What Artists Should Know About Next Big Sound

Perhaps you don’t sell too many albums on iTunes, or have that many SoundCloud plays or YouTube views. But maybe, just maybe, your music is really popular in some far off corner of the digital universe you never even knew about, and all that “exposure” you’ve racked up over the years is paying off behind the scenes.

Next Big Sound provides detailed online music analytics to measure the growth of bands on streaming services and social networks. It doesn’t cover everything, but it casts a wide enough net to shatter an artist’s dreams with cold, hard data. I know it did mine! <sniff> Cidney at NBS agreed to give me an artist credit for one month so that I could write this article, way back in April. Hopefully she’ll forget to downgrade my account.

Features

The screenshot above shows a dozen “key metrics” of my choosing. It’s an easy way to focus on what’s important to me, and not get bogged down in all those numbers. So for example, I could replace Rdio plays with Vine loops, Last.fm shouts, or unique pageviews of my website.

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YouTube's Dirty Little Secret

Ever spotted a terrible video on YouTube with an inconceivably high view count? Of course you have. Would it make you feel better knowing that most of those “views” were completely automated and only lasted 30 seconds with the sound turned off?

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Rich Band, Poor Band - Why You Should "Invest" in Pull Marketing

There is a very famous (and powerful) book called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, by Robert Kiyosaki.  In the book, Kiyosaki explains that “poor parents” will recommend buying your home and “investing” $2,000 a month in your equity, instead of throwing it away on rent.  “Rich parents”, on the other hand, would encourage you to find a property that you can buy for $2,000 per month, and rent to someone for $2,500.

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What Artists Should Know About ReverbNation's Promote It

Running a Facebook ad campaign is confusing. You bid for ad placement, but the price you pay bears little relation to your bid. What’s the difference between reach and social reach, connections and clicks, CPC and CPM? More importantly, is there any way to tell how many people played, downloaded, and shared your song, or signed up for your mailing list? (answer: no, there’s not)

ReverbNation’s new Promote It tool addresses those shortcomings, and then some. You pick a song, photo, and budget, and it automatically generates dozens of optimized Facebook ads based on past Promote It campaigns, and continually optimizes your campaign based on the performance of those ads. New fans click through to customized landing pages that track not just clicks and likes, but plays, downloads, shares, wall posts, and mailing list signups. As I’m quoted as saying in the press release, “It’s the ultimate ‘set it and forget it’ fan-making machine!” I was invited to try it out and provide feedback during the beta period, and I’m flattered that some of my suggestions made it into the final product. So far I’ve run six campaigns. Let’s walk through the creation and performance of my latest and most successful one.

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7 Best WordPress Plugins for Passive Promotion

I’m convinced that WordPress is the most powerful and easily implemented website platform for musicians. Most of my social networking efforts are aimed at directing traffic to my band site, which serves as my base of operations. Countless free plugins allow me to add new features and customize to my heart’s content.

I recently overhauled both of my WordPress sites (colortheory.com and passivepromotion.com are functionally identical), exploring all the popular plugins from each category. Despite my best efforts to keep things lean and mean, I ended up installing 23. All are free, as is WordPress. The only thing I’ve paid for is the Thesis theme, which handles the look and feel of the site, search engine optimization, and other behind-the-scenes details I don’t care to figure out on my own.

I don’t have time to babysit my sites every day, so I’m always on the lookout for new ways to “set it and forget it.”

Here are my seven best WordPress plugins for passive promotion:

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