Ariel Publicity

Welcome back to Musician’s Arsenal. This week we’ll be going over analytics. Too few artists actually pay attention to their social media analytics. Some just don’t know analytics for social media exist, some don’t know where to find them and some don’t think it’s important. It’s time to remedy all of this here and now.

Crowdbooster recently launched the public version of their site (it had been in private beta for a while), and they join a legion of other social media analytics solutions available to musicians. I choose Crowdbooster to write about due to it’s ease of use and affordability (how’s free?). Crowdbooster provides straight ahead, no nonsense analytics in an easily digestible format.

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Welcome back to Musician’s Arsenal! Before we go any further, I must admit that this post is not a real Musician’s Arsenal post, I will not be presenting a sweet app or tool for you this time (that’s coming next week), but rather a tool that will be very useful provided there is enough participation (that’s where you come in). The Future of Music Coalition is performing a survey now through October 28th to determine where artists receive most of their revenue.

Kristin Thomson from FMC was kind enough to answer some questions of mine about this survey and the importance of it. If you’re interested in taking this survey click here (and please do, the more response the better the results).

Without further delay, Kristin:

1. What was the impetus for this project?

Over the past eleven years, we’ve all witnessed drastic, profound and — dare I say — exciting changes in the music industry. Digital recording studios, digital aggregators, online music stores, on-demand streaming services, webcasting stations and satellite radio have greatly reduced the cost barriers to the creation, production, distribution and sale of music. A vast array of new platforms and technologies — from social networks to blogs to Twitter feeds — now help musicians connect with fans.

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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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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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Welcome back to Musician’s Arsenal! In this edition, I’m very excited to be presenting Onesheet to you. Onesheet is a very easy and effective web presence solution for musician’s struggling to create an attractive website. For those of us who can’t build a nice WordPress site to save our lives, Onesheet is here to save the day (while I don’t want to give the impression that creating a Onesheet excludes you from needing a website, this is a fantastic option that can take care of your web presence needs while you build a website the right way).

Creating a Onesheet is incredibly fast and almost too simple. First, you’ll need to enter your email address and create a password. Next, you have the option of verifying your Onesheet through Facebook or Twitter, or by choosing a desired Onesheet URL. Once you complete one of these two options, you choose the social media platforms you want to populate your Onesheet.

Onesheet can pull information from just about anywhere you have set up a social media profile online. Obviously, it can pull from the big sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but Onesheet is much more expansive than that, click here to see the full list, it’s impressive, and it’s growing.

What makes this so powerful is that Onesheet is a one-stop destination for fans. On Onesheet, fans can view photos, see show dates and times, sign up for your mailing list, listen to songs, watch videos, read blog posts, see Facebook wall feed, read your tweet stream…and more!

I could go on, but I won’t, you get the idea. Your whole web presence consolidated in to one sleek looking page. The background of the page is a user-uploaded photo. The media player can be moved anywhere on the page and has several customizable options, including the very handy opacity feature. The font of the band name can be changed to be consistent with your branding. The customization isn’t overly robust, but it’s sufficient. Anything more and Onesheet would lose it’s ease of use, so I believe they’ve found the perfect balance.

The best part about Onesheet is, once you set it up, you don’t need to update it. Because it’s being fed by your other social media sites, and updating them keeps Onesheet up to date.

The only thing I wanted to see on Onesheet that isn’t there now is a way to incentivize fans who want to sign up for your mailing list. Here at Ariel Publicity, we advocate trading songs for email addresses, which most email capture widgets allow you to do. At the moment, when Onesheet imports your email capture system, (from Reverbnation, Fanbridge and many more) it does not import the capability to deliver a free MP3. But fear not, founder and creator, Brenden Mulligan is well aware of this and has informed me this is on his radar for a future addition.

There’s even more to be had from Onesheet than what I’ve just outlined here. Instead reading my endless ramblings, you should really just give it a go. It’s completely self-explanatory and you’ll have your very own Onesheet set up in 5 minutes or less. So get it set up and post a link here in the comments so we can all see!

Also let me know: What do you think of Onesheet?
Is really as easy as I make it out to be?
Is Onesheet the type of platform that can really knock out MySpace once and for all?

Jason Loomis is the director of New Media Relations at Ariel Publicity
Follow him on Twitter at @Jloom718

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Turntable.fm, yet another new site for us to learn and love. At this point, Turntable.fm is all the rage. It has some 140,000 users already in its first month and appears to be picking up speed. Users sign into Turntable.fm with their facebook login, which makes it easy to find friends already using Turntable.fm. On my first visit, I was able to find several friends right away, chat with them and check out what music they are into right now. And while I initially thought this new platform was little more than a fun time waster, after getting in to it, it became apparent this is very powerful for the independent musician.

Turntable.fm works like this: You sign in and create your own playlist by adding songs Turntable.fm already has loaded in their database. If you can’t find the song you want, you can load any MP3 you want from your computer. This has raised a lot of legal concerns that Turntable.fm will have to address, but I’m a music marketer, not a lawyer, so lets move along with the marketing advice. Once you build your playlist, join a room and listen with others or create your own and start DJ-ing. If people like what you play, you’ll get points and fans. The more fans and points you get, the more popular you get and the more people listen to you.

How might an independent musician take advantage? I’m glad you asked. Here at Ariel Publicity we preach posting interesting and compelling content to get fans engaged with your social media profiles. This mean you can’t be overly self-promotional and hypey. In order to do this on Turntable.fm, it means creating a playlist that will get people to follow you. I recommend adding only a few of your own songs in this initial stage. Make sure the playlist you are building is complementary to your style of music.

Create a following and get people excited about the music you’re playing. If you can build a following and build your numbers, then you’ll have an engaged audience and you can begin to sprinkle more of your own music into the mix. Don’t overdo it though, make sure you temper how much original music you play. People are there to find new music, but they want to hear things they know and love too. That’s how you get a following.

Another idea would be to create events that you can invite people to on Turntable.fm. Get together with other bands you know and like, record some live songs, and invite all of your fans and their fans for a ‘concert’ on Turntable.fm. Promote the event on your social media profiles and see how many people you can get to show up.

You can have guest DJs drop in on the events as well. Make it fun and exciting. Create contests and giveaways in conjunction with the event. If you can get a lot of people to show up, you’ll most likely get other people interested just based on the number of listeners in your room.

Jump in now, while it’s early and easier to create a following. Early adopters have a chance to take advantage of this before Turntable.fm runs into any issues. It’s a great opportunity to introduce music lovers to your music and potentially create some new fans.

So sign in and take it for a spin (pun definitely intended). Let us know what you think. Are people open to hearing your original music? Is it hard or easy to create a following on Turntable.fm? Is this the next greatest social networking site? Have you been doing anything fun and original with this new platform?

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