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3 Tips for Kickstarting a Musician’s Digital Strategy
This post was originally a guest blog on one of my favorite social media sites, oneforty. You can find the original post here.
The music industry has seen a large shift over the last ten years. From someone who grew up with cassettes and cd’s I look at my younger sister, who lives in a world of Limewire and iTunes downloads, and realize that the musician’s path just isn’t the same anymore. While there is a wealth of real estate on the web for all musicians now, you need to take control of your own image. This is why a strong Social strategy is essential to the development of the modern artist. While each case is unique, here are a few jump off points to kickstart the process.
Use tools to collect the best measurements
While it’s easy to push out your new songs with a sendspace, limelynx, or zshare MP3 link, why not use a site like Bandcamp or Soundcloud to release your music? These sites provide interesting and comprehensive stats, everything from geographic region to traffic from embed sources. Why do you think more and more blogs/sites/brands are partnering with these sites? Rich analytics and listener insights only provide valuable marketing insight into an artist’s strategy.
Create a Hub Around Your Music
One emerging trend for artists major and independent is bolstering the website. By creating a hub where fans can interact, you’re going beyond the traditional artist relationship. By directing your audience directly to a site that’s your own gives you control, and the ability to measure traffic.
I had the opportunity to speak about this with Corentin Villemeur, General Manager of Thisis50.com, a music community started by 50 Cent and G-Unit Records, and currently ranks in the top 5000 websites in the world according to Alexa.com.
“In May 2007 we started working on the site, ready for the September release of 50 Cent’s new album, which was Curtis at the time. So 50 had announced the Five Borough Tour, performing all over NYC and the site was private. We were following 50 all over New York broadcasting all the shows live. I was going show to show with a camera, laptop and a wireless card broadcasting, and this was before Ustream…so we started about 25,000 users the first few days, then grew till December, when 50 decided he wanted something much bigger, so we opened it up to a blog format and had news about everyone in hip-hop, not just 50 Cent.
Look for opportunities to diversify your music.
While working on your own music is great, sometimes you can step outside and lend your talents to commercial productions. Most brands these days aren’t out to bastardize music, they’re looking for artists with a persona, a look, a sound. By opening your ears to all possibilities, you could find a fast track to a lot of fans, at the very least some great content. Use search functions on Twitter and Google Alerts to monitor the web for opportunities to submit music.
oneforty offers an awesome feature called Toolkits or lists of suggested tools to use online. My Social Media for Musicians Toolkit combines some of the sites I use frequently with success. Obviously Twitter and Facebook are strong, but other sites like Soundcloud (I mentioned above) and WordPress are great ways to get yourself a solid blog and web presence with music. I really like combining sites, for example embed my soundcloud music into a blog post on WordPress, now I’m getting plays for my music in 2 places, not just one. Developer plugins like the Tweet Button make it simple for a fan to share a blog post on Twitter, which is obviously the end goal.
One last point…
It’s important to use social to develop healthy relationships, not just pushing out content to be heard. Find YOUR angle, your lane…develop an approach that is unique to you.
