Creators' Freedom Project
Empowering Creators to Take Control of Their Own Business by Leveraging their Core Skillset — Creativity
A project to understand the needs of creators, highlight and experiment with replicate-able models that help independent artists make a living from their creativity. We'll explore the use of a number of online and tech tools and offerings of scarce goods & unique experiences to discover fans and the merchandise / performances that they want.
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5 great points all creators should pay attention to while on concentrating on social media
Keeping Track of your audience
Why you should bitlify your links
One key part of growing your audience as an artist/band is finding out where your current audience came from, because most likely you will find a lot more fans where there is already a bit of buzz going. The problem is: Not every platform you or your band uses on the internet gives you all the statistics you need.
Take SoundCloud for instance, what you get (for free) is
- How many plays a song gets
- How often a song is downloaded
- Who comments on your track?
But if you’re like me, you don’t want to dish out 29€/year to see who played it (if they are even logged in) or let alone 79€/year to get any geographical knowledge of your audience. YouTube does this way better; they give you statistics en masse, simply because they want you to be successful as it drives profit to them as well.
The tip I’m going to give you will not work for all occasions, but it can be used everytime you link to a song, video, download etc. from another page, say posting a SoundCloud song on Twitter. Before I go further into this, I’ll tell you how I learned this lesson “the hard way” (not that much was lost, but it was annoying none the less). If you just want to know what to do to get more statistics out of your links, just go ahead and skip the following chapter.
Matt Duncan writes about lessons learned by his band The Astray & strategic use of bitly links to track & measure audience response
“By focusing on flexibility, openness, and collaboration, musicians can guide their expenditures of time and money for maximum effectiveness.”
The Social Hour talks with the prolific Seth Godin about his Kickstarter-funded book “The Icarus Deception.” The interview is great to even learn just a bit about how users should be thinking of fan-fundraising services as engagement planforms instead of “just” for fundraising.
Another great interview on the Twit Network. (via The Social Hour 95 | TWiT.TV)
Minnesota theater intros ‘Tweet Seats’ to encourage audiences to engage and share: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/28/3812386/guthrie-theater-tweet-seats-section-twitter
“…a new business model for every piece of content you release.”
BitTorrent is really thinking about the new opportunities for creators!
Pomplamoose’s Jack Conte talks with the Hypebot’s Upward Spiral Podcast on the artist’s successes and failures. It is a refreshingly honest conversation with an artist who is brutally honest about what works and what hasn’t for him.
While Jack importantly emphasizes that no one will work for all artists, he does talk about a number of strategies, like leveraging covers songs with videos, trying to plan ahead with search engine optimization, and knowing your result with data analytics. He talks about Pomplamoose “blasting all channels” with updates, with an emphasis on important and content-rich updates, on many different social media & email platforms as they can, while still knowing that they won’t reach everyone. As pioneers of promoting their video-song on Youtube, it was interesting to hear that for Pomplamoose, they consider their videos to be the promotion or “packaging” for their music.
There’s some great discussion near the end about electronic dance music, or EDM which Jack is very excited about — both as an music artist having a new “palette” to work from, and what its cost of creation could do to the music market.
Great work to Hypebot, Kyle Bylin, and Jason Spitz for a great podcast episode! Don’t forget to subscribe.
(via Triangulation 73 | TWiT.TV)
Great video with Roberto Hoyos who makes speciality throw pillows that cater to his audience —geeks. Roberto talks about how fell into a popular product, took a chance, bootstrap-funded his products, engaged with fans especially via twitter (@throwboy) and podcasts, and stuck to it.
“I think people are naturally curious and want to know where the products they buy are coming from. It is satisfying and fulfilling to have that relationship between the creator and the customer. That’s hard to achieve with a box sitting on a store shelf.”
1 year + $100K + booking agent + tour van split among four bands = very neat experiment.
Question: what will Hard Rock be doing to help the bands strategically build a fan base (and the demand for the band)? Or will the hype of being a Hard Rock band be enough to generate enough attention to sustain a band?
