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.
Search
Additional pages
Recent Tweets
Loading Tweet...
Find CF on...
Tag Results
66 posts tagged music
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.
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?
(via Then vs. Now: The Path to Success for Artists | TuneCorner Music Blog)
Great debate raging this week — this infographic is just to get the conversation going. Make sure to check out the comments on the Tunecore Blog.
Nicki Bluhm’s Van Session Covers and the 1% Youtube Rule for Artists
What you’re seeing above is a great music video cover by Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers of the Hall & Oates classic I Can’t Go For That. The band has been recording from the dashboard of its tour van for some months, presumably between traveling from show to show. These great performances have been dubbed the “Van Sessions,” have been posted to Youtube and nicely curated into a playlist here. If you’ve seen it before, you’re in good company: This video hit the Internets on March 23, 2012 and has steadily been racking up views thanks to posts on Reddit.com, shares among friends on Facebook, showing up on Buzzfeed, thedailywh.at, boingboing.net and isnichwahr.de, among many others. You can see these stats (if the uploader makes them available) from video’s Youtube analytics, the little bar graph button under the video.
The 1 % Rule of Youtube Music Videos
We’ve talked about it before, but by 2010 analytics, Youtube is the number one place people discover music online. If you’re an music artist and your music isn’t on Youtube, you’re making it hard for listeners / viewers to find you, and maybe even frustrating your fans. In our Nashville Rock Your Net workshops, we’ve talked about ways for artists to…
Read more
Flexi Disc Balloon Launch for Jack White - Freedom At 21 (by OfficialTMR)
We talk a lot about artists needing to provide more one-off unique or “scarce” goods for their super fans. You can’t get more scarce than a flexi-disc sent via a biodegradable latex helium balloon.
It’s super unique, the balloon distributed discs will be a hot item when they’re eventually recovered, and the instructions on how to tell the rest of the world via social media will help to spread the word about the record since the actual release of the album is the next week.
hat-tip to Dave Delaney.
“Authenticity and genuine connections always win. Always. Knowing what your followers like about you and your music is key.”
Lessons Learned From Three Successful Kickstarter Music Campaigns - hypebot
There are A TON of good points in this great analysis of three indie artists who’ve had success with fan-fundraising using Kickstarter.com, by Clyde Smith. The conclusions hold true not just for fundraising, but also for all artist-fan engagements.
hat-tip to Michael
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.
