Facebook doesn't grab me but I'm grabbing it

FACEBOOK MUSIC IS ON!!!! GO! GO NOW! GET IN THERE.

More coming up on Googles new open social that should fix everything. I mean . . . well . . .

Social networks on the move: Facebook doesn’t grab me but I’m grabbing it

I don’t like Facebook! It doesn’t do much for me! Silly little stupid boxes everywhere and constantly updating streams of information every time someone on my friends list scratches their arse!

People I barely know off my address book are cyber “hugging” me with their crazy apps and widgets (these are little like mini websites embedded within a website page which are massive component for web 2.0 and distributing content) and “challenging me to an arm wrestle” or “buying me a drink”.

It’s bizarre. What does it mean? I came to network!

I came to represent what I have to offer! I came to reap the kudos of electro shocking music promotion techniques in New Zealand into the 21st century! I don’t want to exchange cutesy little trivialities, just read my damn blog feed – and where am I to pimp my big ass backlinks back to my blog and back to the kurb home site, where I’ve got you where I want you? I’ve got to say myspace is much better for marketing and branding. Facebook’s great if you want to mess around with your mates. But I don’t know about breaking new bands.

Oh I know what you’re thinking, I’m just put out because everyone’s leaving myspace and I can’t get them with my spam. Well just you shush up and don’t worry about that. I got all the spam I need – it just takes time to perfect the recipe and this one’s going to take an extra spoonful of my patented innocuous enthusiasm infused with mass produced sincerity too work the touchy feely environment of Facebook. And Bebo is much the same, but with much a much larger teen focus.

On Bebo the concept of a “band page” is more like a myspace group while Facebook you can’t even have a weird sounding name! To me, unless there’s a change in direction, it is even more of a call to develop your secondary content (video, blog, alternative audio content that you can still promote on facebook) as a strong brand for your band’s identity because on facebook . . . your band isn’t allowed an identity!

THAT of course could all be about to change with Facebook music rumours now flying all over the place.

BREAKING NEWS: FACEBOOK MUSIC IS NOW ON!!! GO GO GO!!!

This from Co-Ed magazine:

Here’s how it works:
Major and independent label artists and will register their sub-domain name through Facebook. Like “www.facebook.com/insertbandnamehere” for example.
On this page Facebook users will be allowed to become “fans” of the artist and connect to the media hosted on the “artist page.”
In the first generation of Facebook Music “fans” will be allowed to listen to artist’s music, watch videos, upload pictures, add music to their page, receive tour information and interact with other fans. Online music moguls, be warned.
Future generations will come quickly and allow unprecedented targeted marketing, ad buys and media promotion. Facebook is developing artist specific sales widgets to allow for music sales through the site as well.


Of course there is an important reason I’m bringing up these new socials which relates to a common theme recently – go where the people are, carve your fanbase out of the traffic.

% of web traffic in NZ October 2007-10-25

1 – Google – 7.13%
2 – Trademe – 3.92%
4 – Bebo - 2.06%
8 – Facebook – 1.11%
9 – Youtube – 1.08%
20 – Myspace - .49%

You feeling me? Myspace is done. I hope you didn’t put too much effort like some.

Go where the people are. The kiddies are going to Bebo, and the grown ups are going to Facebook.

And of course, Kurb is offering all the tools to give you the edge. Seeya there.



Cheers for the connection with Kurb.

We’re supporting musicians with successful promotion strategies for a budget. Come by our page, theres plenty to pick up about new developments in the music industry in our blogs and theres a whole lot of free info and articles at our self promotions hub. Get some scope checking out our overview of online promotion strategies and if you’re interested our artist packages or brand new campaign packages including CD’s, posters and a dedicated online distribution, promotion and videomarketing program.


All the best with your music, from Kurb
For direct enquiries get us on gmail as kurbpromo

Music videos go online - end of music TV era - MUST READ

Awesome article dropping down on the state of music videos as a promotional tool and source of revenue to the music industry.

- Don't forget now! Kurb is australasia's leader in dedicated techniques to market and distribute your videos online through Youtube and potential revenue generators such as megavideo, revver and over 15 other video sharing sites.

The economic model that MTV was built on has been shredded - big budget one off videos are out - the digital revolution is upon us! You have the power to cut an album and make a video in your own bedroom and distribute it worldwide!

So don't make one song, one video, keep making songs, keep uploading videos, film gigs, film band practices, make vblogs, make funny shorts, talk about your music, blog about your music, build your following, interact, be an entertainer, create meaning, connect with them and connect them to your music!

visit Business weeks gallery of 10 stars who revolutionised the industry and reflect how innovation, community and interaction could change your musical career.

This new article drops after Bob Lefsetz and other cutting edge media critics denounce the MTV awards and Top 40 becoming just a circus sideshow to what's really happening in the music industry today - as witnessed by the brutal cannibalising of one of it's own, Ms. Britney Spears.

This from indystar:

Consumers Bop to Rhythm of Online Music Videos

[who came up with that clanger of a headline for such a decent article? Don't they know that blogging is 50% headline and 50% content???]

Viewership of music videos moved from TV to the Web at such a fast pace that few saw it coming.

Yahoo, the Web's top music destination, streams 240 million music videos monthly. MTV, which defined the young music video medium but now devotes nearly all of its airtime to non-music video fare, attracted 1 million viewers in prime-time viewing in August.

"Online is the single-largest place where consumers are watching music videos," says Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of eLabs, Universal Music Group's digital division. "When we release a video, we still put it on MTV and BET, but in terms of the most impact from audience and revenue, it's online."

Videos used to be given to networks such as MTV to sell CDs. Now, labels charge for video usage. "It was clear that all of our content needed to be paid for," says Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG Music Entertainment's global digital business unit. "The times when we could make our content available for free so someone would buy the CD are over. We drive usage to the Internet sites, so we should be paid."

Hesse wouldn't disclose exact figures, but Caraeff says licensing of music videos to sites such as Yahoo, AOL Music and YouTube reaps $20 million yearly for Universal and is growing steadily.

YouTube has been at odds with much of the entertainment industry because some of its users digitize content on their own and put it on the site without compensating the content owner. MTV owner Viacom is suing YouTube owner Google in a copyright infringement case.

But Universal, Sony BMG, Warner Music and EMI have agreements allowing their music videos to be shown on YouTube. In exchange, they share in ad revenue. YouTube attracts the largest video viewing - including movie trailers, amateur productions and tech podcasts - on the Web, with 44.8 million visitors in August.

With 23.4 million visitors in August, Yahoo is the most-visited music site, followed by ArtistDirect, MySpace's music channel, AOL Music and MTV's music channels, including MTV.com, VH1.com and CMT, according to ComScore.

This summer, Yahoo began offering an application to post many of its videos onto pages of the wildly popular social-network site, Facebook. It has since expanded this concept, via a test site, to post videos from Universal and Sony BMG onto personal Web sites or blogs.

Once word gets out and music fans realize that they can take the latest videos by say, Justin Timberlake or Fergie, and post them to their blog, Yahoo Music general manager Ian Rogers believes the viewing of videos online will grow "from 10 to 100 times over the next one to two years," he says. "There's no question people want to do this."

He says Yahoo fought for several years to shut down sites that offered ways to hack into Yahoo Music and post videos. "We know the demand is there."
Demand and convenience caused music fans to migrate to the Web to watch the majority of their music videos, says Rogers.

"If you want to see a music video, why would you turn on MTV and hope to see the video you want, when you could go online and get it immediately?" he says. "The shift happened as music videos became more available online and less available on TV. This was a natural evolution."

MTV, the channel that defined music videos, isn't sitting out the digital revolution. On-air, the TV channel urges viewers to go to MTV.com to see the latest videos and video premieres. "We realize that we live in an on-demand culture," says MTV Executive Vice President Courtney Holt.

Holt says on-demand viewing is great, but it's TV exposure that still makes the difference for emerging bands. He cites groups such as OK Go and Paramore, which had major online exposure but took off after MTV started playing their videos.

MTV recently bought a 50 percent interest in digital music service Rhapsody to expand its online music reach. Both Rhapsody and MTV.com show music videos on their sites, while some sites - most notably Apple's iTunes - offer them for sale. Caraeff says streaming music videos represents the bulk of the action for music videos and that downloads represent a tiny fraction of sales. Hesse says his best-selling download of all time - a recent Timberlake song - clocked in at just 58,000 sales for $1.99 apiece.
"This is a good, growing business," he says. "As more people get video iPods, we'll start to see more people buying music videos."

Label executives are also looking for streams and downloads to mobile phones - currently a niche business - to explode in the coming years as more wireless customers get multimedia phones.

"The average usage time on a phone for entertainment programming is no more than two or three minutes," says Caraeff. "The short-form nature of music videos makes it a perfect fit."

Q&A with Rio Caraeff

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham spoke with Caraeff about how music videos have shifted from TV distribution to the Web, and turned into a profit center.

Question: Is TV distribution for music videos still important?
Answer: Online is the single largest place where consumers are watching video. When we release a video, we still put it on MTV and BET, but in terms of the most impact from audience and revenue, it's online. We're reaching more people than we've ever reached before with our music, and have turned what was a promotional business into a revenue business, worth $20 million a year for us, and growing.

Q. Where are people viewing the music videos online?
A. YouTube and Yahoo Music are the lion's share, along with MySpace and AOL. In the last quarter, we had 265 million streams of our videos online, and that doesn't even include YouTube, which is just starting to report activity. We have a Universal channel on YouTube, and the last time I looked, we had 180 million streams. YouTube is becoming the largest place for where our videos are played.

Q. Talk about how you make money off videos.
A. We were the first major label to realize that the old ways of doing business with music videos wasn't working anymore. Twenty years of videos as a promo piece wasn't stimulating sales of CDs. We had to turn videos into a premium product that feels free and convince Web sites to pay license fees for usage. Now every time the video is played, we get paid. We also offer them for sale at sites like iTunes, and via mobile phones and Verizon and Sprint. Both are flourishing, but the lion's share of activity is via streaming.

Q. Music videos used to boast of million-dollar budgets and big-name directors. What's the state of music videos today?
A. Clearly, the days of multimillion production budgets for videos has waned, but we've been able to do more with less. The budgets have come down, but the creativity has risen. With the challenge of doing more with a smaller budget, some of the best videos have come in with no budget, using Mac computers, high-def cameras and a small crew.
I even envision a world where music videos are created by the fan, and collaboration that exists in a digital, all-Internet world - the artist creates the song, and fans can go online, and make the videos. We're going to see a lot more creativity. It's no longer just about one big company publishing, it's a two-way communication. This is completely new to our industry and something we embrace.



Cheers for the connection with Kurb.

Supporting musicians with successful strategies on a budget.

Kurb is NZ’s leader in online promotion strategies for artists and creative projects plus we offer the cheapest
CD/DVD reproduction and
cheap posters available.


Come by our page, theres plenty to pick up about new developments in the music industry in our blogs and theres a whole lot of free info and articles at our self promotions hub. Get some scope checking out our overview of online promotion strategies and if you’re interested our artist packages or brand new campaign packages including CD’s, posters and a dedicated online distribution, promotion and videomarketing program.


All the best with your music, from Kurb
For direct enquiries get us on gmail as kurbpromo


.....................
Kurb Myspace

Marketing 2.0 for Web 2.0 - how your business can benefit

Marketing 2.0 for Web 2.0 – how can your business benefit?

The Internet is the most powerful and far reaching marketing tool available to small businesses and increasingly word of mouth is now word of blog, email or IM and thats what web 2.0 is - when we stop hearing the messages sent by those who can afford to send them and we just learn from the messages we share from the access the internet now provides to one another.

According to Tim O’Reilly who coined the phrase “Web 2.0” in 2004:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

Web 2.0 presents opportunities to use the internet in new and interactive ways to deliver an unprecedented amount of information and choice to unprecedented audience numbers.

Unlike declining traditional media the internet offers users control over access and it gives consumers choice. Web 2.0 represents a major blow for traditional advertising methods because Web 2.0 is about the online experience the user has customised – and no one wants ads! Marketing is to survive only as part of a media experience that is embraced, not an unwelcome interruption to be filtered out.

Social Networking:

Social networking – the explosion of sites like Myspace, Bebo, and Facebook – has transformed the online social environment into a place where branding happens naturally. Myspace, the big daddy of social networking sites, created an online environment where brands as well as bands, characters and ideas could be accounted for with online identities.

You only have to go to the stats to see the wild popularity of these sites in New Zealand and around the world. Even I choked when the Herald quoted 800,000 kiwis use http://www.bebo.com/. It comes behind only Google and Trademe for volume of usage in NZ.

By creating a presence for your business on social networks you are able to present content and interact with other users participating in a massive global network either as an individual representing or creating awareness (this will be required on facebook and bebo which are not so friendly to commercial brands), a brand profile of your business, or even a key product! Or all three! There’s no rule against having multiple accounts.

SEO and web 2.0 - when content "goes viral"

It is still the truth that most of your website traffic will come from search engines and in New Zealand that is overwhelmingly accounted for by the Google search engine. To put what is often reported to be a complex and competitive study into simple terms, search engine optimisation (SEO) is based around keywords matched to your content, and the ranking of its relevancy in the search by the amount of links to it and the quality of those links.

Search engines can be influenced in two ways – by both the quality and quantity of written content you make available and the quantity and quality of backlinks created to your site from other sites. Distributing and sharing as much content furnished with links back to your site as you can make available is the most effective way to dramatically increase your search rank, send your brand around the world and bring traffic to your website.

All I will say is that websites that follow the web 2.0 format, which are some of the highest ranked in the world – myspace, youtube, blogger – the last two of which of course are owned by google, are ranked in a different way by google, and using these sites in different ways to make people aware and provide links to your website can have dramatic results.

But when your marketing message has assumed the appearance of a media experience – whether a blog, a podcast or a short video demonstration - that you have made available through your various online social network to share and enjoy as “infotainment” it’s no longer advertising! And when people are motivated to share the information you have provided they are not only building your search ranking but sharing your marketing message that your personal brand represents knowledge and experience of the products and services you provide.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is the hottest thing in internet promotion right now and youtube is popular with an older demographic where social networking hasn’t spread. Unlike everything else I’ve talked about – videos in themselves will not increase your search rank on google! But the message out there is if you can do it, prove it - film it! People want to see for themselves and now you can show them!

Video content provides important information, breaking down the anonymity that effects a potential customer or clients decision to purchase through an online connection based on trust. Video is also the most potentially effective opportunity to offer deeper understanding through presentation and demonstration.

many more people will connect with your marketing messages as a visual image and when it comes to media – the types of small businesses that could never dream of affording to market by broadcasting video can now provide it cheaply in a way that makes it accessible to targeted users long after it is first made available.

One of the most successful viral campaigns focused on a series of short clips experimenting with blending different unusual objects in a brand presentation for a blender called "will it blend?"– one of these quirky clips featuring an iphone received over 3 million views on youtube.

XML, RSS, P2P, Aggregation

Web 2.0 continues to present newer and better solutions for distributing and accessing information but unlike social networking and video marketing these concepts of syndicating content feeds and providing ever more options for choice and access are ideas which time is yet to come.

But it remains that web 2.0 marketing is about “pull” and not “push”. Using social networking, and sharing blogs and videos, generating content that appeals to users whether it be through information, experience, demonstration, experiments or simply just the quirky, entertaining or humourous is a chance to build awareness of your business while connecting with people in a way they will appreciate and remember.

People are far more likely to "go with what they know" so establishing social profiles and participating in online communities, providing content that people will use and value, in a way that supports higher ranking in searches for your site is the best way for generating leads and contacts in the new online environment.

Cheers for the connection with Kurb. Supporting musicians with successful strategies on a budget. Kurb in NZ’s leader in online promotion strategies for artists and creative projects plus we offer the cheapest CD/DVD reproduction and cheap posters available.

Come by our page, theres plenty to pick up about new developments in the music industry in our blogs and theres a whole lot of free info and articles at our self promotions hub. Get some scope checking out our overview of online promotion strategies and if you’re interested our artist packages or brand new campaign packages including CD’s, o All the best with your music, from Kurb For direct enquiries get us on gmail as kurbpromo ..................... Kurb Myspace

Overview of online promotion strategies

how digital promotion and social marketing works
more indie self promotion articles hub
Our artist packages
Real cheap CD/DVD reproduction in NZ
postering – placement in Auckland / Free delivery in NZ

Okay people! This for all those on the artist packages and those maybe
interested in what the shape of a comprehensive online campaign looks
like.

Sorry if you haven't heard from me for awhile – on the road for a
month on tour while trying to keep the business going turned out to be
a real over commitment on my part!

Of course I learnt plenty of lessons on the nuts and bolts of putting
on shows around New Zealand so feel free to bend my ear if you're
headed in that direction.

There was a lot of housework to do once I got back but now I'm on top
of that it's back to all the good stuff we were bringing in.

What I've got for you today is a quick overview of everything we're
doing online. So this has got nothing to do with Web design, CD/DVD
Duplication and posters all of which is still going also with decent
discounts for those who are signed on.

However I am strictly limiting the number of acts I am working with
now - so we're starting at $NZ200 p/month but this is way more than
just myspace now. As before you're under no obligation month to month
BUT if things get too crazy with the amount of business we're doing
here you will have to wait for a spot!

My suggestion is this kind of promotion may not turn you into a global
internet superstar overnight but it puts you in the best position to
take advantage of the way the internet is currently completely
changing the music industry – this is the biggest revolution in music
since the phonograph!!!

My approach is dealing with you in a way to address which of these
services are going to be of most benefit to you according to what you
can afford.

But the basics are that I need strong and regular content
(music/video/blog) provided from you in order to make the distribution
and access that I provide to this content worthwhile.

attached is two HOT diagrams one is on online music listening trends
and the other is on future music revenue trends.

Breakdown:

Online distribution - full support
Search – high google rankings, google ad campaign
Social – ongoing automated targeted promotion on social sites, viral
triggers through access
Content (video etc.) – Automated distribution of video and other
content through content providers; automated promotion on youtube
Viral + Web 2.0 strategies – utilizing P2P sharing, Aggregation and RSS feeds
Content required

Online distro + players with storefronts

I can't set it up for you – that's too complicated when we want all
the money going straight to the artists, but I can pretty much walk
you through the whole process and make recommendations based on my
experience. In areas where income is derived from the sale of music my
aim is to keep clients up to date with the latest opportunities.

Search manipulation + advertising

Google search is obviously the main way New Zealanders find things,
it's the most frequently used site here. It is also the internal
search engine powered within myspace.

By generating backlinks from automated distribution of content, I've
learned to manipulate Google pretty successfully for Kurb, but results
come about slowly over the weeks and will vary depending on the nature
and volume of the content available (e.g. acts with a distinct name or
spelling have a distinct advantage on google!)

In addition, an ad campaign on Google on top of "organic search" is
inexpensive and easy to manage – giving the act a higher profile
through googles immense network while helping to underpin traffic
generated from key relevant phrases – for example:

"New Zeland Hip Hop" (back 2 basics was the first nz site a #4)

"Auckland Hardcore" etc. (the myspace of a band "Cell" from west
Auckland came up #1)

The result is obviously we want the name of the act to come up as
close as possible to first when its typed into google. We want the
myspace coming up and we want results from youtube coming up.

Automated social campaigns

Digital promotion on myspace you know about – regularly maintain
searching and requesting of targeted audiences of between 50-100 per
day, then following up with specific campaigns consisting of targeted
messages and comments related to content (new single, new video, tour
announcement, etc.) and offering direct links to downloads, videos,
blogs, backlinks to relevant sites and all relevant content.

The same applies to other social sites to varying extents, I am still
experimenting with this but we already know that Bebo is tremendously
popular with New Zealand teenagers while Facebook has started to
siphon off older and more sophisticated myspace users in there 20's.

A global campaign would involve applying this across many different
accounts with specific geographic or demographic targets assigned to
each account. A New Zealand focused campaign doesn't really require
more than one account.

In regards to security, I feel I need to create separate social
account that is managed separately from the original account
established by the act mainly because if I'm going to get the best
results I don't want to be worried about the consequences of taking
responsibility for a bands account being compromised – though this has
never happened - but just as important I need to know exactly whats
going on with that account, back up data, make specific content
available etc. – especially where key differences in the nature of
specific social sites in relation to artists (myspace/bebo/facebook)
may call for a different approach - without the artists getting
tetchy that im messing around with their personal profiles. This way
of course the artists also keep their privacy.

There needs to be some delineation between the bands own accounts
where the band can be contacted directly and the nature of the
"satellite" account as a promotional entity. obviously the term
"street team" is undesirable but there'll be something related to the
content that will be appropriate.

Again content is key. I can request, I can comment, but the audience
have got to engage with the content beyond another spam campaign
albeit a local one. Obviously providing access to the tools that allow
users to initiate the viral process (specifically promoting access to
the relevant codes that allow users to promote/share/embed content)
should be promoted, but the next step is encouraging/prompting users
to interact with the content – for example: users creating their own
videos applying audio content, making content freely available for
myspace bedroom producers to remix etc.

And once promotion has taken on a life of it's own separate from the
actions of you or me that's when it's "gone viral".

Also a thorough campaign will make use of all other aspects of social
sites available – forums, groups, bulletins etc. – to present content
and make it available for viral proliferation by again making relevant
codes easily accessible.

Youtube . . . + content sites for Video/Blogs/Free Mp3's

Again this applies the concept of taking artist generated content
(video/mp3/copy) and where possible automating distribution through as
many user channels and sites as is reasonable to create blanket
accessibility – Youtube obviously that dominates video content as
well as key social sites that offer content (Myspace, Bebo, Facebook),
key blog sites (Blogger, Wordpress, Livejournal), key mp3 sites
(mp3.com, soundclick, download.com) , reinforcing the presence of such
content online with appropriate and intelligent tagging (tags enable
searches within content providing sites), furnishing with other
content and backlinks to all relevant sites where possible.

Digital promotion allows for this kind of blanket distribution, while
the digital promotion techniques used on social sites (requesting
adds, messaging, commenting etc.) can also be applied on Youtube. The
time consuming part of this job is really in establishing the sites
and managing all the account information.

But the effect is that you're building up a massive self reinforcing
network. Some blogs, some videos may never even be seen, but they
still reinforce the acts presence by the benefit of the links, tags,
and key content phrases.

Viral tie ins

Video/Blog/Mp3 sites present content, social sites are a point of
first contact where promotion can be conducted in order to encourage
users to adopt, interact with and redistribute content and the acts
website is ultimately where we want users to end up – signing up for
mailing lists, seeking in depth information, interacting with primary
content and sharing secondary content with other users in a community
(48may nailed this one).

Players: players allow music to be provided to be presented for
listening (and digital downloads of content in multiple formats
retailed) in a full range of key online environments so are a key
viral tool. Right now many free services exist its just a matter of
utilizing the most useful amongst a range of competitors.

Spam fatigue: it's fundamental when automating promotion to conduct
this in a way that has some authenticity above your garden variety
spam campaign - creating relevance through whatever targeting is
available and creating interest by offering something of value – not
just another excuse to get in peoples faces.

Obviously the big push in in presence - awareness and accessibility,
not the hard sell to move units. But the key is creating as much ease
of access for those who just want to see the video or hear the song
and share it with their friends online to those who do want to
purchase downloads, merchandise, etc. or order cds.

P2P/RSS/Aggregation

P2P (Limewire, Bittorrent, Soulseek etc.) promotion is a forward
looking technique engaging viral users in their own environment, as
P2P is obviously the way most mp3 and increasingly video content is
distributed, albeit illegally. By making mp3 and video content
available 24 hours through all the most appropriate P2P networks,
you're releasing that content "into the wild" so to speak.

Much like creating searchability through the tagging of content, this
content can be duplicated and labelled in different ways to bring in a
broader range of search hits.

Aggregation services such as Last.fm are getting more popular as a
means to discover new music by recommending users music based on the
choices of other users who listen to the same music. As they expand on
the nature of the different music services they provide they're
crossing into providing content also, but creating access through
aggregration is the key.

Whereas RSS technology is still slowly catching on, when it reaches
critical mass, there will be an opportunity to respond by creating
access there.

Content required:

Obviously in terms of audio, video and written copy I work with
whatever I get, but images will be required as buttons and banners for
digital promotion and given the broad scale of promoting video and
audio content and the way that once it "goes viral" theres vey little
control over where it goes I think theres a need to include basic
information within the content – who the act is, their website, etc.

Alright! If you read all that you probably deserve a biscuit!

Don't be afraid to drop me a line!

Cheers all, Matt @ Kurb

Kurb is back

Alright . . . Kurb is BACK!!!

more indie self promotion articles hub
Artist promotions management packages
I've actually been back over a week but I quickly realised I wasn't going to just slot back into where my head was at before I attempted to do a 14 date tour while keeping kurb steaming along . . . as if that was ever gonna happen! More on that later.

Now by the end of july I had started to get a pretty good grasp on where things were headed from the crossroads of music and technology – and how what kurb does fits into that - the big question was the same one most clued up people are asking . . . we understand the direction new technology is taking the music industry, we're just not sure how to make money off it. Yet.

Many of the experts I follow almost religiously (Andrew Dubber, Gerd Leonhard, Bob Lefsetz) Seem to advocate an almost blind faith in a theoretical premise that if you're creating value (i.e free downloads) for users through content (Your songs etc.) and you can build recognition for your brand, you're gonna make some money one way or the other.

One fascinating thing Bob keeps banging on about is how little money there really is left in Top 40 music - his inference is that the people who listen to that music don't really care about it. Most of the biggest earning acts in the US are country acts I've barely ever heard of.

I keep referring back to local D'n B act Concord Dawn, who have accepted that filesharing is the reason they get good money playing to full houses in obscure east European cities they've barely heard of. Those who are the first to embrace the new technology will be the first to benefit.

Anyway, I didn't want to come back on it after my trip without something solid for people to get stuck into. Here's Gerd Leonhards latest slide on revenue streams.



Look at that. I think I'll have to take the time to analyse this in more detail at a later date.

For those looking at Kurbs agency fees of $200-300 p/month obviously it would be wonderful for us to guarantee a return on your investment, but like so many other comparable business models, building an enterprise in the music industry is about investing in your personal brand and creating value in it before seeing a return. Kurb is a business modelling itself to allow artists to take advantage of any proven opportunity the internet is creating an income from the content and brand provided by an artist.

So its situation Normal back at Kurb – you got New Zealand cheapest rates on short cd, dvd and poster runs – we're not talking about high end production standards we're talking about facilitating a multi level promotions strategy on a budget. We don't charge set up fees for graphics plus free delivery in New Zealand on all posters and CD's means you save on heaps of hidden costs on top of the saving you've already made.

So then it's about tackling the whole online situation because however you choose to see it, the internet is continuing to expand its ever growing influence on the music industry. This certainly doesn't mean we should turn our backs completely on traditional means, but in a country like New Zealand (where musicians are really feeling the pinch in a tiny market) you've got to be enthusiastic about how many more opportunities present themselves on a global level. I know this is pretty basic stuff but I'm just settling back in and all.



Though Kurb's key online strategies for artists can be divided into two distinct areas – Social (Myspace, Bebo, Facebook etc.) and Video (Youtube etc.) it's grounded in a concept that the artist is creating content (music, video, blogs, etc.) and we support the artist by mass distributing this content using all the "exclusive insider knowledge" (oooh! aaahhh!) I've built up - building and feeding a massive electronic information distribution network of digital pathways (profile pages, mp3 streaming, mini sites, blogs - lots of blogs) that reinforce themselves - and of course our particular skills and techniques for drawing on the massive audiences and opportunities for exposure and key network contacts created by a number of prominent internet communities – starting with this one.

Again, a future topic will definitely touch more how social networking is evolving – and more technical specifics of what I do for artists in networking and video promotion and why you've really got to approach your whole online marketing in terms of developing and maintaining a content "eco system" for your fans – it's not enough to have a free download on myspace or a cool video on youtube it will never be that simple anymore no matter what the press say.

I'm still watching the competition but still am not aware of anyone else doing everything I'm doing. When I'm talking about the techniques I use with Kurb I'm not talking about getting in amongst the throng, I'm talking about cutting through it and standing out - and using as many electronic loopholes and shortcuts as I'm aware of to get there.

I'm really excited about working with more artists and entrepreneurs who are serious about realising a vision and creating attention for those who are serious about delivering something people will treasure and gives them meaning. It's a really exciting time because what the internet has done is created an environment where quality and substance really does shine out amongst all the crap and for the first time in a while if you haven't got something to offer that's original and authentic you simply wont last.

I'm just getting back into it so drop me a line at kurbpromo@gmail.com

cheers, Matt


Kurb - a promotions company for artists serious about using the most effective online techniques to market their music. Come by our page and read our blogs on how the music industry is fundamentally changing now or check out:
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Cheers and all the best with your music from Kurb

Viral video marketing and the dons of indie music self promotion

Yeah just before you have a peek - you really must recognise the media power broadband is delivering into the hands of every day artists.

I've been researching into publicity (ie how to get artists radio play) and a lot of pundits are just saying forget it. Get your myspace (social networking) down, get your youtube (viral video marketing) down forget about radioplay and paying grands to publicists.

Sure, the digital environment is slowly destroying the retail value of music (please - don't infer this is something I'm pessimistic about - 90% of sweet FA is still a lot better than a record deal where you end up having to pay them back because your album "only" sells a few thousand units!) but now it is making video making and sharing commonplace and putting the power to use video marketing in the hands of every indie artists and small entrepreneur.

Don't worry - my kurb presentation videos are coming soon, we're still building a shooting studio in our shed!

I'm just trying to throw up a blog here, but basically the uses to which video can be used to promote and advertise you, your music, who you are, and what your music really represents - and why people should make a connection with it - the newest and most powerful way of getting out there.

Hopefully you would have seen local Emo band False Start's album launch video in my blogs showing how simple yet powerful interactivity can be in marketing music and entertainment.

A video you upload and link to/share/embed (through a blog - like this, or in a bulletin, comment, message etc.) doesn't have to be a "music video" or a live clip or even an interview . . . it could be you talking, jamming, telling a story, baking a cake - a really effective technique is matching your music to some entertaining footage - a crazy cartoon or maybe some politicized news footage - and sharing that, so people have gotta ask . . . hey . . . I like that tune in the background! This is what happens when something goes "Viral". This is what web 2.0 is all about. user driven content created by users and promoted by other users. Not big money labels spending multi millions so you can't escape from Justin Timberlake and Beyonce.

All this of course is just the start. Once you add Kurb's revolutionary next level online promtions packages, we put the marketing and sharing of your videos into overdrive. Videos or "mobisodes" or "Vblogs" are not only powerful direct marketing and branding exercises but - just like blogs - create additional search traffic - thats why optimizing your keywords, tags and most importantly all linked out with all your relevant links (your homesite, your itunes, your your myspace, your youtube, your bebo - you do have a bebo don't you? in NZ Bebo isn't just for kids anymore!) is SO important.

But not just on Youtube, Google, Myspace etc. - At Kurb we're using over 20 sites to market videos including www... which not only has the highest resolution videos but is also leading the way with paid content for all submissions. Paid content is the go when the big boys are jumping up and down about copyright. And if that means US20c per view and you've got your video on 20 sites being watched as little as 10 times a day each thats still US$40 a day! Once you add Kurbs online promotion techniques on top of that well . . . add another zero!

Anyway - back to those videos.

First off we got Derek from CDbaby stating almost verbatim from the article I put out yesterday. But Derek's like a god to the indie music scene so that's okay.










Finally, if you've got a lot of time on your hands, discover how the internet and definitions of "shelf space" have given dominance to the economic theory of the "Long Tail" - in short the death of "hits" and "blockbusters" and the growth of niches and selectivity is good news for indie artists everywhere. What happens as the 75% ($30b) share of the market controlled by the majors crumbles and punters look to distribute that spend elsewhere?




Also just a reminder of how powerful and exciting embedding stuff is - you can buy cuts from my last album right here!!! I'm not saying you should want to but accesibility is everything! Thats what kurb is about - digital accesibility and digital marketing that will outstrip the effectiveness of anything thats ever come before.

Kurb is a powerful new presence for marketing in the 21st century. We know the economic models, we know the marketing models, we stay up to date on the latest techniques and services and most importantly we exponentialise all of this by using technology your average record exec hasn't even considered. What we're doing is new. Don't miss your opportunity to work with us.

kurbpromoATgmail.com
+64 (0)27 6848250

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Tonight Matthew, I'm releasing an album

Yeah so I decided I really wanted to release an album. So first, I recorded my hit single "Tonight Matthew, I'm going to be a professional musician."

Then I jumped straight onto myspace, bebo and facebook posting bulletins letting all my fans know they can exclusively preview my new hit on the net.

Then I raced over to cdbaby.net. and signed up my new album for distro, featuring 10 super dance mega mixes alongside the original anthem.

I just needed to hook up a barcode so I can start shipping my new album to my distributor. So I paid my US$55 to CDbaby and sent them 5 of my cd's so that people around the world could order my cd from the internet and all good music stores across the ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />united states.

UNFORTUNATELY my NZ distributor felt that despite my professional approach with my registered barcode, my standards of presentation were lacking when I had clearly taken great effort to print my name on the cd. The material was supposed to sound like I had recorded it on a computer mic. Further to that, he remained aloof when I informed him marketing projections for the release of the album showed sales peaking as high as 2 units per month.

Distributors sheesh. The decline in physical sales is destroying the music industry – who do they think theyre kidding. I just went down to Real Groovy and explained that I had quite a following because I'm quite a neat friend to have on myspace and I was in Sione's Wedding briefly and I believed I could probably sell as many as 2 units in each major centre. I also drew their attention to my very professional barcode.

When he asked me the name of the label my record was coming out on, I said "Elephant" because it's the first thing that came into my mind.

They were happy to take 10 copies on a sale-or-return basis.

Later I came back in a wig and bought a copy.

When I got home I rang them for an inventory check and they informed me they had sold one copy.

Then I jumped onto my myspace and bebo and facebook and sent out a bulletin telling everyone that real groovy was now stocking my new album, so was available in each of the main centres!

My Grandma messaged back to say she couldn't get to real groovy because of her gammy hip and I said "That's okay grandma! Im selling copies for $10 on trademe!"

And that's how I set up Elephant Distribution. My friend Ian is really good on the spoons and he yells really crazily at the same time. Once I get my computer mic fixed, I'm going to be putting his album out on Elephant. With a barcode and everything.

I also gave my cd to Amplifier so they could sell my songs as digital downloads that way grandma can download it onto her ipod or buy the CD with her credit card, once ive paid off the bouncy castle. Digital downloads on Amplifier are awesome because those cd's cost me 50c, but when you sell a download it costs nothing.

But I did kind of want a cool banner with a cut and paste code so I could embed a way cool click thru link from my myspace. But I think I still managed to sell one song. I think that was grandma and she told me that it didn't sound like Howard Morrison at all.

And I still wasn't a professional musician! I needed gigs. So I went down to the Wine Cellar and told them how I've got a neat little song that I sing and that Ian is good on the spoons, I had a CD out with a proper barcode available through outlets across the united states and I would like to do a free show to promote the album.

I left them with my presskit which included a copy of my cd, a picture Ian had drawn of me and my bio describing me as "friendly towards females." They said they'd call if anything came up. I felt awesome to be gigging. I was working the circuit.

I also sent my CD to NZ musician to be reviewed because it was available through retail and not just a "demo". Then I was able to use quotes from the review on my myspace such as "if you like retarded yelping recorded through a computer microphone than this is for you". Which I really felt evoked apowerful sense of what my music is about.

But all my fans overseas on myspace like Kiko, Abdul, and Fritz wanted to buy my new single off itunes! So I went back to Cdbaby and signed up for free digital distribution on 30 of the worlds biggest digital retailers which gave me access to 100 million music buyers worldwide so I thought that was fun as I only have 3 friends in real life.

But then CDbaby hooked it up so I could have a storefront sell my mp3's from anywhere!!! My website, email, even on my myspace and in bulletins and comments and stuff! I Called grandma straight away to tell her she could now download my tunes straight from myspace. She asked me if the songs were any different and I told her it didn't matter because this was myspace and I was getting US69c out of US99c everytime she downloaded a song.

That's when I surprised by telling her Id actually used her credit card to download the song 1271 times and, given that I'd actually managed to sell in excess of 1270 downloads that day, I was going to commit some of my earnings towards paying off the bouncy castle.

I love my Grandma.

www.kurb.co.nz
www.myspace.com/kurbpromo

Artist 2.0: Sex, drugs and updating your blog [abridged] - awesome article in NY Times

AWESOME, AWESOME ARTICLE!!!! IF YOU DON'T FINISH IT, COME BACK AND READ THE REST LATER!!!! DONT FORGET OUR NZ MUSIC MONTH SPECIAL!!!50 cd DEMOS // 50 Colour A3's // 1 wild week on myspace with kurb!!!Don't miss out on your chance to work with us!! Word about the work we're doing is on the spread. Today I did my very last free consultancy. From now on if you want to have coffee with me . . . you've got to pay????
'fraid so. I'm a popular guy.

Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog . . .
By CLIVE THOMPSON

Jonathan Coulton sat in Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn, his Apple PowerBook open before him, and began slogging through the day's e-mail. In September 2005, he quit his job as a computer programmer and, with his wife's guarded blessing, became a full-time singer and songwriter. He set a quixotic goal for himself: for the next year, he would write and record a song each week, posting each one to his blog. By the middle of last year, his project had attracted a sizable audience. More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as "a reasonable middle-class living" — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site.

Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he's now feeling guilty about being rude.

Coulton welcomes his fans' avid attention; indeed, he relies on his fans in an almost symbiotic [interactive – Matt] way. When he couldn't perform a guitar solo for "Shop Vac," a glittery pop tune he had written about suburban angst — on his blog, he cursed his "useless sausage fingers" — Coulton asked listeners to record their own attempts, then held an online vote and pasted the winning riff into his tune. Other followers have volunteered hours of their time to help further his career.

Coulton's fans are also his promotion department, an army of thousands who proselytize for his work worldwide. More than 50 fans have created music videos using his music and posted them on YouTube; at a recent gig, half of the audience members I spoke to had originally come across his music via one of these fan-made videos. When he performs, he upends the traditional logic of touring. Normally, a new Brooklyn-based artist like him would trek around the Northeast in grim circles, visiting and revisiting cities like Boston and New York and Chicago in order to slowly build an audience — playing for 3 people the first time, then 10, then (if he got lucky) 50. But Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he'd be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140.

His fans need him; he needs them. Which is why, every day, Coulton wakes up, gets coffee, cracks open his PowerBook and hunkers down for up to six hours of nonstop and frequently exhausting communion with his virtual crowd. The day I met him, he was examining a music video that a woman who identified herself as a "blithering fan" had made for his song "Someone Is Crazy." It was a collection of scenes from anime cartoons, expertly spliced together and offered on YouTube.
"She spent hours working on this," Coulton marveled. "And now her friends are watching that video, and fans of that anime cartoon are watching this video. And that's how people are finding me. It's a crucial part of the picture. And so I have to watch this video; I have to respond to her."
He sipped his coffee. "People always think that when you're a musician you're sitting around strumming your guitar, and that's your job," he said. "But this" — he clicked his keyboard theatrically — "this is my job."

In the past — way back in the mid-'90s, say — artists had only occasional contact with their fans. If a musician was feeling friendly, he might greet a few audience members at the bar after a show. Then the Internet swept in. Now fans think nothing of sending an e-mail message to their favorite singer — and they actually expect a personal reply. This is not merely an illusion of intimacy. Performing artists these days, particularly new or struggling musicians, are increasingly eager, even desperate, to master the new social rules of Internet fame. They know many young fans aren't hearing about bands from MTV or magazines anymore; fame can come instead through viral word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video on YouTube.

So musicians dive into the fray — posting confessional notes on their blogs, reading their fans' comments and carefully replying. They check their personal pages on MySpace, that virtual metropolis where unknown bands and comedians and writers can achieve global renown in a matter of days, if not hours, carried along by rolling cascades of popularity. Band members often post a daily MySpace "bulletin" — a memo to their audience explaining what they're doing right at that moment — and then spend hours more approving "friend requests" from teenagers who want to be put on the artist's sprawling list of online colleagues.

This trend isn't limited to musicians; virtually every genre of artistic endeavor is slowly becoming affected, too. Filmmakers like Kevin Smith ("Clerks") and Rian Johnson ("Brick") post dispatches about the movies they're shooting and politely listen to fans' suggestions; the comedian Dane Cook cultivated such a huge fan base through his Web site that his 2005 CD "Retaliation" became the first comedy album to reach the Billboard Top 5 since 1978. But musicians are at the vanguard of the change. Their product, the three-minute song, was the first piece of pop culture to be fully revolutionized by the Internet. And their second revenue source — touring — makes them highly motivated to connect with far-flung fans.

This confluence of forces has produced a curious inflection point: for rock musicians, being a bit of a nerd now helps you become successful. When I spoke with Damian Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go, he discoursed like a professor on the six-degrees-of-separation theory, talking at one point about "rhizomatic networks." (You can Google it.) Kulash has put his networking expertise to good use: last year, OK Go displayed a canny understanding of online dynamics when it posted on YouTube a low-budget homemade video that showed the band members dancing on treadmills to their song "Here It Goes Again." The video quickly became one of the site's all-time biggest hits. It led to the band's live treadmill performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, which in turn led to a Grammy Award for best video.

This is not a trend that affects A-list stars. The most famous corporate acts — Justin Timberlake, Fergie, Beyoncé — are still creatures of mass marketing, carpet-bombed into popularity by expensive ad campaigns and radio airplay. They do not need the online world to find listeners, and indeed, their audiences are too vast for any artist to even pretend intimacy with. No, this is a trend that is catalyzing the B-list, the new, under-the-radar acts that have always built their success fan by fan. Across the country, the CD business is in a spectacular free fall; sales are down 20 percent this year alone. People are increasingly getting their music online (whether or not they're paying for it), and it seems likely that the artists who forge direct access to their fans have the best chance of figuring out what the new economics of the music business will be. But the B-list increasingly includes a newer and more curious life-form: performers like Coulton, who construct their entire business model online. Without the Internet, their musical careers might not exist at all. Coulton has forgone a record-label contract; instead, he uses a growing array of online tools to sell music directly to fans. He contracts with a virtual fulfillment house called CD Baby, which warehouses his CDs, processes the credit-card payment for each sale and ships it out, while pocketing only $4 of the album's price, a much smaller cut than a traditional label would take. CD Baby also places his music on the major digital-music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster. Most lucratively, Coulton sells MP3s from his own personal Web sites, where there's no middleman at all.

In total, 41 percent of Coulton's income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29 percent of his income is from CD sales; 18 percent is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 percent comes from T-shirts, often bought online.
Indeed, running a Web store has allowed Coulton and other artists to experiment with intriguing innovations in flexible pricing. Remarkably, Coulton offers most of his music free on his site; when fans buy his songs, it is because they want to give him money. The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has an even more clever system: she has a "pay what you can" policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes.

Yet this phenomenon isn't merely about money and business models. In many ways, the Internet's biggest impact on artists is emotional. When you have thousands of fans interacting with you electronically, it can feel as if you're on stage 24 hours a day.

"I vacillate so much on this," Tad Kubler told me one evening in March. "I'm like, I want to keep some privacy, some sense of mystery. But I also want to have this intimacy with our fans. And I'm not sure you can have both." The guitarist for the Brooklyn-based rock band the Hold Steady, Kubler drank a Sapporo beer and explained how radically the Internet had changed his life on the road. His previous band existed before the Web became ubiquitous, and each town it visited was a mystery: Would 20 people come out? Would two? When the Hold Steady formed four years ago, Kubler immediately signed up for a MySpace page, later adding a discussion board, and curious fans were drawn in like iron filings to a magnet. Now the band's board teems with fans asking technical questions about Kubler's guitars, swapping bootlegged MP3 recordings of live gigs with each other, organizing carpool drives to see the band. Some send e-mail messages to Kubler from cities where the band will be performing in a couple of weeks, offering to design, print and distribute concert posters free. As the band's appointed geek, Kubler handles the majority of its online audience relations; fans at gigs chant his online screen-name, "Koob."

"It's like night and day, man," Kubler said, comparing his current situation with his pre-Internet musical career. "It's awesome now."

Yet Kubler sometimes has second thoughts about the intimacy. Part of the allure of rock, when he was a kid, was the shadowy glamour that surrounded his favorite stars. He'd parse their lyrics to try to figure out what they were like in person. Now he wonders: Are today's online artists ruining their own aura by blogging? Can you still idolize someone when you know what they had for breakfast this morning? "It takes a little bit of the mystery out of rock 'n' roll," he said.

So Kubler has cultivated a skill that is unique to the age of Internet fandom, and perhaps increasingly necessary to it, as well: a nuanced ability to seem authentic and confessional without spilling over into a Britney Spears level of information overload..

The Hold Steady's online audience has grown so huge that Kubler, like Jonathan Coulton, is struggling to bear the load. It is the central paradox of online networking: if you're really good at it, your audience quickly grows so big that you can no longer network with them. The Internet makes fame more quickly achievable — and more quickly unmanageable. In the early days of the Hold Steady, Kubler fielded only a few e-mail messages a day, and a couple of "friend" requests on MySpace. But by this spring, he was receiving more than 100 communications from fans each day, and he was losing as much as two or three hours a day dealing with them. "People will say to me, 'Hey, dude, how come you haven't posted a bulletin lately?' " Kubler told me. "And I'm like, 'I haven't done one because every time I do we get 300 messages and I spend a day going through them!' "
To cope with the flood, the Hold Steady has programmed a software robot to automatically approve the 100-plus "friend" requests it receives on MySpace every day. Other artists I spoke to were testing out similar tricks, including automatic e-mail macros that generate instant "thank you very much" replies to fan messages.

[interesting how some of the types of work I do are slowly creeping into public exchange – which comes back to that previous point about providing authenticity – Matt@Kurb]

Even the most upbeat artist eventually crashes and burns. Indeed, fan interactions seem to surf along a sine curve, as an artist's energy for managing the emotional demands waxes and wanes. As I roamed through online discussion boards and blogs, the tone was nearly always pleasant, even exuberant — fans politely chatting with their favorite artists or gushing praise. But inevitably, out of the blue, the artist would be overburdened, or a fan would feel slighted, and some minor grievance would flare up.

When Jonathan Coulton first began writing his weekly songs, he carefully tracked how many people listened to each one on his Web site. His listenership rose steadily, from around 1,000 a week at first to 50,000 by the end of his yearlong song-a-week experiment. But there were exceptions to this gradual rise: five songs that became breakout "hits," receiving almost 10 times as many listeners as the songs that preceded and followed them. The first hit was an improbable cover song: Coulton's deadpan version of the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot rap song "Baby Got Back," performed like a hippie folk ballad. Another was "Code Monkey," his pop song about a disaffected cubicle worker.

Obviously, Coulton was thrilled when his numbers popped, not least because the surge of traffic produced thousands more dollars in sales. But the successes also tortured him: he would rack his brains trying to figure out why people loved those particular songs so much. What had he done right? Could he repeat the same trick?

"Every time I had a hit, it would sort of ruin me for a few weeks," he told me. "I would feel myself being a little bit repressed in my creativity, and ideas would not come to me as easily. Or else I would censor myself a little bit more." His fans, he realized, were most smitten by his geekier songs, the ones that referenced science fiction, mathematics or video games. Whenever he branches out and records more traditional pop fare, he worries it will alienate his audience.
For many of these ultraconnected artists, it seems the nature of creativity itself is changing. It is no longer a solitary act: their audiences are peering over their shoulders as they work, offering pointed comments and suggestions. All the artists I spoke to made a point of saying they would never simply pander to their fans' desires. But many of them also said that staying artistically "pure" now requires the mental discipline of a ninja.

These days, Coulton is wondering whether an Internet-built fan base inevitably hits a plateau. Many potential Coulton fans are fanatical users of MySpace and YouTube, of course; but many more aren't, and the only way for him to reach them is via traditional advertising, which he can't afford, or courting media attention, a wearying and decidedly old-school task. Coulton's single biggest spike in traffic to his Web site took place last December, when he appeared on NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday," a fact that, he notes, proves how powerful old-fashioned media still are. (And "Weekend Edition" is orders of magnitude smaller than major entertainment shows like MTV's "Total Request Live," which can make a new artist in an afternoon.) Perhaps there's no way to use the Internet to vault from the B-list to the A-list and the only bands that sell millions of copies will always do it via a well-financed major-label promotion campaign. "Maybe this is what my career will be," Coulton said: slowly building new fans online, playing live occasionally, making a solid living but never a crazy-rich one. He's considered signing on with a label or a cable network to try to chase a higher circle of fame, but that would mean giving up control. And, he says, "I think I'm addicted to running my own show now."

Will the Internet change the type of person who becomes a musician or writer? It's possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight.
It is also possible, though, that this is simply a natural transition point and that the next generation of musicians and artists — even the avowedly "sensitive" ones — will find the constant presence of their fans unremarkable. The psychological landscape has arguably already tilted that way for anyone under 20. There are plenty of teenagers today who regard themselves as "private" individuals, yet who post openly about their everyday activities on Facebook or LiveJournal, complete with camera-phone pictures. For that generation, the line between public and private is so blurry as to become almost nonexistent. Any teenager with a MySpace page is already fluent in managing a constant stream of dozens of semianonymous people clamoring to befriend them; if those numbers rise to hundreds or even thousands, maybe, for them, it won't be a big deal. It's also true that many recluses in real life flower on the Internet, which can famously be a place of self-expression and self-reinvention.

While researching this article, I occasionally scanned the list of top-rated bands on MySpace — the ones with the most "friends." One of the biggest was a duo called the Scene Aesthetic, whose MySpace presence had sat atop several charts (folk, pop, rock) for a few months. I called Andrew de Torres, a 21-year-old Seattle resident and a co-founder of the group, to find out his story. De Torres, who played in a few emo bands as a teenager, had the idea for the Scene Aesthetic in January 2005, when he wrote a song that required two dueling male voices. He called his friend Eric Bowley, and they recorded the song — an aching ballad called "Beauty in the Breakdown" — in a single afternoon in Bowley's basement. They posted it to MySpace, figuring it might get a couple of listens. But the song clearly struck a chord with the teen-heavy MySpace audience, and within days it had racked up thousands of plays. Requests to be the duo's "friend" came surging in, along with messages demanding more songs. De Torres and Bowley quickly banged out three more; when those went online, their growing fan base urged them to produce a full album and to go on tour.

"It just sort of accidentally turned into this huge thing," de Torres told me when I called him up. "We thought this was a little side project. We thought we wouldn't do much with it. We just threw it up online." Now their album is due out this summer, and they have roughly 22,000 people a day listening to their songs on MySpace, plus more than 180,000 "friends." A cross-country tour that ended last December netted them "a pretty good amount of money," de Torres added.
This sort of career arc was never previously possible. If you were a singer with only one good song, there was no way to release it independently on a global scale — and thus no way of knowing if there was a market for your talent. But the online fan world has different gravitational physics: on the basis of a single tune, the Scene Aesthetic kick-started an entire musical career.

Which is perhaps the end result of the new online fan world: it allows a fresh route to creative success, assuming the artist has the correct emotional tools. De Torres, a decade or more younger than Coulton and the Hold Steady, is a natural Artist 2.0: he happily spends two hours a day or more parsing notes from teenagers who tell him "your work totally got me through some rough times." He knows that to lure in listeners, he needs to post some of his work on MySpace, but since he wants people to eventually buy his album, he doesn't want to give away all his goods. He has thus developed an ear for what he calls "the perfect MySpace song" — a tune that is immediately catchy, yet not necessarily the strongest from his forthcoming album. For him, being a musician is rather like being a business manager, memoirist and group therapist rolled into one, with a politician's thick hide to boot.

The digital revolution and why your music is worth nothing,

Hi I'm Matt from Kurb promo. For my first blog I was going to try and bring musicians up to speed with how the digital distribution of music is changing the industry but last night I had a realisation that I didn't think many musicians are ready to comprehend let alone accept. That is why I decided to write about it.

Your music is worth nothing.

Purely in financial terms, that is. If you get a lot of fulfilment and enjoyment out of writing and performing that's a great reward, but my clients are people who have taken the step of working towards earning a living from music and so that's my angle. But it's not time to collect the coins in your guitar case and go to the pub just yet.

The internet means music is becoming like water. You can try and bottle it and launch a massive marketing campaign to sell it but most people will still choose the tap. So what do you do? Give them the water for free. Start selling cups and glassware.

What the digital revolution means is that technology has now allowed for information – music - to be more accessible to anyone with high speed broadband than ever before. The fact that entertainment no longer needs to have a physical form (i.e. a CD or DVD) is totally changing the music industry. Labels, publishers, distributors, retailers all those who had the most to gain from music as a physical commodity are now bitterly resisting falling profits. Though we might certainly see a "fairer" music industry, even with the online distribution blooming into life musicians have to face that technology is slowing eroding the commercial value of music as a general retail commodity.

If your music is worth buying its worth stealing. In fact if no one wants to steal your music, you know no one will buy it! Which is all a matter of perception because on the internet it's called "sharing" and anybody with half a clue can do it.

The patterns of consumption are changing. Teenagers aren't going to save their pocket money and buy their favourite CD and listen to it for a month. They're going to download something new everyday and listen to it for a week.

I'm not sure it's a moral issue. The point I'm getting at is that I downloaded the latest Shapeshifter album and I decided I liked 3 of the songs, so I paid US$3 to download them and Shapeshifter gets US$2.07. $3. well that doesn't buy many Porsches. In fact it doesn't even by a happy meal, let alone a decent feed of chips for all the guys.

You have to remember when I buy the CD at the Warehouse for $30 the musician doesn't get much more. And with slumping CD sales due to digital developments the business side of the industry is shrinking dramatically, so although Musicians can now see a bigger cut of their earnings than ever before, they have to be smart to stay in it professionally.

So whats going to pay the bills for poor Bic working her day job? Smart musicians have to realise their music that they love is no longer the product, its the window dressing. Lets talk about how musicians are going to make their money in the future: Merchandising: To be fair this is going to make a hell of a lot more sense if you're a teen Christian emo band that plays at the church hall once a month and has a massive following on myspace and in the youth groups. That's why you'll notice many of auckland's emo and punk bands have their own label. And no I don't mean a record label. Obviously if you're an experimental free noise artist it may not be immediately obvious what items may interest your audience but everyone likes clothes. Giving away water at shows? Buy a hot False Start cup. Merchandising may also be a cunning way to influence fans to pay for the CD they've already downloaded "illegally".

Gigs: Obviously. At least one thing will never change. Nothing beats a great live show. Maybe you don't have a great live show. Then you might wanna pay to book a headliner that everyone knows does and support them. If you see what I mean.

Videos: "The singers shit but I love their camera work." Again, your music maybe worth nothing but your music videos are worth more than ever. paid content is coming people. What if you wake up in 2008 and you're being paid as much as US30c for every view on youtube? And 100 people watch your video everyday? What if your video is totally next level and it blows up or gets featured and 100,000 people watch it in a week? Hullo? Which means that guy in media school who's always hanging around? He's your best friend now.

Licensing: Music may not be worth anything any more but it hasn't stopped being sexy. Music creates meaning it creates an image, and if a product has no image then it has no appeal. The trends indicate that digital licensing for film, television, advertising software and all manner of commercial uses is coming up in a big way, not only with the Merlin deal but also online licensing agencies multiplying.See to licensing agents, labels and publishing copyrights are actually now a big drag and they love indie artists who hold all the rights themselves. Take Steriogram, arguably the country's biggest "indie" act. Brad told me their deal with Playstation was done in less than an hour. That'd be a well paid lunch break even for Bic.
So.

Making music is what you love and it's the reason you got into this. But lets face facts. Music is becoming lean and mean, to stay alive, you must evolve. The digital revolution means that already the music you create and record no longer has nearly the value as a product as it has in the past. But it still has value as a brand. It still has value as something true and meaningful that touches people and they believe in it. Which is every marketing manager like me's dream.
Because then you can sell them anything.

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http://www.kurb.co.nz
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