Ariel Publicity

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.

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It’s a big day today, folks, and the office is all a buzz about the exciting new Facebook developments. What Facebook developments, you ask? What!? You haven’t heard??? Timeline has arrived in full force and is now available for brands! Timeline has been received with resistance by some users (but what Facebook update isn’t?), so this may not be music to everyone’s ears. But as far as bands and brands are concerned, this is a powerful move. I tend ramble on a lot at the beginning of these posts, but I’m pretty excited about Timeline, so I’m jumping right in here.

The most noticeable change is the giant cover photo bands can now implement. This was a cool feature for personal profiles and allowed users to show off their creativity (or that amazing photo you took of the sunset on vacation), but it is a really powerful branding tool for bands. Loading up an eye catching photo will help draw fans into your page and solidify your image. Branding has always been a little tricky on Facebook fan pages as you had to use certain apps to effectively do this, but this left the wall essentially “unbranded.” Cover photo solves this issue and brings a whole new life to the “wall.”

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When setting up a Facebook fanpage most artists realize they need to have songs, videos, concert dates, etc. readily available on their page (if you don’t realize this, it’s true, you need it). There are a few big players in this space that most people default to, ReverbNation, Rootmuisc and Fanbridge. CD Baby and Bandcamp also have some pretty nice players, although these two are more focused on selling the music, so they don’t have added features like video players and concert dates. But there’s one app that I feel is often over looked, despite it’s slick layout and ease of use; BandRx. Before I go any further on this post, I’d like to take a moment to say I’m not picking favorites here, we love Fanbridge, Rootmusic and ReverbNation and have used them all extensively. Here at Ariel Publicity we adamantly maintain our neutral status (at least until you catch me with a few drinks down the hatch).

On to BandRx. I’ve seen this app in passing on different fan pages, but didn’t really pay too much attention until the newest Ariel Publicity team member, Jon Ostrow, came in raving about it. Turns out, one of Jon’s favorite bands, The Black Keys (up and coming group, you may have heard of them), uses this app and so we spent half the day just playing with it.

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A few days ago, the unstoppable Bob Baker asked me to write my predictions for marketing your music in 2012. I was included amongst a list of incredible thought leaders and it sparked a conversation here in the Cyber PR Office. So I asked my trustworthy team to share their own predictions for this coming year. Here they are:

Ariel Hyatt – President Ariel Publicity
Founder of Cyber PR®
Twitter: @CyberPR

1. Staying Positive and In Gratitude Will Help Tremendously
Before I make any music marketing trends and predictions for 2012 here’s where to start:
Remember, success in today’s quicksand like music business is HARD and takes WORK, getting into a negative, overwhelmed and angry place will directly effect your success. I’ve seen it now thousands of times in 12 countries. The artists I know who manage to stay positive and who are grateful for the little wins and for the small miracles are happier, more successful and go farther than their counterparts who let it all get the best of them.

2. Music Subscription Sites Will Continue To Takeover
Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, Deezer MOG & Slacker.
These subscription based streaming sites are great for music consumers & not so great for artists. To stay ahead of the pack smart artist markers are going to have to come up with clever ways to incorporate their music and sharing on these powerful platforms that have music consumers going gaga. Sadly this will mean less revenue from sales of music but could provide great opportunities for discovery based creative marketers

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So you have read and completed the new Suggest To Friends feature Facebook offers and you want to increase your fan base even more to an audience beyond your friends list. Have you ever considered taking out a Facebook ad? Facebook ads have been around for years now and are constantly growing in popularity – because they work! We have been testing some methods here at Cyber PR® with several of our artists and I will be sharing them here with you in this post.

Now with Facebooks upcoming changes (stay tuned for TIMELINE and tons of great new music integrations) There are a couple of great options available to you utilizing Facebook ads that can help boost your fan base even further.

The newest option to increase your fan base is ReverbNation’s Promote It. Now this option is extremely enticing due to its targeted research surrounding your ad and how quick it is to actually set up.  The new ReverbNation Promote It tool utilizes a framework built off of thousands of beta tests by 10,000 artists and 18,000 campaigns. This tool is set up to create an effective ad for you by asking your comparisons, targeting demographically, and more with little effort and allowing ReverbNation to create a stellar campaign for you.

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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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