Interviews, Marketing, Music

Setlist Music Part II: What Bands Really Need

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For the second half of this two part series, I interviewed Robin Fairbanks, A&R at Seattle’s Setlist Music Solutions. Robin is an amazing music industry resource who has developed, managed and promoted many bands and solo artists across the country.

She has also done just about everything there else is to do professionally in the music industry, including being an on-air radio personality and doing radio sales, online radio programming, original music sales, full-service advertising and PR, booking, and event promotion. In this interview, Robin gives indie artists her perspective and advice on how to be successful in the music industry.

Robin is so engaging, we spent two full hours together talking together, so this is a long interview, but I think it’s chock full of important information.

You may also be interesting in reading Part I in this series, an interview with Robin’s colleague at Setlist Music, Elizabeth O’Keefe.

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Interviews, Marketing, Music

Setlist Music Part I: Cafeteria Style Marketing For Musicians

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I recently interviewed two of my favorite, no-nonsense women in the Seattle music scene, Robin Fairbanks (A&R) and Elizabeth O’Keefe (Operations). They are both part of a music consulting company called Setlist Music Solutions, headed up by Sean Hensley, which specializes in artist development and management. Part I of this series offers Elizabeth’s perspective, and Part II will showcase Robin’s point of view. Both of these women have a lot of hands-on experience helping indie artists succeed.

It’s no secret that the options for self-promotion are greater than ever before for musicians. As a DIY independent artist myself, I often find it overwhelming just to understand all the different business and marketing things I need to do on a daily basis in order to be successful – to say nothing of actually getting them all done – and I have an MBA (and experience in marketing!) Like many artists, I fantasize about a record label riding in like a white knight, begging to sign me and to do all the work to promote my career as a musician. While this still happens for some artists, for most of us, it’s important to move forward with the reigns of our careers still firmly grasped in our own sweaty, trembling hands.

So what’s a girl to do when she realizes there is no way she can do it all herself?

Boutique Label

The idea of a boutique recording or music label has been around for a while, and has been written about in articles like this in-depth Baltimore City Paper article published in 2010 or in this article about the Arizona-based Cosmica Artists label. While the terms indie label and boutique label often seem to be used interchangeably, a boutique label generally focuses on a small artist roster, or even a single emerging artist. It may even be started and owned by a producer, or the artists themselves. It could be a non-profit artist collective.

The signed artist(s) may do none, or some of their own marketing. The boutique label may or may not act like a traditional label, providing (and funding) most or all of the services an artist needs, from recording to promotion, booking and tour management. Artists may have to pay for some, or all, services provided, but they get to say they are “signed” to a label. Boutique labels will not sign just anyone, but they might take a chance on a relatively unknown artist. The artist and label’s brands are associated with each other. The boutique label generally chooses the artist, not the other way around.

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Marketing, Music

Female Guitarist Alice Stuart Shows Us How It’s Done At 71

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She was featured in Guitar Player magazine in 1974. Rolling Stone did three stories about her in the 1970s.

 “There would be no Bonnie Raitt without Alice Stuart.” – Dick Waterman

If you want to know how to be successful long term in the music business – and how to continue to be successful in the 21st century new online, Do-It-Yourself model – you would do well to study the example of Seattle musician Alice Stuart.

She may not be a household name, but Stuart is a pioneer with a loyal fan base who has had remarkable lifetime success and longevity in a tough industry.

Alice Stuart 1973A Trailblazer For Women in Rock

Alice Stuart blazed the trail for women in rock and roll as one of the only females in the country to write her own music, front a male band, and play lead guitar on national and international circuits.

Stuart has played with many greats, including Jerry Garcia, John Prine, Albert King, Richard Greene, Elvin Bishop, Joan Baez, Doc Watson, Phil Ochs, Mississpi John Hurt, Frank Zappa, The Chambers Brothers, Tower of Power & Commander Cody.

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Marketing, Music

Case Study In Music Marketing: The Aury Moore Band (Part II)

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In Part I of this series, I focused on the successful Kickstarter ($20K+) campaign held last fall by the female-fronted indie Seattle band, the Aury Moore Band. Their recently released CD, Here I Am was produced this spring by Stevie (full disclosure). I’m not affiliated myself in any way with band, although I’ve shared some marketing tips with her over the years, and I appreciate what Aury has done to market her CD. In this post, I will detail Aury’s June 2013 CD release party for Here I Am, including the budget and key promotional elements.

Budget

I received several requests for more detailed cost information after writing a blog post about my own (much smaller) CD release party in April. I think Aury’s party is a better lesson on how to make money on a CD release party, so I asked her if she would be willing to share her numbers. She was most gracious, so here they are:

aury_poster3Costs: Approximately $1300

  • Venue: $0
  • Merchandise: $200 (most was left over from the Kickstarter campaign)
  • Raffle Items: $100
  • Posters, Flyers and VIP Passes:$260
  • Pre-printed Tickets: $40
  • 1000 CDs (jewel case, 4-page color folder/traycard): $1500 (roughly 400 were given out the night of the party, and an additional 200 mailed out to Kickstarter backers)

Revenue: Approximately $10,000

  • Pre-sold Tickets: $4000 (online ticket fees were paid by purchasers)
  • Tickets Sold At Door: $4000 (some attendees were “comped”)
  • Extra Raffle Tickets: $200 (went to charity)
  • Merchandise: $700

(I assume Aury has some kind of revenue-sharing deal with her bandmates, but I didn’t ask about that.) So how did Aury end up netting around $8K at her CD release party?

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Marketing, Social Media

Case Study In Music Marketing: The Aury Moore Band (Part I)

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A few weeks ago I attended an inspiring CD release party for the Aury Moore Band‘s new CD, Here I Am. The AMB is a female-fronted indie Seattle rock band whose latest CD was produced by Stevie (full disclosure). I’ve been fortunate to be a part of Aury’s inner circle, and even to feed her a few music marketing tips. She’s an experienced and accomplished musician and marketer herself, and I wanted to share the story of this 12-song CD.

This article is the first of a two-part series. In the first post, I describe how Aury used Kickstarter to successfully raise over $20,000 to record, promote and pre-sell her CD. In Part II, I outline how Aury followed up with a highly successful CD release party and what might lie in store as she continues the process of marketing her newest release.

The promotion of this CD began even before it was produced. A well-executed CD release, launch and promotion process is ideally 12-14 months, and a crowd funding campaign with Kickstarter (or via another crowd funding platofrm such as PledgeMusic, IndieGoGo or RocketHub) is an important and powerful marketing and pre-sales technique.

The Timeline

  • Spring 2012: Aury and her band came to Stevie, wanting to record a new CD. Aury had recorded in the past, and had actually begun the process with another producer, but he was tragically killed. She didn’t have funds to continue making the CD at the time, and was talking to a few individual fans about the possibility of them funding it. Aury and I talked about the idea of doing a Kickstarter campaign to raise money instead of relying on one or two individuals. I invited Seattle singer-songwriter Jean Mann over to my house to participate in a group discussion on music marketing for several of Stevie’s clients. Jean graciously detailed to the group how she had used Kickstarter to raise money for her CD. It was something Aury and her band had never done before, but Aury recognized the potential right away and started planning.
  • Summer 2012: Aury researched Kickstarter, and then began work on the video and premiums for her campaign.
  • August – October 2012: The AMB Kickstarter campaign ran for 60 days, ultimately raising $2000 above the original goal of $18,000.
  • October 2012 – May 2013: Stevie, Aury and the band recorded and mixed the CD.
  • June 2013: Aury Moore Band CD release party happens with over 400 people attending.
  • July 2013: As of this writing, the new CD is available on CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon, etc. and they have sold about 600 physical CDs.
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Marketing, Social Media

How To Grow Your Twitter Following

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Professional social media marketers know that Twitter is a great way to reach out to fans and influencers, to interact and build a network of professional acquaintances, to gain exposure and, ultimately, to help sell products to a customer or fan base. The logic is, of course, that the more followers you have on Twitter, the larger your marketing reach. There is a lot of debate about whether it’s better to have more followers (“quantity”), or a small group of egaged followers (“quality”). This depends to some extent on one’s business goals, but as one blogging social media expert points out:

As much as you’d like to say that quantity doesn’t matter, well it does. – Jeff Bullas

Follow Others To Increase Your Twitter Following

If you have a Twitter account, you may already know that the best way to grow your followers is to actively follow others, and some percentage will follow you back. The more things you have in common with a user, the more likely they are to follow you back, so it’s a good idea to follow others based on a keyword  search of their profiles or tweets. The problem is that this is a time-consuming process when done manually – one can spend hours a day doing it.

Twitter used to have a feature called automated following, but they recently disabled it. They have done this largely because of the proliferation of fake Twitter accounts which have been used by unscrupulous marketers to inflate Twitter accounts. Along with this change by Twitter, automated Twitter follow tool TweetAdder has settled their lawsuit with Twitter and changed their product, requiring all users to upgrade. Because of the changes Twitter has made to try and address its fake follower problems, TweetAdder and other tools based on Twitter’s automated follow feature are no longer as effective as they used to be.

The truth is that building a large Twitter following has never been “organic.” As far as I can tell from the last 18 months of research and observation, unless you become a YouTube sensation overnight, growing a significant Twitter following quickly requires one of the following four practices:

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Conferences, Marketing, Social Media

Basics of Musician Vlogging and Seattle’s First VloggerFair

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Vlogging is an increasingly popular communication medium, and I think it’s a largely underutilized way for indie musicians to communicate with fans, perform live, do interviews, build their YouTube subscribers, and share information about themselves and their lives. Musicians might even find it an unexpected source of additional income.

What is vlogging, you may ask? Vlogging is a contraction of the phrase “video blogging.” Vlogging is what happens when you publish regular, serialized video episodes on YouTube and people “tune in,” or subscribe, to your YouTube channel to watch. Vloggers, some of them quite young, but many of every age, are making a living doing this. If they offer interesting content, and can build a good subscriber base, it can be a very good living for some of the superstars of vlogging. Vloggers provide the content, people subscribe to watch it, and advertisers sell ads on their YouTube channels through the partner program.

Chris Pirillo’s VloggerFair 2013 In Seattle

I just attended VloggerFair here in sunny Seattle. VloggerFair is a combination trade show and giant fan club convention conceived and organized by the fast-talking and very creative Chris Pirillo. Chris is the star of the YouTube channel LockerGnome, a “Geek Lifestyle” channel with 288,000 subscribers. In addition to his fast-paced LockerGnome tech gadget reviews, Chris and his wife, Diana, also vlog about their day to day lives in what amounts, more or less, to a reality TV show on YouTube.

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Marketing, Social Media

Marketing Chap: The Batman of Blogging

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There are some important things to know about Mark Etingchap (that’s Marketing Chap, to you):

Oh, yes, and, the most important thing of all:

  • Mark Etingchap is not a real person. 
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Marketing, Music

iTunes Past and Future: Hypebot’s Spitz and Bylin [Podcast]

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Alas, a decade is practically an eternity online, and as such, the download-to-own concept that iTunes revolutionized is already showing signs of age. The growth of subscription-based streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, and the current cultural dominance of YouTube, with its more than three billion videos viewed daily, hint that  that music consumers are now largely content to listen, rather than own. – Time Entertainment, April 28, 2013

In this two-part podcast, Jason Spitz and Kyle Bylin of Hypebot’s Upward Spiral Podcast and I discuss some of the customer needs and behaviors that drove iTunes adoption: the unbundling of the single from the CD purchase, as well as the product characteristics (seamless integration with the iPhone, ease of use, standardized pricing). It’s interesting to hear the generational differences in how we adopted (or didn’t!) iTunes to build our personal music libraries, and to note that iTunes clearly was a substitute product for pirated music, even if an imperfect one.

In the second half of our discussion, we cover the transition of customers from download to streaming and debate where the future may lie for Apple’s iTunes and the consumption of music. We discuss iTunes competitors, and what factors might determine whether Apple will continue to dominate music distribution, such as the ubiquity and seamlessness of wifi, and the deep pockets of a platform player like Google, Amazon or Apple, as compared to a software-only offering such as Spotify or Pandora.

Kyle Bylin is the founder and editor of sidewinder.fm, a music and tech think tank, and also conducts research and develop music product concepts for Live Nation Labs. Jason Spitz is an ecommerce expert helping bands, comedians, and other artists build direct-to-fan businesses. In addition to being super-knowledgeable about the music industry, Jason and Kyle are expert conversationalists, and they always pick topics that are timely and interesting.

I sure had fun talking to these guys. Please let me know what you think of our discussion in the comments below!

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