This contribution is by Bas Grasmayer (@Spartz), head of online communication at official.fm, a d.i.y. platform for music creators and content owners.
Be remarkable, be easy to discover, turn your fanbase into a party, connect, listen.
Those were the final words of my article when I introduced my thesis’ main theory of the ecosystem of fans on hypebot back in March. Being a perfectionist, I’ve been waiting with the public release of my thesis until I felt that the layout matched the content. I teamed up with a wonderful designer called Ryan Van Etten, who built an amazing site for this thesis, which you can visit at http://basbasbas.com/thesis (and the entire thing is available in its entirety for free).
Moving beyond piracy
To be frank, one of the main motivations for writing about this topic has to do with my opinion about the piracy debate. I find it a waste of time, partly because I’m a so-called ‘digital native’ who grew up with the internet and I’ve never really seen piracy as a huge problem compared to the massive opportunities the internet created. When I recently interviewed French electro-producer Para One, he echoed my opinion about the internet: “it would be unfair to hate it.”
So after doing some basic research about the music industry more than two years ago, which included interviewing Gerd Leonhard over Skype, I realized that what I wanted to do for record labels and artists is develop a marketing model which accepts and embraces the full reality of the web, not just the bits and pieces that the major lobbies are willing to tolerate. You either embrace the full reality of the web, or you don’t embrace it at all. To me, there is no in-between. Either you get it, or you don’t.
Non-linear communication
Soon I realized that piracy is actually not the main problem or main cause of problems; it’s a symptom of something else. The web has allowed for non-linear communication through networks on a massive scale. The music industry’s first introduction to this was probably Napster (oh yes I said the N-word). To me, Napster symbolizes the music industry’s near total loss of control over the distribution of their product. The industry’s unwillingness or inability to adjust to this new reality of non-linear communication only made things worse (perhaps a lack of understanding has been the problem).
Other symptoms of the web’s non-linear communication are social networks (including the music industry’s darling MySpace), ‘word of mouse’, music like water and there are even people who say it has changed young people’s thought processes:
“It’s not always easy to understand what millennials are saying. That’s because they’ve developed a non-linear way of thinking, that exactly reflects the language of the internet where an infinity of subjects can be followed at the same time. For these millennials, it is natural to start out with something and end up […] somewhere else.”
For a full understanding of what has happened, you should really read the problem section of the thesis.
What I wanted to figure out is: how can artists and labels fully adapt to this changed reality?
The answer is the ecosystem: marketing music through non-linear communication
Although people like Gerd Leonhard, Derek Sivers and Mike Masnick had given me ideas about the dos and don’ts, I didn’t get the full frame I was looking for until I met with Dutch music manager Niels Aalberts for a cup of coffee. When he described his artists’ fanbases as ‘ecosystems’, suddenly everything clicked together.
To me, fanbase suggests a certain distance between artists and fans. It comes from a more linear age where one-to-many was the norm. You would communicate to fans through your music, interviews in magazines, appearances on the radio, music videos and perhaps you would return fanmail every now and then. Now the artist can be placed at the center of the network and is the unifying factor of fans who can now get interconnected. One of my favourite examples of this is deadmau5’ Minecraft server, where fans and artist literally immerse themselves in a world composed of fan art.
The basic formula for the digital age is best explained like this:
- Be remarkable: whatever you do, whoever you are has to be a story worth talking about. Without that you’re never going to be able to leverage non-linear communication. There are a lot of very skillful musicians and artists out there, but how many are really worth talking about?
- Be easy to discover: pretty basic, but you’d be surprised. Be on YouTube, be on Facebook, be on Twitter, have a homepage that unites them all. Publish in as many different places as possible and let your content be your marketing. If your content is truly remarkable, you should make it easy for fans to let it go viral. My favourite example here is The Ugly Dance.
- Turn your fanbase into a party: this is where you will really start witnessing the ecosystem’s dynamics. We’ve all been to house parties where everyone was bored, standing around, waiting for the host to come talk to them whilst figuring out an exit strategy and how much food and drinks to consume to make the trip to the party worth it. What a huge difference that is with a great house party where the host makes sure everybody’s connected and having a good time; the type of party where people wouldn’t really notice if the host went for a 30 minute walk. The internet works the same way!
- Connect: at the same time, one needs to deepen their connection with fans. Fans have to feel involved with you, make them care. People are more likely to buy music after connecting with them.
- Listen: your fans listen to your music and you should listen to them. If you’re really interconnected with your fans, you can more accurately pick up the non-linear communication and jump in whenever people want something. From this listening the business opportunities arise. They go way beyond selling digital or physical copies of music. People want to spend money on music, truly, but you need to give them a reason: don’t offer them something you want them to buy, offer them something they want you to sell.
Be remarkable, be easy to discover, turn your fanbase into a party, connect, listen.
Link to thesis site: The Answer is the Ecosystem: Marketing Music Through Non-Linear Communication
Bas Grasmayer (@Spartz) is an International Communication Management graduate, music biz 2.0 consultant and currently works as Head of Online Communication for startup official.fm which hypebot named one of the 10 Smartest Startups at SF MusicTech.