Marketing Music Through Non-Linear Communication: The Ecosystem Of Fans, Artist & Label

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).

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What Kinds of Images Best Represent Your Band?

As you’ve no doubt realized by now, image is pretty important to your success as an artist. It affects your live show, it affects your online presence, it affects your marketing opportunities and strategy.

But in the countless hours you’re obviously devoting to exploring and experimenting with your image, are you thinking about what kind of image you’re going to use?  

The superb Riff City published a tremendously insightful post last week entitled Docs of Perception: Visual Records and How We Hear Music. In it, author Julianne Escobedo Shephard explores the relationship between camera technology and our perception of artists.

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Using Blogger Motivations to Drive Fan Connections

I was reading David’s post on “Music Blogging in 2011” and was especially moved by the comments. Dozens of bloggers chimed in with their viewpoints on blogging, and, most importantly, their own motivations for blogging.

I’ve written before on constructing personas for bloggers, but I think it’s worth looking at the personas in a different light: motivations. Most music bloggers exhibit some combination of these four motivations:

 - Participating in a community - Bloggers are almost always the biggest consumers of other blogs as well. They comment on each others’ posts, repost content they’ve found on other blogs, join forums, and go to meetups. People like to feel close to people similar to them, and musical taste goes a long way towards identifying potential friends. 

 - Sharing with friends - Most bloggers are the same folks who made all the mixtapes for their friends and parties in high school and college. They want their friends to hear great music, and blogging is a great way to publish their favorites. I know a good portion of the subscribers to my blog personally, and often subscribe to their blogs on other topics.

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What would YOU do with freedom and a healthy budget to break a new artist?

Over the past several years, I’ve spent much more (non-billable) time than I should have trying to convince old-school label execs, independent artists, managers (both big and small) and others that the traditional rules don’t work any more in this new music business.  

When trying to “break” a new artist independently, spending a large amount of money on radio, downplaying internet marketing and direct-to-fan communication and spending a lot on expensive videos rather than producing less-expensive but more interesting/innovative videos (e.g., the now famous OK Go treadmill video) are usually bad moves.  Top-down marketing just doesn’t work any more, unless you’re a very young pop act signed to Disney/Hollywood.  As my marketing friend would say, it’s all about “pull” rather than “push” marketing.

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