video | Solveig Whittle

Interviews, Marketing, Music, Social Media

Positive And Sexy: An Interview With Indie Artist @SuCh

December 17, 2015 5 Comments

I “met” Denver, CO singer and actress Su Charles (AKA SuCh) on one of the Grammy® Facebook pages, where she has been active posting and conversing with other musicians and sharing her music during this fall’s Grammy voting season. I was impressed with her single, “Sugar Maple”, from her 2014 album, Trial and Error, and the many YouTube views of her video (you can watch and listen to Sugar Maple on YouTube at the bottom of this post, where you can also find a link to SuCh’s music website and iTunes page. I also linked below to a lovely bio piece the Denver Post did for more background info).

What impressed me most about SuCh, in addition to her great voice and music, and the incredible diversity of her talents (she’s also an actress), is the positivity and sweet sexiness of her music.

I love that I can enjoy SuCh’s genuine smile, watch her playfully sexy imagery and production – and listen to her music – without her music video being NSFW.

As a woman in music (and an old-school feminist), I applaud any woman who can walk that line and be as successful at promoting their music as SuCh has been. Most of us women in music want visibility for ourselves in the industry. We certainly want people to discover our music. Sometimes it feels, though, like the only path to “visibility” is to show a lot of skin in your music marketing images.

Don’t get me wrong, I love skin. It feels like mainstream pop music videos have merged with the soft porn industry, however. Not so for SuCh’s music videos. There’s skin, but it doesn’t distract us from her music. (Maybe it’s the minister’s daughter thing). OK, I will step down from my post-feminist soapbox now.

Here’s my interview with SuCh, a positive and sexy young woman (and a mother, daughter and wife) who is successfully promoting her music first:

Marketing, Music, Social Media

5 Tips To Make A Viral Music Video

June 1, 2015 2 Comments

[Watch me talk about this post with Michael Brandvold on the Music Biz Weekly Episode 195 on YouTube here or listen to it on Soundcloud here.]

YouTube is the number one search engine for music, so having at least one or two music videos up there seems like a no brainer, check-the-box item for an indie musician.

And once in a while, a music video from an unknown artist goes viral, giving them a huge boost in visibility.

As indie artists, we all feel the pressure to produce a stellar music video (or two), and we look with no small amount of envy at those artists who seem to get discovered overnight via their viral music video. But how is it done? Can you make a music video that is more likely to go viral?

I’m less interested in the viral videos by popular stars like Taylor Swift (Bad Blood) or Sia (Elastic Heart, Big Girls Cry), because those are undoubtedly supported by large online marketing efforts. I’m more interested in music videos made by relatively unknown artists with small to zero marketing budgets which nonetheless seem to have caught on and propelled those musicians’ careers forward in a significant way.

So let’s look at three recent examples.

Interviews, Marketing, Music, News, Social Media

How New Age Musicians @RickyKej and @WouterKellerman Won A Grammy

October 27, 2014 5 Comments

In fall of 2014, I interviewed New Age artists Ricky Kej and Wouter Kellerman about how they marketed their newest collaboration, Winds of Samsara. The album debuted in July at No. 1 on the Billboard New Age Chart, and then spent the following 12 weeks in the Top 10.

****** UPDATE!! February 8, 2015 – Kellerman and Kej WON a Grammy for Best New Age Album at the 57th Grammys. Congratulations! It couldn’t have gone to two nicer musicians and a harder working team. ******

Ricky, Wouter and their team are a hybrid indie artist marketing model: neither the artist nor the label does 100% of the marketing. Most of the marketing strategy, however, is planned and driven by the artists and their managers, with similarities to how Macklemore (Ben Haggerty), Ryan Lewis and Zach Quillen drove the charting success of The Heist in 2013.

Ricky and Wouter signed this project with a label, but they recognized from the start that their label wasn’t going to do everything needed to promote the album. The artists themselves needed to pitch in, especially with social media promotion. That is the powerful story here – all the incredible networking and promotion this team did for the album, in addition to using key industry resources at their label to help strategically promote the album in distribution and on the radio.

I’ve seen first hand on social media how Ricky, his wife Varsha Kej, Wouter, and Wouter’s manager, Tholsi Pillay, persistently promote Winds of Samsara. All four fluidly mix the creative with business. In addition to being Wouter’s manager, Tholsi played keyboards and synth on the album, and Varsha is Ricky’s manager as well as a sitar player.

I wanted to hear more about how this marketing dynamo planned and executed their marketing, and what has gone into debuting and maintaining Winds of Samsara’s Billboard chart status over the past weeks and months. I also wanted to know what kind of promotional team they have behind them (distributor, PR, etc.)

Conferences, Marketing, Social Media

Basics of Musician Vlogging and Seattle’s First VloggerFair

June 11, 2013 2 Comments

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.