Transcript for MTG #23 – New Marketing For Musicians
Intro: Welcome to the brand new world of digital marketing consumer-generated media and no control PR. The rules of engagement are no longer black and white. You need to change, to evolve, to manage the gray, and how do you do that? You let C.C. Chapman help you.
C.C. Chapman: Well, hey everybody. Welcome to Managing the Gray #23. I am C.C. Chapman coming to you live from Metro West Boston. Managing the Gray? What is that? Well, Managing the Gray is my podcast, a marketing podcast for the new media professionals as I like to term it. We talk about everything possible out there in the social mediascape; new marketing, consumer-generated content, viral, Second Life, blogging, podcasting. You name it, we talk about it.
When I first started this show — this is episode number 23. When I started it, one of the things I wanted to do every so often was do very specialized podcast that focused on a particular individual, a genre, a market space, a vertical whatever you want to call it dependent. Today, I got an audio comment that I said, “You know what, it’s time to do one of these,” especially since I have not done one yet. One minute we would focus on filmmaking and the next we are focusing on music or financial or small business. If you have got an idea for one, I would love to hear from you, managingthegray@gmail.com. Let me know what you think would make for a great topic because I would love to focus on the areas that you want to hear about. I just got an email probably a couple of minutes ago talking about from a small video production company. I could talk a lot about that area because it is something I know a lot about.
Well, today we are focusing on music because music is my first passion. It is something I absolutely love. If you are not familiar, I also do two other podcasts over at accidenthash.com and the u-turncafe.com, both of which are music podcasts. It is what I am known for by the podcasting community at large until recently and now I got into marketing too. So, today we are going to focus on musicians and what they should be doing in the new marketing space. Now, I do not want to step on anybody’s toes because I have a really good friend named Jay, Jay Moonah, who does a podcast called Online Music Marketing. I have got to be honest, I am subscribed, I have all 15 episodes downloaded and I have not listened to a single one of them because I am so behind in all my podcast listening. Check him out at onlinemusicmarketing.com. I know he will appreciate the love and check it out because all he does is focus on this. If you are a musician and you are looking for a podcast on a regular basis that focuses on that, check this out.
These are my ideas. I have not listened to his, so I am not stealing any of his ideas. I love Jay, Jay is a good guy. He plays in a band called Uncle Seth, which if you want to check him out, musicface.com/uncleseth. All of these will be in the show notes over managingthegray.com of course.
So, you are an artist. Whether you are a soloist, a band, and whatever genre you are, there are some things you can do in the new marketing space you can really embrace and do. A lot of these things would hold true for businesses or individuals, but I am going to focus on the musician angle.
So, what are you going to do first? You have to have a domain name. Go buy the domain name. It does not matter where you buy it from. There are a lot of different services you can buy them from. Search the web, you will find places, GoDaddy of course I have a personal affiliation with my other shows. DirectNIC, I have used for years. There are probably a million other ones. Register.com, I do not know who owns them now, but anyway, you have got to own a domain name. You cannot be going around — and I am sorry, you cannot be going around going, “Go to MySpace.” I saw some bands are going, “Go to myspace.com/” and then the name of the band. Do not do that. Domain names are such a simple thing and you are going to want to own them. Yes, you might change band names. Well, let us face it. You can get domain names for under ten bucks now. That is cheaper than a beer in most concerts. So, take the moment, spend the money, invest in your brand. Buy the domain name.
Now, I know musicians, you probably do not have a lot of money. That is okay, you do not have to build a website behind it. You should when you are ready build a website, but if you cannot, one of the other things I am going to tell you is you should have web presence on every one of the free services out there. Things like MySpace. Facebook now, we will get to that in a minute. All these — Sonic Bids, Pure Volume; they allow you to build web presence on them. If you want a MySpace site, it is great. It will not cost you a dime. It is free to set it up. Own a domain name and every service out there you are going to register it to, will let you do something called forwarding or redirecting where you can change that, you know, bandx.com and redirect it to a MySpace page. So, you go to your bandname.com or dot.org or dot.net or whatever you want to do, dot.ca, and it will bounce over to your MySpace page. You do not have to pay for the web hosting, but please go get that domain name. All right? Please, please, please, please do it. It is the most important thing you could do because it is going to stay with you. You are going to want to own that rather than some other band or some other individual, so go buy that.
Then set up a MySpace page. MySpace of course is really hot right now, so is Facebook. If you are not familiar with Facebook, Facebook was and is, it was MySpace geared specifically towards college students. For the longest time, until real recently, you could not get into Facebook unless you had “.edu” email address. It was a very sweet spot market and it was not oversaturated with marketers and other people. It was really interesting and organic, kids were posting all kinds of things and it has kind of opened up and kind of shifted a little bit, but you can create groups in there and everything. It is a great area if you are targeting college students. Get your fans to do stuff for you. Get them to create a group for you. I saw this the other day with the band Kill the Alarm. They invited me during their Kill the Alarm group in Facebook. I thought there is a great idea because college students will post photos when they go to your shows. They will post comments on new songs. They will spread the love for you, which is the best thing you can do with your band whether you are an individual — see how this all crosses over? It does not matter but I am focusing on musicians. You do not have a lot of money, so you want people to help you spread the word about you.
MySpace. MySpace does some other things. Make sure you sign up as a musician, make sure you are signing up as a band and not an individual because you get added bonus things. The biggest thing being you can upload music to it. Uploading music is very cool on MySpace because all of a sudden people — I am going to talk about this in a minute in detail, but more people, you know, they are, “Oh, I don’t wanna download.” You do not have to. MySpace allows you to upload the tune and people can just stream it. They can also imbed it in their profiles, but people cannot download it. So, you are protected in that if you are worried about that, which you should not be and that will be another conversation in a minute. MySpace also has calendar of events so you can put up your gigs where you are playing and people get notified if they subscribe to you. MySpace also gives you a blog for free. I am not trying to focus on MySpace alone, but what I am trying to stress to you is the fact that here is a tool that for free you can basically get everything you need to get going on the web as a musician. For free, that is the key part. The nice thing now is MySpace blogs is that they get picked up by Google. If you fill in all the right keywords, you are going to get hit, which is a cool, cool thing for you.
So, you have got your MySpace page, you have got every other — I am going to tell you, there are so many different places out there that will set up free musician sites. It is funny. I was actually to the lead singer of the band called Amplifico the other day. They are from Scotland. She was talking about how much time her and her band spent putting up all these free websites and never knowing if they are going to get a return. Yeah, that does kind of suck that you are not necessarily going to get a lot of return from a lot of these, but it is free so how can you not invest? Probably it is going to take you an hour on each site and most of it is going to ask for the same thing; a bio, a picture, some credential information about who you are and what you do. It is all canned, just have it up in a notepad or Microsoft Word and just copy and paste, but get it up. Spend the time, invest the time. Hit the big ones first of course.
If you want to sell your music, I know a lot of artists go, “Oh, I’ve got a CD, how do I sell my music?” Cdbaby.com, I am going to highly recommend. They are so behind the artist, which I think is so great. Derek Sivers, the guy who created it, I have actually talked to him on the phone. Great guy, does some amazing things and he is so focused on taking care of the artist because he is a musician, too. That is very important. You do not always see that. What is cool about CD Baby and there are other services that will do, I believe IODA does this too, is they will actually handle the distribution of your music as well to all the online services. So, you upload it, you give a CD to CD Baby to sell. I know musicians who have done this when they do not have a physical CD yet but they have — I have a friend, Madsumo, who put together a CD of tracks. He did not want to actually make and spend the money to make real CDs, so he made some raw, pretty home-burned CD-R copies, sent it to CD Baby, and then bought all three of them so no one can actually buy a physical CD. Reason being was, all that music got put into all the major distribution channels. We are talking iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, Tower Records, all those things. CD Baby does that for you and it is a low — it is a one time fee, I forget exactly what it is. It is like $35 or $40, something like that, to get that out there. It does take a little while, I know iTunes takes two to three months if you are lucky, but it gets you out there. It gets your music out there and it is worth the investment because you do it once and it spreads everywhere. Then you can also say, “Buy me on iTunes, buy me on Napster, buy me on eMusic.” That is one of the cool things about it.
Also, you knew I was coming to this, didn’t you? People who know we personally are going, “When’s he gonna talk about the PMN?” The Podsafe Music Network is a huge, huge thing for musicians. Yes I am — full disclosure, I am completely affiliated with the Podsafe Music Network. I served as project manager, building the site. I am still heavily involved with it. I am an evangelist for it. I use it all the time for my music. I am getting that out there, I am directly related with the Podsafe Music Network. But that said, I still think it is an amazing service. What it allows you to do as an artist is you can upload a track, one track or a million tracks, upload them. By uploading them, you are giving permission and you are signing a license that says, “Any podcaster can play this music so long as they give me credit, link to my site and then also report back to the system that they played it,” so that way, you are getting data, you are seeing where your music is being played. Trust me, if you need references as a musician, if you want some references from musicians on how this has worked and if it has worked for them, let me know. Contact me at cc.chapman@gmail.com. I will put you directly in touch with the artist who will sing the praise of the PMN as well, so it not just me.
It is still not fully rolled out yet and I hope, hope it comes soon is the ability for you to sell your tracks. Right now, it is being rolled out in phases. My dream for the Podsafe Music Network, it was my dream from day one when I got first got told about it was for somebody to be able to record a song that night whether it is on their home studio or at like a live concert; take that track, upload it to Podsafe Music Network so that podcasters could play it right away and they can also set it for sale immediately, so they can record a song and have it for sale as soon as possible none of that waiting for iTunes or the other systems. Instantaneously, it is in the control of the artist. That is where it is headed and that is where I hope it goes soon.
So, I am talking all these technology and stuff, too, but do not forget — I hinted this before, your fans. Use your fans. If I am a fan of a musician, I will do anything I can for them to help them. That is one of the cool things about podcasting is I get to help artists. Trust me, I guarantee you, once you have fans — and you will have fans right away if you are any good at all, there is going to be a techno geek out there who is going to be able to help you. There is going to be some marketing student who wants to make your concert posters or your T-shirts. There will be somebody who will sell CDs for you at the door. You leverage your fan base, they will help you. Trust me. Send out an email, you need to have an email list. Even if it is just a canned — you know there are plenty of services out there. Even if it is just old-fashioned, hand-coated putting together text, that is fine. I have seen that too, just old-fashioned email. We all have email lists, right? Just do that. You need to have some way to reach out to your fans and communicate with your fans. There is such a level of intimacy with artists nowadays where I can literally call up an artist that I know and be like, “Dude,” and just talk to them. That is cool. Get that level with your fans. They will be committed to you and they will do everything possible to help you do that.
But listen, none of these stuff is going to happen overnight. You are going to have to work at it. Nothing in life is free. If you honestly think you are going to be discovered tomorrow playing in that coffeehouse down in the corner, good luck! It is not going to happen, all right? It is just not going to happen. You have better chances being hit by the bus that is going by the coffeehouse. You have got to work at it. You have got to be persistent. You have got to be out there. You have got to work every angle imaginable. Contact every podcaster who plays you on their show. Give me a break. It should not take you more than a few minutes to email them, but do it. Thank them for playing it. Reach out. When someone leaves a MySpace comment, say, “Hey, what’s up?” You can tell which ones are spam and tell which ones are sincere. Blogging? Yeah, do it every couple of times from the road. If you can podcast, podcasting is a huge step, but it is not that hard. With services like Hipcast where you can pick up a phone and just call in a podcast from the road, that is easy. That is easy, easy money. Spend a little bit but huge, huge returns if you can do it and please if you are a musician and you can record on GarageBand, you can do a podcast. All right? Just ask Matthew Ebel. That is not a slam against Ebel. I am just saying that GarageBand empowers musicians to a level that is ridiculously amazing and there are other programs, too, but I know GarageBand, a lot of musicians use it because it is free and it is a good place to start out with.
Thinking about things like fan clubs and incentives, I mean we have all seen the fan clubs for as long as we can remember and they work for a reason. In the virtual space, they are even better. I have seen Street Team emails saying, “Hey, who can help me hang up posters?” “Hang up a hundred posters, we’ll give you a free ticket to tonight’s gig.” People will do that, little things like that.
Cross over, integrate all these worlds together. Actually, here is an audio comment I want to play that fits into this because I have not talked about Second Life once tonight. It is about time, so here is a comment that actually fits perfect in this show.
Rich Palmer: “Hi C.C., Rich Palmer here. Hey, I was listening to Managing the Gray and you were talking about your really great line on your schedule and how sometimes your virtual schedule and your real life schedule have become somewhat transparent and I am realizing the same thing. It really enlightened me that past week because I am putting on my schedule my various calendar events for Second Life. I play a lot of shows there as a live musician in Second Life. I am doing a lot of performances, four, five, six a week and I am putting those obviously on my regular calendar. I put them in Outlook and schedule those the same as I would any other scheduled item and I have a lot of scheduled items both real life and Second Life. So, I am seeing that it is really starting to merge and it is beautiful because Second Life to me is another marketing opportunity. I play so many shows and with those I am able to tag on some other things. I market not only my own CD and my own original music, but I also market my internet music show, Audio Gumshoe, and it gives me an opportunity in Second Life to see so many people worldwide from so many cultures, so many time zones, that otherwise would not have been exposed to what it is that I am offering. So, schedules aside, here is a great opportunity to market. Because I am marketing, I have a lot to schedule and there are a lot of appointments, there are a lot of shows, that we even have meetings and we do discussions about how we are going to market and promote life music in Second Life, so it has really been a great, great opportunity. Again, this is Rich Palmer, Rich Desoto in Second Life. Find me at audiogumshoe.com. Thanks for your time and thank you so much for Managing the Gray. We appreciate you, C.C. Bye.
C.C. Chapman: See, there is an artist talking about Second Life. I was going to mention Second Life as yet another place where artists can get their groove on, so to speak. Again, you do not have to have a major technology because you can work with people to do it. This past weekend, I actually opened the virtual U-Turn Cafe in Second Life, which is basically — imagine it as a nightclub. It is a nightclub where artists are going to perform their music and we had it live. Live, not canned or recorded. It was a live concert from Toronto, live at Say What was the name of the club. The band was Uncle Seth and they performed live and they fed in into Second Life. I had a guy that still blows me away, a guy who got into Second Life just because he heard me talk about this Uncle Seth show. First time he had ever been in Second Life and he was in Australia. He was having lunch in Australia and here it was, you know, 10:30 at night, P.M., Boston time and he was having lunch and he got in just to hear this band live. He has not played with Second Life, he does not know if he is ever going to play with Second Life, but he wanted to take part in this live gig, which I thought was amazing. That tells you the power of these new mediums such as this where it is yet another way where an artist can be heard. Uncle Seth put up — they had links to their iTunes store, they had links to their podcast feed. Sound familiar? Sound like a website maybe? You know, the same things. See? You need the same things, you have that crossover. Everything you get on the Uncle Seth website, you could get from their Second Life presence during that performance. They did tip jar. They made real money that night. I know because I gave them some and so did everybody else. They were getting paid. That is a pretty powerful message.
I am sorry if some of the traditional marketing people listening are going, “I took nothing away from the show.” Well, if you took nothing, you were not really listening because everything on this show is totally pertinent, except maybe the selling the CDs and the PMN. It is totally pertinent to every single aspect of marketing as well. Get out there. Use the technology. Do not be afraid of it. It will not bite and if it does bite, it only hurts a little bit.
So, with that, I am going to leave you for today. Embrace new marketing, get out there, have fun. You could check out the show, email managingthegray@gmail.com or swing by managingthegray.com. I am blogging quite a bit there now. I kind of separated from my personal blog. It is really interesting, my wife has not figured out which site I blog which on, so it is an interesting thing. It is a weird dichotomy, weird double-nature thing going on, but it is all good. So, you guys take care, I will talk to you very soon and thank you for listening to Managing the Gray! I will talk to you soon. I just said that. Bye-bye.
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