate, you should communicate the significance of your news (if that is appropriate for the medium). For instance, if you say, “We signed a record deal,” who cares? However, if you say, “We signed a deal, so the new album will be in shops next week,” then that puts the news in a context that really means something to fans.
When you come to look at the details you need to communicate, there are two approaches. You can give all of the details, or you can give none of the details and just communicate the headline news. Let me explain the difference with a practical example. Suppose you are announcing a gig. The pertinent details here are:
The date of the gig and the time it starts
The location of the gig
The cost of tickets and where they are available
Any special restrictions (for instance, if you’re playing in a club at which people must be 18 or 21 to be admitted)
This is the bare minimum of information that you must communicate. There’s much more you could say, such as whether you’re playing any special songs, whether there will be an opening act, and so on.
Now let’s say you decided to communicate details of this gig by email. You could either send out an email with all of the details (which would be quite long by the time you’ve explained all the purchase options), or you could send out an email that says, “We’re playing a gig in London on November 25th” and include a link to a website for further details.
The advantage of referring people back to your website is that you can give much more information than you could easily give in an email. For instance, you can include a link to a map of the gig’s location. Also, you could include links to purchase tickets, thereby encouraging people to buy them.
Another advantage of this approach is that if you make any changes (for instance, if there is a mistake in the published date of the gig), then you can change the web page very easily. Obviously, if you make a change like that, I would expect you to drop a brief email to say, “Whoops...we made a mistake on our website, and the correct date is now shown.”
By contrast, if you included the wrong date in an email, even if you send a correcting email, there is always the chance that someone will look at the wrong email and end up being disappointed (or embarrassed/angry if he turns up at the venue on the wrong night).
Even if the whole basis of your act is that you swear like troopers, when communicating directly with fans (in other words, when tweeting, sending SMS messages, emails, letters, and so on), I recommend that you remove as much profanity as possible.
I recommend this for several practical reasons:
First, many people, particularly corporations, use profanity filters to block emails that may contain bad language. You may craft the most literate and amusing email, but it will be to no avail if it gets caught in a nasty spam filter.
The other reason for caution in your language is that you don’t know where your communication is going to end up. Emails can get sent to the wrong people, letters and emails can be opened by other members of a family, tweets get re-tweeted, and so on.
You should also use the fans’ language when writing as much as possible. That is to say, you should use terms that they use in a manner that they would understand. You should refine your language in a similar manner, although I caution against using the vernacular if it is going to sound false. We’ve all heard middle-aged people trying to get “hip with the kids.” It never works and it isn’t pretty, so don’t do it!
As a final point (and the irony of this comment is not lost on me), remember that not everyone speaks English as a first language. We’re dealing with music here, so it’s not necessary to use your most flowery prose. (Save that for your lyrics, if you really must.) The simpler and more straightforward you can keep your communications, the better.
The practicalities of how you communicate need some thought, so I’ll address that in the next few sections.
The content of the social networks is almost exclusively communication of one form or another.
Virtually all of the social networks allow you to communicate in a range of ways, usually including through a web browser or through a dedicated client on your phone or tablet. (Look back to Figure 2.5 for an example of a combined Twitter/Facebook client.) Pretty much the only prerequisite for being able to send a message over the social networks is an internet connection, and that is not always necessary if you are delaying the sending of a message (perhaps to ensure that an announcement is not made until, for instance, tickets are available) or if your network accepts SMS messages.
To be able to communicate with people across the social networks, they must know that you have a presence on a specific network—they can then follow you, like you, or do whatever is necessary to ensure that your messages hit their inbox or come into their information flow. Accordingly, you should ensure that:
Your presence on specific social networks is flagged on your website, on your marketing materials, and so on.
You are actually present where you say you are. If it looks like you use social media only when you’ve got something to sell, then people are less likely to follow you/try to interact with you, and you’ll lose the benefit of being able to communicate through these mediums.
There are several ways you can send one SMS message to many people:
Most mobile phones will allow you to send one message to several people. However, this is not really practical when you’re sending a message to more than a few people.
To make life easier, many mobile phones allow you to connect your computer so that you can type your message and manage your mailing list. If your phone has this feature, it will make sending SMS messages much easier; however, it’s still not really practical when you start getting into reasonable numbers.
Perhaps the most practical option is one of the many internet services that allow you to send SMS messages. You type a message (you can use your favorite word processor to check the typing), and then you load the message and a list of the phone numbers to which you want to send the message. You hit a button, and the messages are all sent for you. These services are not particularly cheap. (They tend to cost in the region of 5 to 10 cents per person per message.) However, they are much more convenient than using your cell phone to do all this.
A regular email program (such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird) or an online mail service, such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, will allow you to send emails to more than one recipient. However, this is practical only up to a certain size of mailing list, and beyond a certain point, internet service providers are likely to throttle the amount of email you can send per hour (to prevent spam).
There are specialized mailing programs. These are useful but ultimately limited, since they will be running on one computer, which may not be accessible if you aren’t in “the office” (and if you’re carrying your email list on a laptop, then there’s a different issue of data security).
In my opinion, a better option for sending out bulk emails is to use a specialized service, such as Campaign Monitor (see Figure 2.7; campaignmonitor.com) or MailChimp (mailchimp.com).
Figure 2.7. The Campaign Monitor website, which gives an indication of some of the company’s services.
The advantage of using a specialized service, such as Campaign Monitor or Mail-Chimp, is that you bring power, know-how, and infrastructure online at the flick of a switch. There are, of course, downsides—the most immediate being the cost—but when used sensibly, these services offer excellent value and a range of services.
The main functions you can expect this type of service to offer are:
Integration with your website so that individuals can join (or leave) your mailing list without leaving your website. In addition, these changes can be effected immediately.
Subscription management—in other words, administering the process by which people join and leave your mailing list and maintaining a database of all your contacts.
Sending an email to multiple contacts. When you’re sending an email to a few hundred people, this may not seem like a big deal. When you’re sending an email to thousands or tens of thousands of people, it is quite a tough logistical issue, and you can expect the company to also handle bounced/failed emails (which again present a challenge when you’re sending in large quantities).
In other words, these services offer pretty much everything you need to manage your mailing list.
One other significant advantage of this approach is accessibility: You can access your mailing list (and so contact your following) from anywhere you have access to the internet. This gives you geographic flexibility and is another form of data protection. (If the house burns down, then you’ll still be able to get to your email list—it won’t matter that your hard drive melted.)
I want to reiterate my point about exploiting with integrity.
Think about when you go into a restaurant. You eat a meal, and you are then charged for that meal. The charge is greater than the cost of the ingredients. The charge is greater than the cost of the ingredients plus a share of the cost of running the restaurant (including property and staff costs, as well as taxes). Provided it was a good meal, you are happy to pay the bill and will probably even add a tip (through generosity, because you feel it is deserved, or just because you feel bad about not leaving a tip).
So does the restaurant exploit you?
Good exploit? Yes, probably. They give you something you can’t get at home—a meal without hassle (perhaps better than you could cook yourself), ambience, choice of food, wine maybe. The reasons are many and varied.
Bad exploit? Probably not.
If you like the meal, you will probably return to the restaurant and will probably recommend it to your friends. And here we are reaching the heart of the point I am trying to make. The factor that is going to grow your fan base the fastest is word of mouth—trusted friends telling each other about your music and recommending it because they like what you do. In today’s connected social-media world, word of mouth can spread the message in an instant. Remember, if word of mouth is going to work, then you need to give people something to talk about.
Let’s move on and look in a bit more detail at the mechanics of building and keeping your fan base.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again because it’s important: Any career in music will only succeed if there is someone to buy the product. The people who will buy the product are the fans. You need to cherish and nurture your fans (as people) if you are to survive and have a career in music.
There is a process by which you develop interest into income. There are several stages to this process:
Generate some sort of interest so that people come to you.
Develop the interest so that the individual becomes someone you could regard as a fan.
Persuade the fan to (a) keep coming back, and (b) perhaps spend money.
Ensure that the fan is happy about spending money and keeps visiting your money-making activities on a regular basis.
Figure 2.8 shows that conversion process and illustrates how a new fan can then bring in more fans by word of mouth.
Figure 2.8. Once you have drawn in your potential fans, it is crucial that you keep their interest and create a situation where they want to spend money (on you).
As soon as you start making some noise (figuratively), you will get interest. Your key challenge is to convert that interest into a fan base and to convert that fan base into an income stream. It would be a rather foolish act to try to raise your public profile without being able to capitalize on the interest.
In this section, I want to look at how you can proactively manage that conversion process.
People are likely to come to you through one of two routes:
Personal recommendation. Direct word of mouth from someone who could already be regarded as a fan.
Chance. People may come across you by chance if they hear a track on the radio, see an interview with you in a magazine, find a reference to you from one of their social-media contacts, or come across you while browsing the internet (and in this category, I’m including finding you on the video-sharing sites, such as YouTube).
If you are really lucky—really, really lucky—then people will hear some of your music, will love it, and will want to buy it. That’s great: It provides you with income, as long as the new potential fan can find out where to buy the product. Your challenge then is to make sure that person becomes a true fan and keeps consuming your output/spending money on your products.
However, you may not always be that lucky. Many people won’t hear your music or will want to hear more before they decide whether they like you. Whenever somebody wants to know more about an artist, the most logical place to look for information is a website. This could be your own website or on YouTube (or something similar). As I’ll talk about later in this part of the book, realistically, if you don’t have a web presence, then it is very difficult for potential fans to decide whether they like you. And if they can’t find a way to like you, then you won’t be able to convert them into a source of income.
It may feel great when you look at your website statistics to see that thousands of people have been hitting your site, but however good this may feel, it means nothing. It means nothing because you don’t know who these people are, and they are not spending money on you.
To take a significant step forward, you will need to get these people to tell you how you can contact them. Once you can contact them, then you can enter into a relationship with them and start talking about what you’re doing. If they stay interested, then they’ll check out what you’re up to, and you can start generating income.
There are a number of ways that people will allow you to contact them:
By giving you their email address (usually by joining your mailing list)
Through social media (by liking or following you, or something similar)
Through some sort of internet forum
It’s much easier—and far less risky from their perspective—for people to follow you through the social-media channels. For instance, you only have to click the Follow button on Twitter to follow someone. If you don’t like what they are saying, or if they bore you, then you can click the Unfollow button, and that’s it—end of relationship.
In this case, the follower has the power—she determines whether the relationship continues. Once the relationship has ended, there is no easy way for you to contact that person, and indeed, she can block you and report inappropriate activity on your part if she wants.
This is very different from the situation with email, where data (the email address) is being disclosed to you. Although there is legislation in much of the world about how data is treated, and theoretically email addresses should be deleted if the owner so requests, we all know that this doesn’t always happen. While I am sure you would have honorable intentions about how data is treated, and you may back these intentions with actions, that doesn’t stop people from being cautious about giving out their details.
If you are going to try to capture email data—and because direct email is such a powerful communication medium, I suggest you do—then be aware that most people first will want to see how they can unsubscribe, and second will want some sort of reassurance in the form of a privacy policy before they give out their email address. And even then, many people will remain skeptical. Your privacy policy may be explicit (in the form of “Click here to see our privacy policy”) or implicit, with a note to the effect that “We hate spam as much as you do and will never share your email address with anyone.”
So what else might persuade someone to give you his email address (or other contact details)?
If you ask nicely, then I’m sure some people will be happy to give you their email address. However, I would be a bit suspicious of anyone who asked for my email address and didn’t give me a reason why. If you ask nicely and explain what you’re going to do with the email address, then I think you’ll get much better results.
For instance, if you say something to the effect of, “Please let us have your email address so we can keep in touch with you and let you know about our gigs and releases,” then you may get more favorable results.
Many people aren’t going to want to give you an email address unless they feel they are really getting something in return. For these people, you need to be more subtle in your approach. Instead of simply asking for an email address, you can give access to a password-protected area of your website, perhaps by encouraging people to sign up for a virtual “backstage pass” or something else suitably musical (but perhaps slightly less corny).
You will also find that there are some people who simply will not give you their email address or any other personal details. On the whole, these people are less likely to become fans with whom you can develop a relationship. However, you may still be able to reach these people in other ways (such as through social media).
So now you’ve got the potential fans interested. They may even think of themselves as being fans. So how do you get them to spend money?
You don’t. It just happens.
Now before I get more cryptic, let’s look at the two ways income will flow from your fan base to you.
The first way is if your fan base buys things, if you sell—directly or through a retail outlet—goods such as CDs, downloads, DVDs, T-shirts, gig tickets, and so on.
The second way is through advertising.
Let’s look at these in turn.
There’s no need to beg fans to spend money on you.
Your role is to provide the right product for your fans to buy. Let them know what they can buy, and—provided they want to—they will buy. Remember, we’re exploiting fans in a good way, not a bad way. You’re a musician, not a secondhand car dealer.
Sometimes the buying happens quickly, and sometimes it happens slowly. Sometimes you don’t realize it has happened. If your songs are available from iTunes, then you won’t know the identity of the purchaser. Even if the only place where any of your products can be purchased is your website, you may not know that you have converted someone into a purchase—a friend could have bought his ticket for a gig or given him a CD as a present.
The thought of advertising may be quite uncomfortable for you.
However, it is a reality of commerce today and is one of the reasons why so many of the services that support our online lives are “free.”
Rightly or wrongly, many people are of the view that music should be free. They hear music on the radio, and from their perspective it is free (even if it’s not because someone else is paying—usually an advertiser). Once the principle of music-for-free has been established by the radio (and other outlets), people then have a hard time figuring out why they should, for instance, pay for a download. After all, it’s digital, so there’s no cost, right?
And for people who don’t want to pay you for your music, you can still earn money through advertising.
Beyond that, the more you look, the more you will see that there is advertising put up against a lot of content. Someone somewhere is often making money on the basis of your work, so why shouldn’t the person making the money be you?
Advertising also has some other real benefits:
New acts can generate income at a much earlier stage in their career by giving away their music and earning advertising revenue.
Fans can discover and consume new music for free, but the artist can still receive some income.
Acts can use their music for publicity purposes and generate income.
Perhaps the most obvious example of a situation where you can generate income from advertising is YouTube (see Figure 2.9). If you join the YouTube Partner Program (which does require a certain level of content/traffic before you are allowed in), then you can share the advertising revenues.
Figure 2.9. Advertising on YouTube. As you can see, there is an advertisement over the video and another to the right of the video. Someone is making money—if you created the video, why shouldn’t you be making money?
To make serious money with advertising, your content needs to be consumed a lot so that a lot of advertisements can be displayed. More consumption equates to more opportunities to show advertisements. From an income perspective, there is little difference between having your content consumed on many occasions by a smaller number of people and having it consumed by a large number of people once or twice.
While YouTube is a great example of how you can generate advertising revenue, as your fan base expands, you will find many other ways to generate advertising-related income. This could include carrying advertisements, endorsements, and so on.
Let’s assume everything has gone according to plan, you are building your fan base, and your fans are consuming content and are happy to spend money with you.
Great! Congratulations.
You now know how hard it can be to start building a fan base. That hard work should never cease; you will always want new fans. However, there is one thing easier than trying to find a new fan and converting that person into someone who will generate income—keeping your existing fans.
Existing fans know and like you. Existing fans will have spent money with you and will be happy to spend more money with you. Whenever you release a new product, you can be sure that many of your existing fans will buy it at the earliest opportunity (or will provide opportunities to generate advertising-related income). For these reasons, existing fans should be your highest priority.
In many ways, you don’t need to do anything out of the ordinary to keep these existing fans happy. However, you should keep them happy, and there are two simple things that you can do to ensure this:
Come up with new products. Come up with new tracks, new videos, new CDs, new DVDs, new posters, new merchandise, and so on. You get the idea. Fans want to know that you are thinking of them and working to create new stuff for them.
Interact with your fans. When you interact with your fans, they feel as if you care, and in addition to buying your product, they will continue to work as your sales force and ambassadors.
The other thing you need to do is not upset your fans. This issue is discussed later in this chapter, in the “Losing Fans” section.
Later, I will look at more of the options for publicity. For the moment, I want to look at the main places where you can get in touch directly with potential fans.
I’ve talked a bit about growing the fan base. Because it is such an important factor in your career, I want to look at some specific ways you can find your fans and grow your fan base. This really is one area where you have to be very proactive—if you’re not prepared to be proactive here, then you are unlikely to have a career.
There are two things to remember when looking at the number of your fans:
The numbers will not grow in a linear manner. Some weeks you will pick up many new fans, and others you will pick up only a few fans. You will probably find that you pick up more new fans when you make a noise (or shortly thereafter) and fewer new fans during your quiet periods. However, this will not always be the case.
When you are relying on word of mouth, the increase in numbers can be startling. At some times you may even see exponential growth in the number of your fans (where one person tells two people, those two people each tell two people, making four new people, then those four people each tell two people, making eight people, and those eight people each tell two people, and so on—see Figures 2.10 and 2.11). However, exponential growth is ultimately unsustainable (you will eventually run out of people to tell) and doesn’t reflect human nature, where you will usually find one person telling lots of people and many people not passing on the word. More realistically, the longer you keep a fan, the more people he will introduce to you.
Figure 2.10. If you can reach out to two people, who each talk to two people, who each tell two people about you (and so on), then your number of contacts will grow rapidly.
Figure 2.11. As Figure 2.10 shows, your total number of contacts will grow more swiftly as you have more people finding new contacts for you.
To connect with a potential audience, you need to find the place where people who could make up your audience go (whether physically or metaphorically). You then need to go there. This destination could include:
Social networks
Websites
Magazines/fanzines
Radio shows, TV shows, internet sites
Gig venues
To a certain extent, finding fans is a numbers game—the more people you approach, the more people you are likely to find. However, you should perhaps be a bit discriminating. For instance, if you’re a thrash metal band, maybe your grandmother’s friends would not be the best source of new fans. Then again, your grandmother’s friends may have their own grandchildren who would like your music. You never know...
Anyway, the following sections discuss a few of the places to start looking for fans. Remember, these people are of no use to you until you know how to contact them, so get ready to start collecting email addresses.
The obvious place to start your quest for new fans is with your family and friends. Your friends may be happy to come and support you at gigs, but they are unlikely to want to buy every piece of merchandise you have. In fact, many will expect you to give them stuff for free in exchange for their support. However, your friends will have friends (and those friends will have friends). Use word of mouth, and you will start to grow your numbers.
Social networks are, of course, a place to find new fans. There are many ways to find fans this way—for instance, many networks have affinity groups (people interested in similar topics). Equally, you can find people who like music that might be similar to yours. (On most networks, people tell you what they like and don’t; they will give you a great start.) By beginning a dialogue with people who like music similar to yours, you can find potential new fans.
But perhaps the best way to find new fans through the social networks is simply by being there—create great music, let your fans spread the word (even if you only have a small number of fans), and be ready to interact with new people as they come along.
I’ve mentioned your website several times and will discuss it in greater detail in the next chapter.
Gigs are an excellent place to find new people, but gig venues (which may be dark, sweaty rooms) are often not great places to collect contact details. However, because gigs present such a great opportunity to reach new people, you should try.
It may not be practical to get people to join your email mailing list at a gig. However, you may persuade them to join your social-media network. (For instance, if they have a phone with them, they may be able to follow you on Twitter—you might even tweet from stage to encourage them to sign up.)
It’s easy to see a gig but then to forget to go to the band’s website and sign up for the mailing list, so you should do whatever you can to encourage people to follow up. As one example, if you take pictures at a gig, you can put them on one of the photo-sharing sites (such as Flickr; flickr.com). If you tell people their picture will be up tomorrow morning, that will encourage them to take a look and hopefully will also provide a conduit to searching out more information about you.
A great way to grow a fan base with gigs is to swap gigs with another act: You play a hometown gig, and they act as support, and they play a hometown gig with you acting as support. Of course, it helps if you are from different geographic locations (even different sides of the same city). If the other act is as well organized as you, it will also have its own contacts (in a combination of an email list, social media contacts, and so on), so each act can engage its own fan base and direct its fans to the other act’s web presence.
Press and broadcasting covers a very wide range of media, including radio (terrestrial, satellite, and internet), television (in all its forms and variants, such as video podcasting, and we should include video-sharing sites too), and newspapers and magazines (real and online).
You would be crazy to ignore these outlets. However, as a means to increase your fan base (and increase numbers on your mailing list), the mainstream press and broadcasting are fairly blunt instruments. Think about radio, for instance. Very often you don’t know whose song is being played. Even if someone hears you and likes what they hear, you have to hope that your name is given out clearly and that the listener then writes down the name and searches you out on the internet. This may happen (especially if your record is played several times on the radio); however, you are more likely to find that this is a tough way to create a fan base.
Before I move on from the media, I want to mention blogs and fanzines briefly. It is easy to look disparagingly at fanzines because they are often “amateur” productions. However, fanzines are often very closely aligned to their target audience, so if you find one that covers your niche, you will find a very quick way to access a large potential audience. This audience is likely to be very engaged with and very passionate about their music.
Added to this, fanzines are usually run by people with a genuine passion for music, who are more interested in finding something cool and including it in their magazine than they are in chasing the commercial imperative.
When you tour (if you tour), it is well worth taking the time to meet as many fanzine editors as possible, because they will introduce you to many fans.
There is a similar principle with blogs. Although the audience for any one blog may seem small, blogs offer several advantages, the main one being that you are connecting to a community of people with a very specific interest. This highly targeted nature of blogs makes them well worth seeking out as a means of finding new fans.
There are bad things in this world. One bad thing is losing fans, as Figure 2.12 shows.
Figure 2.12. Take a look at these formulas. Provided you can increase your fan base faster than you lose your fans, you can increase your earnings from your fans. However, if you lose fans at a higher rate than you gain fans, then you are likely to see your income start to fall.
You usually will lose fans for one of two reasons:
Boredom. It could be that your act has grown stale, or it could be that the fans’ tastes have changed.
Active dislike. If you do something really stupid, it is quite possible to change devoted fans into a well-motivated group of upset individuals who could do serious damage to your career.
All lost fans usually are lost forever. The former group (that is, the bored fans) may come back to you at a later stage, but this is unlikely. However, those who have chosen to actively dislike you are almost always lost forever, as well as being vocal in their criticism of you. Clearly, this vocal criticism will not help in your efforts to expand your remaining fan base.
We’ll look at the boredom factor later in the book. For the moment, I want to talk about some of the things that will alienate your fan base and cause the people who have provided your income to actively dislike you.
There are several bad things you can do with email (and SMS) contacts. The first time you use your mailing list to do one of the following things is when you will instantly lose fans (and find out how quickly they tell their friends about your appalling behavior—you really will see the social networks in action):
Sell your mailing list, especially if you sell it to an organization that supports, for instance, the clubbing to death of baby seals. In this case, you would lose fans for two reasons: first for selling the list, and second for being associated with something that most of your fans are likely to regard as very uncool.
Spam your mailing list, which in this context means bombarding your mailing list with unsolicited emails. You should also be careful if you have several email addresses for one person (assuming you can notice this), because people tend to get annoyed if you send an email more than once (even if it’s their fault that you have multiple email addresses on file for them).
Use the mailing list to advertise products that are not your own. For instance, if you start sending advertisements for power tools, then your fan base is likely to become disgruntled.
This, of course, is not the end of the list, and as you would expect, there are a lot of other ways you can upset people (especially through social media).
Remember, we live in a high-tech world, and most people are pretty tech savvy. They instinctively realize when they’re being ripped off or used. Some people have disposable email addresses to check where spam and the like originates, so if you start abusing the trust people have put in you by giving you their email address, then you are likely to be found out and exposed very quickly.
I also suspect that if any of your fans think you have undertaken any of these activities (even if you have not), the results will be equally disastrous.
I will talk about website design in the next chapter, but before we get there, I want to mention a few things that will alienate your fans (and your possible fans).
Associate links (for instance, to Amazon) on your website are fine within reason. If you have a link so that someone can purchase one of your products at Amazon, it will not be a problem. If you are linking to a related product (for instance, if you are a Celtic band placing links to books about the origins and history of Celtic music), I’m sure no one will object. However, if your site is linking to all sorts of (apparently) unrelated products, and it just looks like a bad imitation of Amazon, then people are likely to distrust your motives and feel alienated.
I talked about advertising earlier in this chapter. It is a really tricky issue, and one where you must know your audience.
Some sites carry advertisements placed around their content. You may be able to get away with this form of advertising, but to my mind this is a truly naff thing to do and is likely to turn people off. You really must have a good reason to convince your fan base that advertisements are justified. This, along with other forms of rampant commercialism, is likely to alienate many people.
You can also alienate your fan base through your actions (and sometimes inactions). For instance:
If you are accused (or convicted) of a crime, your image will be tarnished. Whether the tarnishing will turn off fans depends on the crime, the level of reporting, and the nature of your fan base. For instance, most crimes of violence are likely to be unpopular with your fan base (unless you’re a gangsta rapper, in which case your fans may be somewhat more likely to accept criminal behavior on your part). On the other hand, drugs may not be a problem unless you have a squeaky-clean image or a young fan base.
Selling out, as in giving up on your principles in return for money, will cast you in a bad light with your fans. Try not to do it or allow the perception that you have sold out to arise.
Fans want to interact on a human level. If you are from the “treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen” school, then you may have difficulty with long-term relationships (with your fans and your partners).
There are many other ways you can upset your fans. Before you take any actions, take a moment to consider your fans’ possible reactions and whether there will be any adverse consequences for your career. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t do anything edgy or dangerous—just that you should consider the implications before you throw away your career.
So far this book has assumed that you are a musician who will have (or will be able to have) a direct relationship with your fan base (provided you can just get motivated). However, there are many musicians for whom this relationship is not practical, so they reach their audience through an intermediary.
There are many musicians in this situation, for instance:
Composers and songwriters
DJs, MCs, and beat creators
For these people, there are two options: Carry on working through an intermediary (between you and the paying public) or find another way to get your music directly to the public.
Before we look at the direct options, think for a moment about what happens if you don’t have a direct relationship with a fan base—let’s take the example of a songwriter. If a songwriter writes a song, then before the song can reach an audience, the songwriter (or the songwriter’s publisher) has to find an artist to record the song.
This effectively puts the songwriter’s income at the mercy of the artist (and the artist’s fan base). If the artist makes a poor recording of the song and/or has a small fan base, then the songwriter will not see very high royalties. Now, of course, the counterarguments are that the songwriter can still place the song with another artist, and the artist can always make a great recording. Both of these options can be lucrative for the songwriter.
However, the music is being consumed because of the other artist—not because of the songwriter. With a few exceptions, people don’t buy songs because of the songwriter’s brand—they buy because of the artist’s brand. By using an intermediary (in this case, a publisher and then a recording artist, who in turn may be dependent on managers, record companies, and so on), the songwriter is ceding control over his income and his career to a whole range of other people who won’t suffer the same (financial) consequences that the songwriter will suffer if the song doesn’t generate income.
If you want to take control—take responsibility—for your earnings, then the better option will always be to find a way to form a direct relationship with a source of income. In other words, create a product that can be marketed and build a community to which you can sell that product. In short, put yourself in the same situation as performing musicians and start community building.
This section looks at some of the options to do that.
To generate your own independent flows of income, the non-performing musician will need to start to create products.
It’s not enough to simply create products, but it’s the place from which to start. Without something tangible, there are no possibilities for generating independent income.
Once you can create products, then you need to build and sustain a community. Simply releasing products is not the answer. Your approach and attitude to your community will determine the success of your products. You need to work as hard—in other words, you need to spend as much time—on building and maintaining a community as performing musicians do. Getting out and gigging generates income, but it also generates publicity and helps to create, foster, and grow a community. Unless you are spending equivalent amounts of time building your community, you are unlikely to see similar results.
So what products should the non-performing musician create? There are several obvious choices:
The first creation should be a song (or other piece of music). Hopefully, this is logical... However, it’s important to do more than simply write a song—a complete release-ready track needs to be created. (In other words, the song needs to be written, recorded, produced, mastered, and so on, so that it is at a professional level—a demo recording does not constitute a product around which you can start to build a community.)
The next logical step is for some sort of video. Clearly, if you’re a non-performing artist, creating a video may pose a challenge (not least of all, a financial challenge). However, in our current world, where YouTube is so powerful—and is a potential source of income—you’re going to have to be creative and find a way to create videos.
Once you have some traction with a growing fan base, then you can think about merchandising. However, you need to start building your interest around musical productions first.
Once you have products, then you can start converting them into income:
Audio tracks can be sold as downloads (individually or as part of an album). The tracks can also be sold as CDs.
Videos can be used for publicity and to generate advertising income. Equally, a collection of videos could be sold as a DVD.
Non-performing musicians will always be at a disadvantage to performing musicians when it comes to building a fan base (and remember, no fan base = no career), so one possible avenue for the non-performing musician would be to form a band, create a show, and go in search of an audience.
Let’s take the example of how this could apply to a songwriter who wants to remain as a non-performing musician. From a practical perspective, the songwriter would need to be both songwriter and (at least initially) the manager. With this dual role, the first tasks the songwriter would need to complete are:
Writing songs for the band.
Finding musicians.
Teaching the musicians the songs and getting the act into shape.
Developing the products that can be sold or monetized (primarily audio recordings, videos, and limited merchandising in the first instance).
Finding ways to reach out to the audience—finding the fan base and arranging gigs.
Clearly, this is not going to be a solution for a quick buck—this option represents a huge amount of work and a large time investment, where the songwriter will be spending the time doing things other than writing songs. However, the flip side is that it develops a community around the songwriter’s music, and to a certain extent, the personalities of the band are less significant.
If the notion of years of gigging does not appeal to you, remember that just because you formed the band, that doesn’t mean you have to join it. However, if you’re not going to be a member of the band, then you need to consider some very practical issues.
For instance, if you are not present (either in your role as manager or as a member of the band) at a gig, then you need to have someone you can trust to collect the money and look after the arrangements (such as liaising with the promoter, keeping the band in line so they don’t get drunk before the show, and so on). You could easily reach a situation where you have the same logistical concerns that a major band has for a tour (albeit on a smaller scale) and all you’re doing is playing a few bars and clubs. You could then find that the band doesn’t want to play your material and walks.
As I say, this could be quite a difficult situation. It could also take a considerable financial investment. However, do you like the alternatives: no career or a career that is at the mercy of other people?
In many ways this option is not new—there have been production companies around for years. For some production companies, the line between production and management is sometimes a fine one. Often, the production company will start as the de facto manager and will get a more experienced manager involved later.
The twist here is that instead of creating an act and licensing them through a record label, you would take responsibility for building and managing the fan base. In essence, the fan base would be your property to exploit. So, for instance, once you have a first act up and running, you could then establish a second act and use the same fan base to market that second act. For the songwriter, this has the advantage that she can create more than one act to perform her material. This can significantly improve the income and her exposure.
The purpose of publicity is to generate interest, not sales.
Earlier in this chapter, I discussed the process for converting interest into fans, fans into sales, and sales into a stream of income. Publicity means nothing if it is wasted on interesting people who will not convert—you need to get money-spending punters, or at least people who will consume your output from advertising-backed hubs.
Publicity takes a lot of time and can cost a lot of money. If your publicity isn’t going to reach people who you can (ultimately) convert into a stream of income, then don’t bother with the publicity—you will be much better served by growing your fan base organically.
Publicity can be categorized under two very loose headings:
Active publicity. Reaching out to people to try to get them interested.
Passive publicity. Publicity that “just happens” without your intervention.
Figure 2.13 gives some examples of active and passive publicity.
For the remainder of this chapter, I am going to focus on active publicity. In the next chapter, I will look at passive publicity, which in certain instances can be far more valuable than active publicity.
Active publicity can take many forms, but in essence it requires you to take action in order to persuade someone to expose you (and your music) to his public. This could be action that you take to get yourself into a newspaper, get your track played on the radio, or see your video played on TV.
In short, we’re looking at three things here:
Advertising—paying someone to mention your product.
Getting your music played or reviewed in any media channels.
Publicity—creating stories that can be featured in the media. These stories can range from publicity stunts to human-interest stories.
Many people have a mistaken notion that if they sign with a record company, then that label will make them a star. This is untrue. The label will expect and will push the artist to do his or her own publicity—for instance, if you are a band, the label will expect you to tour.
The label may help focus the publicity activities by bringing in public-relations people, but ultimately all the label can do is to push an artist to do what the artist needs to do.
However, it is very easy to encourage artists to connect with their fan base in a disconnected way. Marketing can be seen as a one-way flow—from the artist to the fan—and not as a two-way communication. Equally, the wider aim—converting a relationship into a marriage—can often be forgotten when publicity professionals are involved, because these people will often be remunerated according to short-term goals (for instance, a track that needs to be publicized).
You should be aiming to foster natural, organic growth, so in many ways this form of active publicity is an anathema and a waste of resources. Although I would never suggest that you ignore any broad-based form of publicity, I think you will find that trying to connect directly with people will be more effective in the long term.
There are three main areas of active publicity that you are likely to pursue: radio, TV, the press (generally meaning the print press), and the internet. However, publicity through traditional radio, TV, and press is becoming less effective for several reasons:
The markets are stagnant.
Consumer spending on TV is increasing only slowly, and the 16-to-24 age group watches less television, both in terms of the amount of television that this age group has historically watched and in relation to other age groups.
Consumer spending on radio services is fairly static.
The markets are fragmenting—with many more services available, the audience is being spread more thinly.
People are increasingly getting their information from other sources (which primarily means the internet).
There are many places where you can advertise, including radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, and the internet.
In many cases if you want to start placing advertisements, then you are going to have to deal with advertising people. These people are the enemy: They will imply that they can bring you the world. They will not, but they will charge you a lot of money.
The statistics that advertising people can produce will suggest how effective each of the media outlets is at reaching your target audience. So for instance, they will be able to say that Show A on Radio Station B has an audience of C million people, and D% of those people are in the 18-to-45 age group.
Now, consider a conversation with your bank manager if you want to borrow money. What is going to impress her more—several million people hearing your advertisement on the radio or a known number of fans who have purchased your product and who have therefore generated a known amount of income?
In short, advertising people will not be able to deliver any measurable results. You will not be able to prove that their actions have increased your sales. However, they are likely to have a positive effect.
One area where a lot of money is spent is TV advertising. Many record companies will heavily advertise products where they know there is an audience and where past experience has suggested that they will recoup their advertising expenditure. However, as television becomes less significant for the younger age groups, it remains to be seen whether TV advertising will be the way that ensures music is sold in the future. And of course, for a regular musician, the budgets for TV advertising will be ludicrously high.
One place where advertising budgets can be kept to sensible levels (even to the level of a few cents per day) is the online advertising market. This is also one place where you may not need to deal with advertising people, which is an added bonus.
There are many forms of online advertising, but some of the most frequently used advertising is offered by the search engines (in particular, Google and Microsoft’s Bing). This form of advertising and the options that are available are constantly changing, but in broad terms, two types of advertising are available:
Search advertising
Display advertising
If you search on Google or Bing, above and to the right of your search results, you will see advertisements. If you’ve ever clicked on one of these ads, then you’ll understand how effective this form of advertising can be.
The way these advertisements work is by targeting keywords. The advertiser pays to have their ad displayed whenever a certain keyword is searched for.
The ranking of each ad and the cost is determined by a bidding process. All advertisers who want to have their ad displayed against a certain search term bid. The highest bidder gets their ad displayed in the number-one slot, the second highest in the second slot, and so on.
The cost of displaying the ad is (generally) the amount bid by the next-highest bidder, plus a small amount. However, the advertiser is not charged unless someone clicks on the ad. In other words, there’s no cost to display an ad, but there is a cost if someone clicks through to your site, so you only pay if the ad “works.”
You can control the cost of advertising in two ways:
First, by limiting the maximum bid. This will have implications for where an ad is ranked if it is served.
Second, by setting a daily budget—once the daily budget has been spent, no further advertisements will be served. Therefore, the daily budget has implications for how many times an ad will be served.
For the musician, online advertising offers options to reach many people. However, the cost of advertisements when compared to the revenue generated may be disproportionate. You may need 10 people to click on an ad before you sell a download. If you make, say, 70 cents by selling a download, then if (as will be almost certain) you pay more than 7 cents for each click, you may not immediately profit from advertising. That being said, if you initiate a relationship following an advertisement, then the benefit could be immeasurable in financial terms.
There are several key advantages to advertising in this manner:
You can reach people you may not be able to reach in any other way.
You can target your audience (in terms of age, geography, as well as interest).
You can find people in unusual ways. For instance, you could use the name of a similar act as a search term so your new fan finds you by accident when looking for that other act.
Display advertisements are shown around websites and blogs. These ads can be text-based or have graphics, and they can be for regular-sized (full-screen) websites or sites that display on a small-sized screen (such as a smartphone screen).
Like search-based ads, these ads are placed on websites that have an affinity with the terms you specify. And again, you can bid for placement and only pay if the ad is clicked.
However, there is usually a further payment option. Instead of cost-per-click payment, you can pay on what is called a CPM (cost-per-thousand) basis, where you pay for your ad to be served and are charged irrespective of whether the ad is clicked. The advantage to this basis is that the cost of having the ad served may be lower. Clearly, the disadvantage is that you may spend a lot of money and not receive any clicks.
There are many options around this form of advertising—for instance, you can specify sites where you want your ad displayed (and equally, you can specify sites where you do not want your ad displayed). The market is very dynamic and changes rapidly, so do take a while to investigate the very latest options if this is of interest to you.
A similar form of display advertising that might be interesting to musicians may be available by buying advertising space directly on a website. If a blog or website is particularly popular with a certain demographic/interest group that chimes with your potential audience, then you may want to investigate the cost of advertising on that site.
The line between advertising and promotion is a fine one. To make the distinction, what I mean by “promotion” is publicity work, generally for a specific project. For instance, if you have a track to promote, then you might perform that song on as many television programs as possible, or if you have an album to promote, you might perform some live gigs (or undertake a tour).
Promotion is expensive; however, it is not necessarily as expensive as advertising. It may also be more effective than advertising.
One thing that promotion may do is give you an opportunity to connect with your fan base (as well as the chance to find new fans). Clearly, you should always remember what you are promoting. However, why not use the opportunity to do something a bit special?
For instance, if you are promoting your new single and you are doing a radio interview, then why not take an acoustic guitar and perform the song live (with just a voice and a guitar)? You may not always be able to do this, but it will give you the opportunity to connect with people and to prove that you are a real performer who loves what you do.
And if you are going to perform an acoustic version of a song, then why not take your video camera and upload the video to YouTube to generate some further publicity and possible income?
As you may have gathered, I’m fairly skeptical of the benefits of advertising. My skepticism is not because I think you won’t get results, but because in a lot of cases I don’t believe you get the results you pay for, unless those results are to raise your profile with people who will never buy your product.
I don’t want to damn the whole of the marketing industry. There is one piece of marketing that I think can be very useful and that I want to single out. If you have an experienced PR person at your disposal (who may work for a record company or for an agency), that person can be very helpful. The kind of PR person you should be looking for must have lots of contacts whom he can call.
With this route, you will be getting lots of well-placed publicity, and you will be controlling the message to a much greater extent. Just taking any publicity you can get leaves you prey to whims of journalists trying to make a name for themselves.