The Musician of Oz

The great and powerful, Wizard of Oz, presented himself as a supernatural, omniscient being.  However, he was revealed to be a much different individual, operating a complex facade of smoke screens and holograms, without any real power.  Musicians can put themselves in the same position as Oz did, by abusing the gap between the digital and dimensional worlds.

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The Weekly Batch

Musicians are expected to be everywhere these days. We’re interacting on social networks, following up on blog comments, keeping our profiles on countless music sites up to date, and checking our stats and analytics with a variety of online tools. It’s enough to make a lifelong indie yearn for a label - one with a marketing department!

Most of these items don’t need to be addressed daily, but they do need to be performed on a regular basis. Tasks that have to be done on a given day, I schedule. Everything else is relegated to The Weekly Batch™ (note: not actually trademarked). I tackle the entire list as a single to-do item on Friday afternoons, when I find it hard to do much of anything else. Here’s my latest iteration:

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How to be a Rockstar at Social Media: What Every Band Should Be Doing

Are you listening?

Are you really listening?

I’ve mentioned it a few times before: treat social media more like a telephone and less like a megaphone. I’ve written about it when talking about the best social media sites for bands too. However, after talking to a few artists, I realize that some might not know how or where  to listen. This is important because like any business or organization, you want to know what’s being said about you and where are they saying it. You’ll also want to know how to respond.

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4 Emerging Trends in Social Media & How They’ll Impact The Music Industry

With a rise in social TV, multi-channel engagement, and recent reports suggesting that there are more mobile phones than people in 4/6 of the World’s regions, this year will no doubt be an interesting one for social media, but how will these trends impact the music industry?

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6 Critical Ways For YOU To Manage Your Expectations of Digital PR & Social Media Marketing

This article was co-written by Ariel Hyatt and Jon Ostrow.

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“80% of marketers begin with tactics instead of goals” – eMarketer Report.

One of the most difficult things that we, and really any digital marketer faces is the ability to effectively manage the expectations of our clients.

We primarily consider clients who pay us to represent them in the realm of new media and social media. For us, it means properly identifying your goals as a client (be it an artist, author, entrepreneur or well-established brand) and often times, educating you as to why certain expectations and goals may need to be re-considered.

So many times we’ve had potential clients come to us complaining about how their previous digital PR or social media marketing campaign didn’t garner the results they had hoped for…

And you know what the first thing we ask is?

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To Indie Artists and Dreams

In the increasingly difficult world of getting your music heard, indie artists are being supplied with unparalleled tools in the form of social media, web sites specializing in “helping” musicians with marketing, and audio platforms which promise unlimited access to the public.

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Twitter Vine for Musicians

As of a few days ago, you can now add 6 second videos to your tweets to spice them up a little bit. The start-up company Vine makes it incredibly easy to create and share bite-sized videos that have a lot of potential in the music marketing world.

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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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Why Being On Oprah Was The Worst Day of My Life

Dream of your big “Break” ?  Think again….  This is the story of what happened to me when I went on the Oprah Show… Being on Oprah changed my perception of what I was doing for a living forever and marked the beginning of my long love affair with social media.  The story goes like this…

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The Ultimate Musician's Guide to Tumblr

I’ve briefly touched on the importance of Tumblr in other posts, but I’ve yet to dive into what exactly Tumblr can do for your band’s promotion efforts. This ultimate guide will hold your hand through the sign-up process and take you all the way through to a point where you can use Tumblr DAILY to promote your music and gain new fans. Before you know it, your micro-blogging platform will be a major part of your promotion efforts.

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What the 2012 Nielsen Social Media Report Means for Music Marketing

The world’s leading global communication and measurement company, Nielsen, just released their newest report, State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012. While the continued growth of social media is no surprise, there are several new trends that musicians should be aware of.

First, there is the idea of “the global living room” or “social tv.” TV-watching has transformed into a new immediate and shared experience. Over 33% of Twitter users actively tweet about TV-related content, making it a shared experience on a larger scale. People especially love to engage real-time during broadcasted events. TV programs are responding by not only taking in the immediate feedback, but writers are adjusting scripts based on what trends, TV shows promote hashtags for viewers, and they sometimes broadcast live tweets (if appropriate for the program).

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The Social Media Bandwagon: Everybody "Likes" a Winner

Mumford & Sons released their 2nd album Babel a few weeks ago. It’s hard to know what any listeners think of it. But one thing we all seem to know — Babel sold 600,000+ copies in its first week. That statistic was re-blogged and re-tweeted thousands of times, blindly hailing “the best debut of 2012.” Everybody {likes, re-tweets, +1’s} a winner.

Does a splashy debut lose significance as media transitions from the physical to weightless digital? We’ll get to that later. In any case, debut has replaced legacy as a benchmark of worth.

Artistic works that build their audience slowly and sustain it for long periods are becoming rare. Most works live and die with their debut. Open big or enjoy staying under the radar. In music, Adele’s 21 is the most recent outlier. No one saw it coming, and then nothing could displace it for more than a year. In the back catalog, Pink Floyd’s enduring hit Dark Side of the Moon returned to the Billboard Top 200 (at #156) for the week ending 21-Oct-2012. That’s 817 (non-consecutive) weeks on the chart (more than 15 chart-years).

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The Best Social Media Site for Bands

I often get asked: what’s the best social media site for bands? My business clients ask the same thing using different words: what is the best marketing channel to promote my brand? The idea that there is a magic formula or single solution to take care of all your needs is a misnomer. Where you should be promoting and the tools that you should be using should revolve around one main concept: where your target audience is. It’s as simple as that.

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Why Buying Followers is a Bad Idea

Buying Facebook or Twitter Followers

There are several companies out there that offer services where you can buy “real” followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Other services sell “real” views on YouTube videos or plays on Sound Cloud. For nearly every social media site available, there are services that claim to boost your reach, increase your followers, and give you more credibility by increased views.

How They Work

Follower services are driven by bots. In other words, they are fake accounts generated by a system that is only programmed to follow, watch a video, or listen to a song. Often times, the followers will be from other countries, only speak in a foreign language, and the names/photos will be obviously fake. While these sites claim that what they are offering is completely legitimate, nearly every social media site strictly prohibits buying followers and it can result in the suspension of an account.

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