Ariel Publicity

I hope everyone survived hurricane Irene this weekend. Now that natural disasters are out of the way, it’s time to get back to rockin’ the music world! This week in Musician’s Arsenal, I’d like to talk about something most musician’s don’t like to think about. Rights. An unfortunate, but necessary reality of the music industry is that we need to understand how procure the rights to not only our own songs, but to covers as well.

I don’t think I need to go into the difficulty of getting people to check out your original music (if you’re the one reader who’d like me to elaborate, please contact me, I’d love to chat). We all struggle to get people to notice our music and there are many creative methods for drawing attention to your original music. One technique that is growing in popularity (especially on YouTube, Ariel has a video about this here) is the cover song. The idea being, cover a popular song well and it will drive traffic to your original music. Leveraging an established artist’s fan base is a brilliant and effective plan and has helped break some of todays biggest acts.

But even beyond just helping drive traffic to your original music, recording and releasing cover songs can actually be a good source of revenue as well. Alex Holz over at RightsFlow wrote two awesome blog posts about this here and here. I recommend both. Basically, what Alex points out is that there are many artists who, for various reasons, don’t distribute their music digitally. A savvy artist can fill the void left by these artists and release covers. A prime example, as Alex points out, is Kid Rock, who can’t be found on iTunes, but many covers of his songs exist in his stead, some of which have made good money.

But Alex has written about this extensively, so I’ll leave it at that. Again, what we’re really here for is rights. In order to record and release these cover songs, you need to acquire the appropriate rights. You, of course, can do this all on your own. All you need to do is, 1) find out who owns the copyright, 2) send a notice of intent to the copyright owner, 3) provide a monthly accounting/payment to the copyright owner and 4) get a sign-off from an independent CPA at the end of the year.

OR, you could simply contact our friends over at Limelight and they can take care of all that for you. Limelight is a part of RightsFlow and they can handle all of your licensing rights needs when it comes to recording and releasing a cover song.

Here’s the point, cover songs are a great way to help get your music out there, but you need to get the rights in order to do this legally. If you’re at all like me, the last thing you want to worry about is which rights apply when and who needs to be contacted to make sure your not breaking the law.

And while we’re on the topic of rights, I suppose it makes sense to talk about copyrighting your own music. If one day you want your music to be covered and have other artists pay you for permission to use your songs, you’ll need to have this step covered. MySpark is another company under the RightsFlow umbrella and they can handle all of your copyrighting needs. While getting copyrights for your music is a simpler process then licensing a cover song, sometimes it’s just easier to outsource the task and not worry about dealing with the government.

Limelight is a simple and affordable solution for licensing cover songs. If you want to jump on the cover song bandwagon (which is good idea), make sure you do it right. You worry about making the cover song amazing, let Limelight worry about making sure you’re covered.

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Hey Everyone,

Wes (aka Publicity Director for Cyber PR) here with some Facebook tips to ease your hurricane worries!

So you wake up in the morning, and before you read the paper (or Perez Hilton in my case) you check your Facebook. However, you can bet by lunchtime something has changed in this ever-growing social media platform. One of the most recent changes is actually extremely beneficial to artists and can help grow your fan base.

When you used to suggest your page to friends, it would basically get shoved in the corner of Facebook like your dirty laundry. They would rarely see the suggestion because it was in some random spot with a million other requests (Farmville, anyone?) If you’re like me, the only notification you really pay attention to is that little red flag at the top. You know you pay attention to those, you can admit it. You want to know who liked that funny status you wrote or who commented on that super artistic photo you took with instragram. So the other day when I received a red flag it was undoubtedly the first icon I clicked, and my friend had “suggested” me to like her band.

Like I do with every status update, I clicked to see what this notification was all about. I checked out her band, enjoyed her music, and instantly became a new fan of her page. That’s when I realized how fast that took and how easy it was.

Many times as a musician you have thousands of “friends” on your “personal” page (quote-pun, intended) and you would love to convert those to your fan page. However, there is no Facebook Fairy that will magically do this for you. With this new Facebook feature, it is extremely easy to get noticed and have a WAY higher turnover conversion from your personal to fan page.

First, go to your fan page. Once you are there because you are an admin you will see the box below where you can “Invite Friends.”

Once you click “Invite Friends”, you simply choose which friends you would like to suggest the page to. If they are already fans of your page, you will not be able to choose them. Once you check each friend you would like to invite and press “submit”, the next time they login they too will receive that exciting red box at the top of their page.

You can definitely brainstorm on other ways to use this to your advantage as well. Only admins of the page can utilize this new feature. So you converted a ton of friends to fans. What about your superfans? What if you made them feel special by giving them admin access for the day to invite all their friends to like your band?

This is one of the newest and most beneficial updates to Facebook for musicians. Granted, it is only lunchtime and this could change by dinner.

Please try this out and let us know what you think and how it works for you!

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Hello again and welcome back to Musician’s Arsenal. This week I’d like to present to you, Visibli. A good friend of ours, Jordan Walker (@jordanwalker), came by the Cyber PR® office a few weeks back for some after hours drinks, and as our conversations usually do around here, the talk quickly turned to the music industry, specifically effective technology for independent musicians. In no time Jordan was on the computer showing me all the ins and outs of this great new tool and I’ve been chomping at the bit ever since to write this post.

Visibli, at it’s simplest, is another version of bit.ly. But Visibli takes it to the next level (and can actually work with bit.ly). Imagine a world where every time you posted a link on Twitter or on Facebook, that link carried your brand, linked back to your website, played your music, promoted your social media sites and provided links to buy your music. Enter Visibli.

Visibli does all of these things for you. Just like bit.ly, once you’ve found a link you want to share with your fans, copy that link and paste it into Visibli’s shortener. Visibli can push the link out to your Facebook or Twitter, or you can copy and paste the link where ever you need it. When someone clicks on the link, the website they are taken to will have a banner across the top that can contain all the information I listed before. (Saif Ajani, founder of Visibli, told me that while the Facebook feature is normally a premium feature, he’ll turn it for our readers for free. Thanks Saif! Hit me up @jloom718 and we’ll get you set up.)

I say ‘can’ because this banner is customizable. You have the option of choosing things like a Facebook ‘Like’ button, Twitter ‘Follow’ button, SoundCloud clip, iTunes buy link, Topspin widget, FanBridge widget etc. You can also upload a picture to the banner and customize the font and color of your band name. It’s very cool, click here to see the one I created (in about 10 minutes) for Cyber PR®.

I want to make sure you’re seated now, ‘cause this next part really pushed it over the edge for me. Visibli has a WordPress plugin (they also have code to do this on any website) that allows all of your external links in your blog to carry this banner. Ok, maybe I over did it when I made sure you were seated (but seriously, who reads blogs standing up?) but picture it, every link you put out carrying all of your information. The fan will never forget where the link came from.

But let’s set aside the fact that Visibli is really freakin’ cool technology for a second. How does this help an independent musician, or any musician, brand, company or individual. Let’s say you share a link on Facebook that happens to show up in one of your ambient fan’s news feed. They are interested and click on the link. Without Visibli, they are likely to forget who shared the link and may not engage you further. With Visibli, they are constantly aware of who shared that link with them and are presented with many opportunities to engage you.

Taking this a step further, if a friend shares a link you posted with their community (assuming they don’t change the link) it will still carry your banner and a whole new set of potential fans will have direct access to all of your important links.

Visibli helps take fan engagement to the next level. Providing links to relevant and interesting articles has long been part of the fan engagement strategy. Now this can be done without directing the fan away from your brand. They remain in contact with you the entire time.

It seems I have to say this every time, but alas, I’m leaving out some lovely features I’d like to tell you about, but the best way to learn is to get your hands on it. Go and set up your own Visibli account and come back here and let me know how it goes. Are you able to engage your fans more? Do you see any increase in email sign ups? Is the traffic on your website or social media sites increasing?

Good luck and don’t forget to share you experiences!

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Song-writing can be an arduous affair; from the tedious write-erase-rewrite process on the notepad to the long hours spent at the recording studio, it’s fair to say that once a song is completed, a feeling of pride and ownership prevails. Therefore, why on earth would an artist, who devoted so much time in crafting a song (which essentially, is a product) work so hard, only to give it away in the end for free? Well, we cracked down this week to find out these answers as this week’s topic is:

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