Album Pre-Sale

A great way to build excitement amongst your fanbase leading up to the release of a new album is to organize a pre-sale campaign. Hold a contest, where everyone that makes a pre-sale purchase is entered in to win a prize. Prizes could be additional merchandise, tickets to the CD release show or if you really wanted to get crazy, offer to write and record a song about the winner.

From your online store you should have a few different pre-sale packages at different price points available. For example:

- Tickets to CD release show and digital album
- Autographed CD and tickets to release show
- Autographed CD, T-Shirt and tickets to release show

And make sure everyone who purchased the album during the presale gets their purchase by the release day (that’s the point of the pre-sale!), so mail out any packages a week beforehand and send them a digital download of the album by release day or better yet, the day before.

Press Campaign

A big component when promoting a new album is the press campaign, working with either a PR company to handle your press outreach or going the DIY route. I talk to many independent artists who don’t see the point in a press campaign for their new release, usually because either an artist they know, or them themselves, had spent thousands of dollars on a PR company in the past with little to no results. I definitely feel for artists here, but ignoring press completely is not the solution. When hiring a publicist make sure your music is a good fit with their existing roster and that the publicist has a well thought out plan for the campaign, and most of all, honestly likes your music. An expensive campaign with a PR company that has some major label big name clients is not by any means a slam dunk that you will get “tons” of “great” press for your independent release, and many times will be the exact opposite. Try contacting boutique PR firms that can offer more personal attention or PR companies that are focused on independent artists.

A PR company will work with you on making sure you are prepared and will handle the press outreach, but if you’re going with a do-it-yourself approach here are some tips and strategies for an effective campaign:

Pictures
Make sure you have at least 3-4 great press shots. And variety is very important, so try and have both landscape and portrait options, and some that are in color and also some that are black & white. Taking the photos in interesting locations or while dressed in “wacky” outfits are good to have too to help make you stand out, but you should also have some simple and more straight forward shots.

Bio
I know I said these were all “DIY” tips, but I’d suggest hiring a professional writer to write your bio, even if you are a great writer it can be hard to write about yourself or your own band. A professional writer will be able to write a compelling bio and one that can effectively convey all the important details while keeping in mind the audience, which in this case is press and music industry folk.

Press Outreach
The first people to target should be local press and press outlets that have written about you in the past (if applicable). When contacting blogs make it personal, say Hi and their name, and then start off by saying how much you liked a recent post of theirs, before launching in about the new album. Include a download link to a song from the new album that they can give away for free, blogs love to offer free music to their readers. Follow up about once a week and if you’ve received some press since the last time you contacted them, make sure to include a link and press quote in the follow up email. Then as I touched on in Part 1, plan ahead so you will have content for multiple press releases for the months after the album comes out, such as a new music video and tour dates, as you don’t want to just keep sending out the same message about the new album over and over, but you do want to keep contacting press and drilling it home that you are someone who deserves to be noticed.

Launch Timeline

Plan some milestones starting from two months before the release date to at least one month after the album comes out. Here is how this could look:

Two Months Before Release
- Release a single, a great way to get the fans excited and also to get some current press quotes to include when contacting press about the full length album
- Announce to your fans that tickets are for sale for the CD release show

One Month Before Release
- Press campaign begins for new album
- Announce pre-sale campaign through your newsletter, and social networks including Facebook and Twitter
- Set up a Facebook invite for the new release, send it to all your Facebook friends and post on your Fan Page

Two Weeks Before Release
- Keep the excitement going, hold a contest to win a copy of the new album or tickets to CD release show

Release Day Activities
- Write a news post about the release on your official website
- Send out a Newsletter to mailing list
- Update Twitter and Facebook with an “album out now” post and link to where they can purchase it.

One Month After The Release
- Service press with official music video and announce tour dates

Again, the more activities you can plan leading up to the release will help build the excitement with your fans, and the more press points you can arrange for after a release will enable you to keep contacting press with new content, while at the same time reminding them about the new album.

Also don’t forget to ask your family, friends and fans to write reviews of your new album on iTunes and other digital retailers the minute it becomes available. Studies have shown that albums that are reviewed at iTunes actually sell more than albums with little to no reviews posted.

In the next and final post I will talk about supplying content while you’re in between album cycles, as a means to stay relevant and fresh with your current fans, and to increase your fanbase as well.

Related Articles:

• Marketing Plan Tactics For Independent Musicians – Part 1 of 3: New Album Preparations

This call will feature celebrity vocal coach, artist development expert (independent A&R guidance), and new music business mentor extraordinaire Cari Cole!

For those of you who do not know Cari this will be an amazing opportunity to learn from her (and yours truly of course)

Now that anyone can make a CD – there is a bigger challenge at hand: How to break through. Cari is masterful at teaching just how to do this.

In this 75-minute teleseminar, you will learn:

• That Success in music is created, manufactured and orchestrated. It’s up to you to put the wheels in motion and we will show you how

• There is a proven system behind exposure that actually makes a difference when creating music and a brand that go the distance.

• To uncover the 3 factors that must be equally present in order to create fame (whatever fame means for you)

• The 5 main quadrants of Social Media and how to leverage them to your benefit to capture and engage fans and music industry professionals who will help you

This FREE teleseminar Call will take place on Monday May 14th at 5 PM Pacific / 8 PM Eastern it is open to all who register.

Related Articles:

• Ariel Hyatt: 7 Questions For A Real Live Music Supervisor Sarah Gavigan of Get Your Music Licensed
• Music Marketers FAQ – How Do I Get A Job In The Music Industry?
• 9 Steps To Getting A Job In The Music Business

Once you have all the expense accounted for, your fans essentially ask you come to their city. When a fan requests you come to their city, GigFunder runs the expenses and determines what it will cost the band to tour to that city. At that point, the band and fans work to promote the tour in much the same way any other fan funding campaign is promoted. If enough money is raised, the tour happens. If not, then no go.

In this scenario, the band is happy because they have a tour paid for and guaranteed attendees, fans are happy because they get the band they want in their city and the venue is happy because the tickets are pre-sold. It’s a win-win-win!

Artists can also fund a pre-planned tour. This is the more traditional fan funding model in which a goal specific goal is set and fans help the band realize this goal.

As in any fan funding campaign, the success of these campaigns depends on the vitality of your social media presence and the quality of your incentives. The obvious and base incentive for GigFunder will be entry to the show. But, Matt Pearson tells me artists have been very creative so far, offering up free guitars after shows, meet and greets, allowing fans to request specific cover songs and even bringing fans on stage with them.

GigFunder launches today, so head over there and check it out! Start planning your tour today, or let your fans decide where you’ll be going.

What do think of fan funding campaigns? What’s your take on fan driven tours?

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Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Chris Hacker here, I create Marketing Plans for artists at Cyber PR® and really enjoy working with my many clients. I’ve noticed a huge problem though. Artists call the Cyber PR® offices all the time looking for us to promote their new album, totally fine of course, but the problem lies in that many of these artists call us when their albums are coming out the next week!! It completely baffles me that an artist or band will work so hard on an album, spending hours and hours writing songs and practicing these songs and then spending large sums of money recording, mixing and mastering, to only rush the release with no plan in place! Not planning enough lead time for a press campaign isn’t the only issue, but many people we talk to try to release their album when some of the basic music promotion elements aren’t even in place, for example a website where you can sell the music!

In a three part series I will discuss some basic components of a marketing plan to help properly market you and a new release. This first blog post in the series can eloquently be called the “getting your sh*t together” phase. Here I’ve laid out 5 areas that need to be addressed before any official announcements should be made about a new album coming out.

1. Digital Distribution

Figure out how you’re going to digitally distribute the album, and a physical CD only release or selling the CD and mp3′s strictly on your website is not the way to go. You need to make your music available everywhere digital music can be streamed and bought, such as on iTunes and Spotify, and the best way to do that is work with a digital distribution company like CD Baby or Tunecore. With that said, I talk to people all the time who then take this one step too far and sign up with multiple distribution companies because they think they are covering all their bases this way. Which they are not. All that does is put multiple copies of the same album on iTunes and the like, which looks silly and can cause unnecessary confusion. And if you plan on working with a PR company to promote the release don’t set the release date until AFTER you have talked with them first.

2. Online presence

Make sure your online presence is complete, effective and contains all the necessary promotional tools. There are lots of places online that artists can have a presence, here I talk about three of the most important sites: Official Website, Facebook and YouTube.

Official Website – Your website should have a place where people can easily listen to and buy your music (but not a player that plays automatically when a person enters the site, can’t stress that enough), a homepage that has a news section where people can read the latest happenings with your career, and a newsletter sign up form, one that offers an incentive for signing up such as free music or discounts on merch. Plus it always surprises when I go to an artist website and can’t find any contact information or links to their social media networks.

Facebook – Just as important as your website is your Facebook Fan Page. On the new timeline there are three tabs that are on display; one tab should be a band profile that at a minimum contains a music player, tour dates and press quotes. Next is a newsletter sign up form, and again, this should offer an incentive for signing up. And the last visible tab should be a Store.

YouTube – Another important piece of your online presence is YouTube. I’m always curious how people listen and discover new music and time and time again the response I hear back is YouTube. It’s critical to have videos up on YouTube for every song of the new release by the release date or soon after. Not saying these have to be well produced music videos, but just the songs themselves. To do this some artists just put up an image of their cover and leave it at that, but people are much more inclined to listen to your music if there are scrolling lyrics they can read as they listen or if there is a slideshow to watch. Taking free archival footage and editing together to make a music video is another relatively easy and inexpensive way to create a video for your songs, and can be a lot of fun too.

3. Newsletter

This is real simple. Have one. And contact your mailing list once a month with news. Don’t cut corners on this either, a newsletter is where you’ll see the greatest impact on sales. All the tweets and facebook posts about a new album out for sale won’t equal the results of a well crafted newsletter, so spend money on a mailing list service provider that can help you design a rich looking email and provide analytics and tracking capabilities so you can measure the effectiveness of your newsletters and make adjustments where need be.

4. Touring

Ideally you’ll have a tour booked immediately following the release, which greatly helps a PR campaign. A local blog or local newspaper will be much more inclined to cover a new album for an artist if a show is booked in town. And not saying this has to be a month long tour, just a few regional dates will help with your press efforts. Now timing can be tricky here, just like setting a release date too soon, you don’t want to book a tour and then not have the album ready or press plan in place. So wait until you have a better idea of what that will look like and then start booking a tour, and if the tour doesn’t happen until a month or so after the release that is quite alright.

5. Merchandise

Pretty much everything in regards to your music career takes longer than expected, from making the album to creating the artwork to booking shows, and this definitely applies to any merchandise you want to have available to sell with the new album. And merch isn’t limited to T-Shirts and tote bags, handmade items can make for great unique offerings. Here’s a tip, at your merch booth bundle your music with these items cheaply and easily through download stickers from MerchMusic.com, where 120 codes will cost you just $10. Even though people aren’t buying CDs much anymore, they are still interested in supporting artists they love so give them lots of different ways to support you and purchase your music instead of just having a CD and leaving it at that.

So remember, plan early so you can have these items when you’re ready to release a new album, which I will be getting in to in more detail in the next blog post where I will discuss some basic principles for an effective pre-sale and album launch.

To find out more about the marketing plans I create for artists please visit our page here.

Related Articles:

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Welcome to the final segment of a 3 part series that was inspired by a mastermind program I participated in with Ali Brown who is my mentor in the world of online marketing.

Here’s the recap of what we’ve gone over thus far…

There are three ways to increase your income:

Part 1. Increase your number of clients (fans).

Part 2. Increase the frequency of purchase, how often your fans buy from you. (and you’d better have more than just music to sell).

Part 3. Increase the amount of money that you charge…

Increasing the amount of money you charge poses a problem if all you have to sell is music because music is now widely available for free, and people have proven that they are not willing to pay a premium for music.

However, fans will pay plenty of money for experiences, like a great concert or a chance to be a contribution to an artist, a special memento, or wonderful merchandise that really resonates with your fans.

An Example…

Jeff Krantz created a BIG payday in one fell swoop.

Jeff Krantz & The $10,000 Song
http://jeffkrantzmusic.com

Recently I was hanging out with past Cyber PR client who had a fabulous tale to tell. Jeff launched his singer-songwriter career in Second Life where he has managed to build a wonderful fan base.

Through networking online, he met a man who fell in love with his songwriting and became a fan. This man called up my artist and told him that he was having a big anniversary coming up and he wanted a special song written just for his wife. He asked if he would be up for writing and recording a custom song for her.

Realizing that this was a huge opportunity told his fan that he would present him with some options he began to THINK BIG. So he created 3 packages that this man could choose from with three separate prices (depending on how much he wanted to spend / how involved it would be silver, gold and platinum)

Here’s what Jeff wrote about how it worked:

As part of the Gold package that the client chose, I agreed to write 3 different songs (first verse and chorus) for the client to chose from. Once the client selected the song, I spent 1 week writing 2 full lyrical options for the client to chose from. Once they had decided on the song, Jeff went into his studio and recorded the song, bringing in musicians to fill out the arrangement. He then sent it to a top studio to be mixed and mastered and 2 weeks later he sent the client the finished song (with the masters). “It took about 60 hours in total but it was so much fun and I made almost 10 grand for the effort!”

The point is because he leveraged just ONE relationship with just one fan he managed to make over $10,000 on ONE song.

Had he not been working on increasing his fanbase by networking online, he never would have had this opportunity present itself to him.

Fan Funding

A newer option that has become a widely available option for indepdent musicians to take advantage of is fan funding. Fan funding sites (often called ‘Crowdfunding’) have become an incredible resource for musicians to employ this very strategy.

Here are a few options available:

Be it your album creation process, setting up a tour, creating merchandise, or any other important aspect of being an independent musician, creating a fan funding campaign not only helps you to raise the funds, but it will allow you to give your fans the opportunity to take part in a unique experience.

Your fans will be paying more because they will be buying into more than just a pre-sale for a project, they are paying for the opportunity to join your journey to get there.

How Have You Added Value?

I would love to hear how you have managed to add value and get more profit. Please share!

Related Articles:

• Basic Marketing Principles For Artists – Part 2: Increasing the Frequency of Purchases
• 12 Ways to Increase Your Fan Base for 2012
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Marissa from Team CyberPR here.

Ah, infographics…somehow they’re much more fun to read than just plain type. Most people tend to like and remember information much better when it’s presented visually, which is probably one reason why the popularity of infographics exploded in 2011 (they also tend to do well in Google searches).

And since an infographic presents information in a compact format, people like sharing them. I’m in a sharing kind of mood today, so here are 3 helpful social media infographics I’d like to share with you!

1. “Why Pinterest Should Become Part of Your Social Media Strategy Today”

Are you on Pinterest yet? If not, this infographic may convince you to start your own pin board. Pinterest’s number of users has totally skyrocketed since the beginning of 2012. Even better, users stay on Pinterest for longer than they stay on Facebook or Twitter. Why not give your songs a visual component and create your own board? Not only can you find inspiration from other users’ boards, but you can reach a new niche of people with a different format and inspire them. You know how I said that people tend to remember visuals better? With all of the different ways that people are discovering music today, it would be in your best interest to make yours memorable.

(Source: Hypebot)

2. “How to Use Twitter”

You probably know how much Ariel loves Twitter. It’s an awesome tool to share things quickly and talk to people outside of your normal social circle! But even with all of the opportunities that Twitter provides to indie musicians (don’t believe me? check out what Marian Call did), many shy away. Why? I’ve had some tell me that they don’t know what to do or what to tweet about. It can be weird to think that people out there are interested in what you have to say, but they are! Post good content often, engage in conversation, and the followers will come. If you don’t have a Twitter account yet, or you do but you want to make it better, read the tips in this extensive infographic and consider your basic Twitter questions answered. And if you still need a little boost in your numbers or just some hand-holding, there’s a CyberPR Campaign for that!

(Source: HubSpot)

3. “Why Bands Need Better Mobile Websites Now”

This infographic was posted right before SXSW and uses those concerts as an example, but it highlights the importance of maximizing your fans’ experience at any and every show you perform. You may not have thought about making your website or music smartphone-friendly, but there are enough stats presented here to urge you to do so. One of the reasons to have a live show in the first place is to increase your fanbase and expose yourself to new people, so be sure you’re taking advantage of your audience’s openness. Whether it’s giving them a free download code at the show or letting them upload their rad concert pics to your site, make it easy for them to connect with you!

(Source: Mashable)

Did any of these make you think about revamping your own social media strategy? Which was your favorite? Have you seen any other infographics that you’d like to share with us? Let us know in the comments, and have a fantastic weekend!

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