Veeple - Make Your Videos Interactive - Interview Feature
03 Nov
Posted by elemental as Interview, web 2.0 tools
Veeple is an “interactive video service”. They provide a way for content owners and publishers to monetize their video content, by embedding interactive, clickable elements to your video. So for example you can embed clickable logos and links within your video to send viewers to your website, social network profile, online retailer etc.
This is not another Youtube. Veeple is not a distribution network, but rather a tool to enhance the content that you distribute. Taken from the Veeple site:
Make anything in your video clickable, or add clickable media files, images, relevant icons, MP3 files, and more, creating a powerful interactive experience for your users.
Engage with advertisers and sponsors to pay for interactive links anywhere within your video. Share your interactive video across the internet, driving traffic back to your site or anywhere on the web through your clickable links.
Why You Need A Digital Strategy, Not Just A Marketing Campaign
14 Oct
Posted by elemental as Marketing Tips
The idea for this article would nag at me each time I realized that an artist or label didn’t have any kind of long term digital plan, relegating online matters to the realm of “let’s set up a myspace page” but were banking on their next album to create a big splash. I find that many still aren’t collecting email addresses or doing anything to proactively find and communicate with their fans. There’s also some large corporations I know of whose online activities are less strategic and mostly just chaotic. Artists, (and indeed other businesses and brands) would do better to think of themselves in larger terms and see album releases, not as the be-all and end-all, but as another promotional event within an overall business strategy.
What’s the difference between a strategy and a promotional/marketing campaign?
What I mean by strategy is a long-term vision, plan or direction that you have for your career as an artist, business or brand. It is not only the vision, but the roadmap that helps you plan your course. Your strategy may change over time or adapt to circumstances, but the point is that you are not just blindly plodding along hoping for the best.
In contrast, a marketing campaign is a short/mid term promotional plan, usually around a specific product or event, such as an album release, or a tour. Such a campaign would be one element of your overall strategy.
What I usually find is that a lot of independent artists think that their album marketing campaign IS their strategy. They hire publicists and promoters etc when they have an album coming out and know they need a promotional push, but what’s going on the other 9 or 10 months out of the year that are not part of that new release window? Many times, the answer seems to be, not much.
Why treat yourself as a seasonal business that must hope to make as much as possible from one release? Wouldn’t it be better to develop ways to create residual income with the bonus of spikes around album releases, tours and so forth?
This is where strategy comes into play.
A Musician Speaks Out On The Benefits of P2P
13 Oct
Posted by elemental as Marketing Tips, New Music Business Models
DrownedInSound.com just published a post from a musician explaining in clear detail how P2P, and specifically Mininova has helped him gain access to potential fans. It can be summed up in this sentence:
“In two days more people have been exposed to my music than in the entire previous 12 months.”
While this type of promotion may not be the right choice for every artist, Fakesensations’ story shows that it can be an effective strategy, and more importantly that the option to utilize P2P should be up to the artists, not the major labels, ISPs or anyone else.
So this is definitely the coolest thing I learned this week and I wanted to share it with you because it takes digital marketing to a whole new level!
Yesterday I was coordinating the press preview for Scion’s new exhibit at their Culver City gallery: “Insiders, Outsiders & the Middle” curated by Giant Robot. Space Invader is one of the featured artists. As I watched the artists set up their work and transform the gallery before my eyes, I had the opportunity to chat with Space Invader about one of his pieces. The photo below was taken with my Blackberry Curve, so it’s not the best, but it will do….
So while this is a piece of art, there is very literally a hidden message. This is actually a QR Code/Data Matrix , which is the next generation of barcodes. I believe that QR Code and Data Matrix are 2 versions of the same technology and that the former was developed by a Japanese company and the latter by an American one. They work in the same way but just look a little different. We are all familiar with the black and white vertical lines of a barcode which designate a series of numbers. Well the QR Code, which is already very common in Japan (of course the US is technologically lagging), actually contains real data - words, hyperlinks, contact info, numbers etc. You can scan it with your reader-equipped cell phone and a message will pop up on your screen, or even a hyperlink.
Will Variable Pricing Ruin The Music Industry?
28 Jul
Posted by elemental as Commentary, New Music Business Models
Well, in my opinion it will if the price goes too low.
Ever since iTunes instigated the $0.99 per song model, it has been hotly debated. Some folks think $0.99 is too expensive for a song; others think it is not expensive enough. Still more think that there shouldn’t just be one standard price for tracks; that labels and artists should have more flexibility in pricing so that hot, new items can be priced higher than catalog material, following the pattern in brick and mortar stores. As part of this overall debate, there seems to be emerging what I think is a disturbing trend of wanting the new standard per-track price to be in the region of just $0.25.
I was prompted to write this specific post by what I read in a recent email newsletter from Bob Davis of Soul Patrol. He referred to some comments from Nettwerk Management CEO Terry McBride suggesting that the sweet spot for selling digital tracks is $0.25 and that this is what labels should be selling them for in order to create a ‘tipping point’ for digital music sales. Davis suggested that he felt the same way based on sales of his Virtual Album project where he varied the pricing of the album and found that approx $0.20 was the most popular per-track price.
I definitely agree with the overall concept of having variable pricing available as a digital retail model - the more options for artists, labels and consumers, the better. But I just can’t get my head around the overall goal of making music so ridiculously cheap. Call me old-fashioned but music in digital format has already been greatly devalued in the eyes of the consumer so why perpetuate this devaluation by suggesting that a song is only worth $0.25? Shouldn’t we be doing more to add value, not decrease it?
An article in the new VIBE magazine looks at ways rappers like Crooked I, Mickey Factz and others have been operating outside the label system and using the internet to create demand for themselves. I just read the online excerpt but am curious to check out the full story. For the past 52 weeks, Crooked I has released a new freestyle via the web every Tuesday to create his own buzz. Factz has released numerous mixtapes online in the past couple of years and is now about to have a video on MTV.
So this is proof that the internet can work for some artists, but the common denominator in these, and other examples, is that it didn’t happen overnight. We’re talking months and years of consistent action and online networking in order to create the critical mass of online buzz needed to garner real attention. As I emphasised in my post on common Myths and Mistakes in Online Music Marketing, a digital strategy has to have a short and long term - it’s not a fast-track to instant success and I think this is where a lot of artists go wrong. This applies offline as well, but you have to be in it for the long haul and have a plan that makes best use of the tools available.
Adding Value To Single Songs
15 Jul
Posted by elemental as Commentary, Marketing Tips, New Music Business Models
Even though I’m clearly firmly entrenched in the digital age, I’m still a little old school when it comes to music. What I mean is that while I buy digital music on a regular basis, I still love the idea of CDs- something tangible that gives me more than just the music - liner notes, pictures, lyrics, all the writing/production credits etc. There’s no doubt in my mind that the advent of digital music has devalued music and the consumption of it. Quantity has overtaken quality in many cases - how many free songs can I download, how much can I fit on my iPod, how many new artists can I find today. Nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but it just means that, in these terms, a single, solitary song is seen as disposable and barely worth paying for.
So it made me very happy to see what Lucas Gonze has been working on with his own music. He has created a dedicated page for a song “Frog In The Well” which adds a tremendous amount of context and value. There’s video as well as audio files, blog posts, sheet music, and background info. This is smart from several points of view and I’d love to see more artists doing this:
1) Additional SEO-able content for your site
2) With the addition of comments, you can create community around one song and further engage your audience.
3) Adding all this value for one song adds an additional emotional appeal to your music. Not only can fans see the amount of care and attention that has been invested on the part of the artist but it broadens their experience of the song and their emotional attachment to it.
4) By using a Creative Commons license and encouraging derivations, the life of the song is extended.
These are just some of the benefits of this type of song - enhancement and I look forward to see what Lucas and other artists will continue to do with this type of experiment.
If you are an artist and are doing something similar, or implement a similar method to Lucas, feel free to drop me a line.
Lucas has also taken this concept a step further and published on his blog a manifesto for the song page which includes ideas for structured implementation of this concept. I highly recommend reading this
So this is not really a digital marketing post but I thought I’d share some other music-related thoughts here.
On Monday June 30th I attended the Urban Alternative Music panel here in Los Angeles, put on by The Recording Academy Los Angeles Chapter, at The Standard hotel downtown. A who’s who of the LA urban music scene was in attendance. Everyone from artists Leon Ware and Lina, to publicists, promoters, local artists, as well as reps from major labels and publishers, were in the room.
The moderator was David Mitchell of Urban Network Magazine. The panelists were:
Vikter Duplaix - GRAMMY-nominated recording artist and DJ
Dexter Story – Talent buyer/concert promoter, Temple Bar, Zanzibar, Little temple
Steve McKeever - Founder, Hidden Beach Recordings
Garth Trinidad – DJ – KCRW, music supervisor, event promoter
Sy Smith – Recording artist, musician
The panel was in part a debate on the Urban Alternative Performance category of the GRAMMYs, and in part a recruiting initiative for the Recording Academy to gain more members, that would better represent the audience of this category. This category is defined by the Academy as follows: “For newly recorded urban/alternative performances with vocals. This category is intended for artists who have been influenced by a cross section of urban music- from R&B, Rap and Jazz, to Rock and Spoken Word – and whose music is generally that which is outside of mainstream trends.”
The panel started out with a discussion on “what is the definition of urban alternative music?” which was a continuing theme throughout the evening. Honestly I felt this aspect was a little fruitless. Anyone who is truly a music lover pretty much ignores categories. And have you ever heard an artist say “I love it when people put me in a box and define my music for me”? So here you have a group of artists and artist-friendly people, discussing the thing they hate – categories – in a panel put on by one of the industry’s chief proponents of categories! So that part of the discussion was a little circular and unproductive as for the most part people discussed how restrictive it is for artists to have to define themselves a certain way etc. Nothing new there. Clearly in the context of the GRAMMYs, categories are necessary, and since this category has already been defined as described above, why talk circles around it? Why not start out accepting the fact that the category has been defined in the way it has, and move on from there?
I touched on the issue of major labels not allowing the embedding of their content, in a previous post “9 Myths and Mistakes in Online Music Marketing“. It’s my position that this is a Bad Move on the part of the majors, or any corporation that tries to do this. It is contrary to the nature of the viral sites they upload content to, such as YouTube, to try and prevent the obvious taking place. Why must they take tools designed for sharing and viral perpetuation and try and bend and warp them to their will? If you don’t want to play nice, just get out of the sandbox instead of trying to own the sandbox for yourself. No one likes a bully.
Lucas Gonze presents a much more eloquent and well-balanced view of this issue in this blog post, “the business impact of requesting to disable embedding of music videos in label channels on YouTube.” Read the rest of this entry »