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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10 posts tagged analytics
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
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.
Bandcamp’s Analytics Shows It’s Making Lemonade from Free Lemons
Bandcamp has a great post on their blog showing the results of inbound website traffic data. At least for Bandcamp, it shows that some users of freeloader websites still end up buying music, with a number of great examples.
It ends with some inspiring hope from the innovative company:
When we first launched Bandcamp, the conventional wisdom was that music retail was moribund, and that artists’ futures were all about those terrifically lucrative tours you guys go on, supplemented perhaps by trickle-down advertising revenue generated by millions of listeners enjoying your tunes while doing their best to ignore ads for toothpaste. Fortunately, it appears there’s still a thriving community of fans who understand that the best way to support the artists they love is by handing them money.
Amazing mix of technology brings Blink 182’s fans & their neighbors together to share the music experience:
(via Blink-182 Promo Integrates w/ SoundCloud, SimpleGeo & More For Premiere - hypebot)
- hattip to Nick Hardy
An amazing 3 minute explanation of Search Engine Optimization from Search Engine Land and Common Craft.
-via This Week in Google, Ep. 114, from Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land
We received a few requests from some cheeky individuals asking us if our new high profile had translated into more plays, sales, etc… That got us thinking.
We were thinking of posting some numbers to give people an idea of what a bit of internet buzz can do for your bank account and self…
(via Apple allows Publishers to ask iPad Magazine Subscribers for their Info — 50% subscribers say yes.)
This is a big step for digital subscriptions for magazine / newspaper subscriptions on Apple devices. Having the ability to access customers & fans continues to be a barrier for music artists who sell through the iTunes Music Store, and a is a major reason for artists to have offers directly to fans from their own website.
It will be interesting to learn the statistics about what devices and services have high opt-in rates. Is Apple’s 50% considered high or low? Does it depend more on the device or the provider of app and it’s content? Is this opt-in thru Apple’s devices provided to all app developers or just those blessed by Apple? WIll other app stores begin to provide the same information to their developers?
Parachute Musical Case Study Update 2011-05-05: Using the Tools
Over the past few months, Parachute Musical’s been taking advantage of Topspin Media’s online tools to aggregate all their fans’ contact info, unify their online offerings, and provide a consistent way to sign-up new fans. Here’s how we began using the tools to offer the band’s new single, “New Love.”
Kickstarter Email Test
After migrating PM’s email mailing lists into Topspin (a fairly easy but tedious process of exporting existing lists to spreadsheet / list csv files and importing them into Topspin’s fans database), you’re able to separate or tag your fans into lists, some created by you, some automatically created by the system.
For instance, we wanted to make a list of those fans that pledged during PM’s Kickstarter campaign so we could send them the tracks that were promised them — so we exported that email list from Kicsktarter as a csv and imported it into Topspin, assigning all those people to a specific list that could be used to send a special link to download.
We made a hidden page on PM’s website that included …
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PARACHUTE MUSICAL CASE STUDY UPDATE 2011.04.19
Building on our most recent update on the band Parachute Musical, in this post, we’ll be pulling back the curtain on what we’ve been working on.
While we’re telling this story, we’d like to hear your story — what’s worked (and just as importantly, hasn’t worked) for you as an artist. How have you taken advantage of the tools out there to find fans, provide new offerings, and maximized your performance buck? Won’t you share you’re insight as we share ours?
Assessing and Quantifying
Our previous efforts have been to take a more holistic approach to our online strategy and migrate to as few services as possible. Parachute Musical’s website is privately hosted on GoDaddy servers and thankfully uses an analytics package, Google Analytics, that helps us track traffic. This lets the band discover information like how many people visit their site, where in the world visitors are from, how they found found the site, and if the visitor is browsing from a desktop computer or mobile device. The band’s blog, which is hosted on Tumblr (just like the blog you’re reading now), and did not have analytics running. Since the blog tends to be the most dynamic part of PM’s site, being able to see traffic trends was a must — so we added it. Adding the bit of “code” to your website to track traffic can be easy, and the good folks at Tumblr explain the fairly simple process here.
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This episode looks at mobile music streaming. We talk about why 2011 might be the year for streaming music services to hit more mainstream because of the new technologies made available in cars, and the advantages the greater popularity of these services bring to to consumers and music artists.
