Beginning today, we’ll be posting one “mandatory strategy” every week or two, where our objective is to give you a quick strategy recommendation that we believe to be a “must” if you want to be successful in today’s wild, often unknown, and digitally driven landscape of the music business. This week’s “mandatory strategy” recommendation is to ALWAYS BE ACQUIRING new fans.
The Art of Frequency
Anyone who knows me (Ryan Wines) and my philosophies will know that I regularly preach that artists today need to develop the “art of frequency”, where they are regularly creating and evangelizing new music to their fans and to the masses. It is my belief that independent artists who take more than a year to release a record these days, without releasing any other public material (EPs, singles, demos, live tracks, videos, etc), will be largely be abandoned by their fans and will be considered irrelevant by others. This is do to a large variety of factors, one of them being the vast competition from other artists who produce material more regularly and a general inundation of music from so many sources. If you want to separate yourself from the static that surrounds us, you must produce material with a high degree of frequency and your work must simply be better than most of the rest (be BRILLIANT!). Note: More on “The Art of Frequency” can be found in a previous essay here: http://petmarmoset.com/about/pet-marmoset-strategy-posts/
Fan Acquisition
As such, if you are regularly putting out new material, you ABSOLUTELY MUST be working equally hard (if not harder) at building and developing your fan base. Simply put, there’s no point in putting out a lot of material if you don’t have an audience already interested, developed, and ready to go nuts when they get it. As many of you know, at Pet Marmoset PR + Digital Strategy, we work closely with Topspin Media in developing and executing our direct-to-fan strategies. At Topspin, they focus on three core stages of development:
- Creating awareness (aka Fan Acquisition)
- Making connections (I prefer to call this “Engage and Interact”)
- Monetizing
Too often, artists complain that they aren’t selling enough merchandise to justify an investment of time and resources in strategy, publicity, an effective website and other tools. Many artists take the standpoint that they don’t make enough money to invest any more than they’re already spending on recording, mixing, mastering, duplication and other more traditional costs associated with releasing music. As such, most artists will skip steps #1 and #2 and will get frustrated that #3 isn’t happening.
What are you doing?
As I sort of borrow/paraphrase some wise words that Ian Rogers expressed in a recent essay/post, what artists need to better understand is that consumers and music fans have an unlimited number of places to spend their time and money today. How are you getting in front of them? What is your strategy? What are you doing to compel them to interact with you and follow you? This is not a world where you can simply record an excellent song and expect that people will naturally discover it and go crazy for it. This is NOT a “build-it-and-they-will-come world.” Sometimes I even wonder how a band like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones would stand out and succeed in a world like we have today.
In the beginning (“beginning” meaning that you are not doing music full time or for a living), more than anything else, your focus needs to be on fan acquisition. What are you doing to acquire new fans? Are you working hard to grow your email list? What are you doing to get more Twitter followers? Do you have a blog? If yes, is it easy for fans to subscribe to it? How are you managing your Facebook page? Are you offering free song downloads in exchange for email sign-ups and Facebook Fan sign-ups?
More fan impressions equals more sales. No fan impressions equals zero sales. That’s easy math. Thus, if you’re not working to grow your fan base and followers, you won’t succeed at selling or monetizing anything.
Case study: The Pixies
While I was in Austin last week for SXSW, I thoroughly enjoyed my time meeting with the talented team at Topspin Media and caught a very interesting presentation and case study examination from Topspin‘s CEO and direct-to-fan guru, Ian Rogers. He presented The Pixies as a case study and it went something like this…
As their fans already know, The Pixies have been extremely slow at the whole “online” game. With the exception of a few impressive fan sites and the usual Myspace page, the internet had sort of been a desert wasteland to the band for many years, and as far as I know, they didn’t even have an official band site until late last year (2009). Sure, there were some pretty cool fan sites and things developed and maintained by other people (fans), but the band itself simply had not made direct-to-fan marketing a priority. As such, even though they were The Pixies and already had thousands of fans around the world, they had not tracked or managed any of their fan connections or communication channels. So the first thing the band did when launching a new website and embarking on a mission of direct-to-fan strategy was focus on “fan acquisition”.
As you can see at their website – http://www.pixiesmusic.com – your first impression is an immediate and in your face call-to-action to download a free live EP, in exchange for your email address. This is “Fan Acquisition 101.” Notice that long before offering to sell you anything and even before playing a song for you with a streaming player, The Pixies want to give you something in exchange for your email address. They want to “acquire” you as a fan/relationship.
This bares results in three AMAZING ways:
- It elicits and compels immediate interaction between the band and the fans, opening up a communication channel that can be utilized moving forward.
- It gives the fan something of value in return for giving the band their email address, further vesting them as an activist and a participating fan of the band.
- It allows the fan to “opt in” to the email list giving the band expressed permission to engage them in the future. The value of this to the band is immense. Product marketers in the non-music business world will often pay a lot of money, sometimes an upwards of hundreds of dollars for a single, qualified fan acquisition of this nature. The value here is tremendous.
Also worth noting, if you explore The Pixies website, you’ll quickly find that they’re not selling anything. Does that seem weird or odd to anyone else? Well… actually, this is indication of their firm understanding of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. You see, The Pixies are aware that they first need to acquire and build a fan base before they can expect to sell them anything. They are much smarter than they may appear.
The set-up pitch
Once a reasonable fan base has been built (or as you’re building it), you should you develop a comprehensive strategy for regularly engaging and interacting with your fans. This will create dialog and a participative community, compelling fans to follow you a little bit closer than a more casual fan. In all honesty, this is the equivalent to a “set-up pitch” in baseball.
A set up pitch is used to throw the hitter off balance, so the next pitch will get him out. Usually, the set-up pitch precedes a strike out pitch or a pitch that the hitter will not hit hard. The purpose of using set-up pitches is to get the hitter off balance. For example: you may be calling all soft pitches (change up, curve ball) away, away, away. The hitter will be thinking away and then you bust him up and in with a fastball. You were using these soft away pitches to set up the hard inside pitch.
Essentially, if you can first build and establish a reasonable fan base… and then engage them, participate with them and get them really paying attention to you and excited about what you’re doing… then the conditions will be perfect for you to give them what they really want: WHATEVER YOU ARE SELLING.
Here are some worthwhile tools that every artist should be using today to acquire new fans:
- Offer a free song/demo/EP/video/(insert valued material) in exchange for a fan email address
- Offer a free song/demo/EP/video/(insert valued material) in exchange for becoming a Facebook Fan
- Offer a free song/demo/EP/video/(insert valued material) in exchange for a Twitter follow or retweet
- Have an email newsletter subscription in an easy to find place on your website
- Have a blog and have a blog subscription in an easy to find place on your website
- Immediately following a live performance, walk the room with an email sign-up list. Swallow your pride/insecurities and do it.
- Dedicate 30 minutes every day to a specific and measurable digital strategy (ie: Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, etc). This is CRUCIAL.
- Feature recent comments to your blog or artist website. Fans want to join in and participate.
- Give fans the ability to share or recommend your songs/site/etc to their friends.
- Regularly feature contests and giveaways on your website to bring good will and excitement to your fans.
- Make a viral video. No, not the typical band video. Do something wild and crazy or outside of the box and post it through your digital channels.
To see some of these tools in action, you can check out some of these artist sites:
+ www.paulmccartney.com/goodeveningnewyorkcity
The time is now!
One last warning that is worth bringing to your attention… Whatever you do, don’t wait until you have a new record to release to start doing these things. From a strategic standpoint, you want to spend several months (if not years), acquiring fans, developing them through regular engagement and interaction, and getting them ready. I’ve seen way too many artists finally decide to start doing some of these tactics and strategies right around the time that their new record is being released. This is the equivalent to cooking up a big amazing dinner for 15 people, but forgetting to send out the invitations and not giving people enough time to plan on attending. Then you and your closest two friends end up with a big amazing meal, along with a huge table setting, all by yourselves and without the company of others.
In fact, if you are an artist and you have a record that is done and you’re feeling like you’re way behind on getting these things done, consider using your new record as a fan acquisition tool so you can build up your fan base for the NEXT record or project you make.
Resources
As you may already be aware, http://www.topspinmedia.com, BandCamp, and a few other similar platforms offer many cool and innovative solutions for executing many of the recommendations in this essay. There are also a lot of great articles on the web that you can find and explore. Here’s one from Topspin’s CEO, Ian Rogers on related topics: http://www.fistfulayen.com/blog/?p=509
Need help?
Last, but not least, at Pet Marmoset PR + Digital Strategy, we know a few things about direct-to-fan strategy and are available to work with you to help you develop strategies and tools of your own, so you can accomplish some of the ideas and objectives that we’re recommending in this essay. Please feel free to reach out and say hello or ask us for more information by emailing Ryan Wines at ryan@petmarmoset.com.
Thanks for reading.
