Knowing your audience is crucial for any artist. A while ago ReverbNation announced a new feature on their social network called Fan Exclusives, which allows artists to offer some of their songs exclusively to “real fans”. By real fans ReverbNation refers to people, who sign up to the artist’s mailing list and provide some information about themselves (age, gender and location). If an artist chooses to offer exclusive songs to fans, non-fan listeners can only listen to 30-second teasers of the exclusive songs. The idea itself is good, and it might actually work pretty well for some better known artists, but I’m not so sure if it’s functional for unestablished artists.

Musicians can use exclusive content for various purposes: to create hype, to get more information about their fans, to get more people on their mailing list, to recruit more people to their street team, etc. However it is important to understand that the strategies that work for international rock stars don’t usually work so well for emerging artists, who are still finding their audience. If an unknown band would release one of their songs exclusively via iLike the effect would most likely be quite different than on U2’s case. In fact, offering songs exclusively through certain channels can have an indirect negative impact on the spreading of your music, because you are at the same time restricting the spreading of your music, which is something that unestablished artists should most definitely avoid. Besides, nowadays your music will most probably end up being distributed freely through peer-to-peer and BitTorrent networks. The free sharing culture on the Internet is blossoming and exclusivity doesn’t fit in the picture so well.

Exclusive interaction vs. exclusive content

So, how can independent musicians, who have only a small fan base or none at all, use exclusivity as a marketing tactic? The trick in my view is to offer something special to fans, which can remain exclusive. For example, if there is enough demand your songs end up in free distribution very quickly, whether you like it or not. The same thing can happen to all your exclusive videos, pictures and basically anything that can be copied and shared. Exclusivity works best if the content you are offering stays exclusive, which is rather an impossible equation in the online environment. Instead of digital content, you could offer interaction - more specifically, exclusive interaction.

You could for example share your Messenger user name or your Skype user name with every fan, who signs up to your mailing list. Instant messaging is in my humble opinion better way to build a relationship with your fans than sending emails. I believe that “true fans” appreciate communication with the artist much more than exclusive songs, which probably won’t stay so exclusive on the Internet anyways. This same tactic could and should be used with your street team members. If you are up to it, you could also think about doing exclusive video calls via Skype. Naturally, all this might be very stressing at some point and you should definitely limit the number of people you let in your “inner circle”.

A more easily manageable way to offer exclusive communication could be using Facebook. Create a normal profile with your artist name and add all the fans as your friends, who have signed up for your mailing list, “liked” you on iLike, taken a survey on your official website etc. Then just hang around once a day with your fans on Facebook doing what people usually do there - bond. Take quizzes and compare your movie taste with your “inner circle” fans. It’s really up to you what you want to achieve with this exclusive interaction stunt, but it provides a much stronger incentive for your fans to participate in something than offering exclusive digital content.

When you are marketing your music on Facebook you have to realize that Facebook works best as a communication tool between you and your existing fans, getting new fans is the hard part. On MySpace the most used music marketing technique is searching for bands and musicians, who play similar music to yours, adding their fans as your friends and sending a big picture comment. You could always try to imitate that technique, aka spamming, on Facebook by searching artists whose music is similar to yours and interacting with their fans by “poking” them or sending them a message. However, due to Facebook’s nature I don’t think you’re going to get good results, people will most likely ignore you.

Optimizing your Facebook musician page

Before you embark on your marketing efforts it’s important to first optimize your Facebook page. First of all upload an eye-catching profile photo and fill in the basic info. Keep your page as “clean” as possible, in other words remove all applications you are not using and place the most important applications as high up on the page as possible. When we are talking about which applications to use on your musician page there are various possibilities in the ever growing catalog of Facebook applications, but only a few of them are actually useful for musicians. As a musician you should consider using applications, which allow you to put your songs, music videos, pictures, upcoming concerts etc. on your page and which allow you to interact with your fans.

Facebook offers pretty standard applications for musician pages to begin with, such as music player, events, video, photos, wall, discussion board, notes and discography. However, for all musicians I recommend using iLike’s applications and possibly also ReverbNation’s applications. Both of the companies have created some very efficient interaction and marketing tools for artists and the main reason I recommend iLike over ReverbNation is the amount of active users. iLike has over 15 million registered users with a collective audience of over 200 million users. The iLike application for music fans, which I’m personally using quite a lot to follow the latest news of my favorite bands, is the most popular music application on Facebook and every musician should try to take advantage of that.

Use iLike to communicate with your fans

In a way iLike is a social network inside other social networks. Basically this means that once you create your iLike profile you can integrate that profile on to other social networks, such as Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, and control all the iLike applications on those social networks through your iLike Universal Artist Dashboard. Instead of having to collect new fans on each social network separately iLike allows you to collect fans to one destination no matter in which social network the iLike application is integrated on. You can also communicate easily with all of your fans, who are using iLike on various social networks, through your iLike account. This kind of system works surprisingly good and it is the best aspect of iLike.

A good example of using iLike applications effectively on your musician page can be seen on The Academy Is… band’s Facebook page. If we examine the band’s Facebook page a bit closer, an interesting occurrence is that they have 2624 Facebook fans at the time of writing this article, which is not so much compared to their 193689 iLike fans. This also arouses a question that should you use iLike to get more fans on your Facebook page or the other way around? After some research I noticed that basically every artist had more fans on iLike than on Facebook. It makes sense since iLike is not limited to only one social network.

As I said before, in my opinion your Facebook page alone can be a very effective communication tool between you and your fans, especially because of the News Feed function, which collects your friends mini-feeds into one big stream of events. However, combined with iLike, Facebook is probably the best communication tool available for musicians. If you have iLike on your Facebook profile and you have “liked” some artists, the News Feed shows also notifications from those artists if they have listed events or news on their iLike musician profile. Clicking the iLike notification link will redirect you to your iLike Music Feed, which shows you more detailed information about your favourite artists’ concerts, events and news.

Personally I’m using the Music Feed function quite a lot to check out what my favorite artists are up to and if they have any upcoming concerts in my area. This way I don’t have to check all of my favorite artists’ websites for tour dates and news. Of course your official website should aways be your main communication tool between you and your fans, but since there are services like Facebook and iLike available for free I really recommend taking advantage of them.

Spice up your Facebook page

In my opinion ReverbNation is one of the best social music networks around. They offer a wide variety of music marketing tools for free and their music promotion widgets are especially useful for any artist. Similar to iLike, you could consider ReverbNation as a social network inside other social networks, thanks to their widgets which can be embedded on various social networking services. ReverbNation’s Facebook application, My Band, is a great addition to the company’s previous music promotion widgets and a great way to spice up your musician page and personal profile.

However, if you are already using iLike’s Facebook applications I recommend you keep on using them. Having two or more music player applications on your Facebook page with the same songs on them might lead to some clutter, which should be avoided. Nevertheless, in the end it comes down to your own preferences and marketing approach. Experiment with different applications and use the ones that work best for your purposes. Below are some random application ideas to spice up your Facebook musician page.

• If you have a blog, use Simply RSS to show your blog’s RSS feed on your Facebook page. You could also use Simply RSS to show your Twitter updates if you are into micro-blogging.
• Joining and supporting a good cause is always good publicity, check out Causes application.
• Let your fans know more about you with Extended Info application.
• Show your fans where they can find you on the Internet with As seen on… application.

Getting new fans

So, how can you get new fans, who don’t have a clue about your band, on Facebook? A good way to start is using your already existing fans and friends. Invite all your existing Facebook friends to become a fan of your musician page and to use the iLike application to “like” you, ideally also adding your songs to their profiles. Also, notify your fans through your other social network profiles and official website about your new Facebook page. Every Facebook profile with your music on it is a marketing opportunity. Try to persuade your fans and friends to place iLike/ReverbNation application on the top of their profile, so that every visitor has an easy access to your music.

The most active way to market your music on Facebook is using your own personal Facebook profile and your band members’ profiles. You can for example post your songs or music videos on your friends’ wall applications and leave links to your musician page. You could also use the iLike application’s “dedicate song” function and dedicate your own songs to your friends, who have the iLike application on their profile. Also, join relevant groups and do these same activities on the group’s wall and discussion board.

Another good strategy is making friends with other bands, who play similar music to yours, and cross-promote each other by adding each other’s songs on your iLike applications. This kind of technique is used quite a lot on MySpace as bands often show other bands on their top friends.

There are probably a lot more ways to market your music on Facebook than the ones I’ve mentioned here, so if you happen to know any of them please do share your wisdom and knowledge with us. It would really be appreciated since we are all here to help out each other.

You don’t need to register your songs to get them copyright protected. A song is legally protected when it is created in tangible form. After you’ve managed to record your song or write it in the form of musical notation you get some exclusive rights to your work. These rights are as follows:

• To produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies (including, typically, electronic copies)

• To import or export the work

• To create derivative works (works that adapt the original work)

• To perform or display the work publicly

• To sell or assign these rights to others

• To transmit or display by means of digital audio transmission

Now remember that a song and a sound recording are different legal entities with different kind of protections. Sound recording is the actual physical product while the song is the composition and lyrics. When you sign a record deal with a record company you are usually required to sign over the rights to your recording (phonographic copyright). However, when you sign a music publishing deal you give the publisher right to exploit your song’s copyright.

A song remains protected by law 70 years after the death of the songwriter. Phonographic copyright, however, expires in 50 years after the year when the recording was first broadcast or on sale. Like the holder of songs copyrights the holder of records copyrights has also some exclusive rights.

• The right to object to various forms of use of the sound recording

• Broadcasting and public performance rights

• The reproduction right

• The distribution right

• The hiring and lending right

Now the thing that Creative Commons licenses do is give away some of your exclusive rights, it’s up to you which ones and how many. It’s good to bear in mind though that you can give away (waive) any of your exclusive rights without involving Creative Commons in the process in any way. You can always just announce on your website how people can use your works. But why would you want to waive any of your precious rights in the first place, with which you possibly make your living?

The big idea behind Creative Commons is to give more freedom to content creators and users. Depending on the type of Creative Commons license the users of Creative Commons licensed content don’t necessarily have to ask permission from the author. This kind of system encourages a free culture where people share, receive and build upon each others’ work.

A really good aspect of Creative Commons is the community. There are already many online music distribution and licensing services that have embraced Creative Commons licenses in various ways. Some good examples are ccMixter, Jamendo, YouLicense, Magnatune, SoundClick, Pump Audio and BeatPick. Although more and more composers, musicians and music related online services are adopting Creative Commons licenses, as a musician you should consider how licensing your songs with a Creative Commons license could affect your income.

If you allow your content to be distributed and shared for free you will be shutting down one possible revenue source, right? Not necessarily. If you are a musician your music is likely to be distributed and shared for free through BitTorrent and p2p networks anyways. Actually, by allowing and encouraging people to share and distribute your music for free you would probably earn some respect from your fans, and get free promotion as your music spreads freely on the Internet.

In my view Creative Commons licenses improve traditional copyright by meeting the demands of Internet Age music consumers. More and more people want music to be free and Creative Commons licenses offer a great way to make it free for consumers while at the same time retaining other important exclusive rights you have. For example by choosing CC Music Sharing License, you allow people to “legally download, file-share, and trade your music but not sell, or make any commercial use out of it. They must also give you attribution when using your music, and cannot make remixes without permission.”

So how can musicians generate revenue while at the same time implementing Creative Commons licenses on their songs? Concerts, music licensing and merchandise. When your music spreads freely on the Internet you will most likely gain more fans, who possibly have now more money to spend to see your concerts, when they don’t have to pay for your songs. There are already many online music licensing services, which plug your music to movies, ads, TV shows etc. and offer non-exclusive deals. I recommend taking advantage of as many of them as you can.

Sources:
Mustard - Music Business Resources For Students
Bemuso - Music Copyright
Wikipedia - Copyright
Creative Commons

Start a blog for your music. Yes, a blog. Blogging phenomenon is still growing and it is about time that musicians embrace it as promotional platform. There are a lot of promotional channels for blogs alone, which can be leveraged to gain exposure for the blog. Now, there are a lot of possibilities how to run that blog, but the main idea is that you publish one finished song at a time through your blog. Naturally there will be some long gaps between the finished songs, when you are composing and recording new music. So in the meantime use the blog to talk to your fans, post pictures of the recording process and let them know better who you are or what your band is about. This is much more personal approach and you also create a cycle of continuous interaction with your fans.

I have also been thinking about the idea of using blogging software such as Wordpress to create your “official” artist website and I was very positively surprised as I stumbled on a live example of that idea. A Finnish band called Jermaine has successfully utilized the idea of using a blog as an interaction and information tool between the artist and the audience, without compromising over design or functionality.

Getting started with your music blog

Wordpress is the blogging software and has been widely adopted among the most popular blogs in the world. It is free, fairly simple to use and install, and highly customizable. The most interesting aspects of Wordpress are Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and the massive amount of useful plugins. RSS feeds are a great way for your fans to stay “remotely” in touch with the latest happenings on your website and to filter out the most interesting news.

Wordpress offers automatically a number of different RSS feeds when you create a new blog, but I recommend cheking out FeedBurner’s services also since they offer many useful RSS feed promotion tools. Below is an example of FeedBurner’s Headline Animator that shows my latest blog posts. It is very customizable and you could easily make one that displays your upcoming concerts or public appearances, and then try to get your fans to put it on their own blogs/websites/social network profiles.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

The great thing about Wordpress is the community, which is actively developing and improving numerous useful plugins. Although there are no specially designed plugins for musicians, you can still make good use of many of the plugins. Mashable has compiled a great article of over 50 different Wordpress plugins for multimedia purposes, and I bet you can implement at least some of them in your artists blog/website.

Selling your music with music sales widgets

In my humble opinion there are better ways to make money with music nowadays than selling it directly to consumers. However, if you are into selling your music Hometracked has a great article listing and comparing 7 most popular music sales widgets around. Music sales widgets are basically online MP3 players that have an integrated option to also buy the track you are listening to. I checked them all out and noticed one fundamental drawback in each one - they are all aimed at US markets. If you live in Europe and your fans are in Europe, US dollars aren’t the most convenient way for your fans to pay for the music. Until we see a music sales widget with multilingual and multi-currency support I recommend selling your music through iTunes and other similar music stores that support various languages and currencies.

Here are some music sales widgets:

Nimbit, Hoooka, Amie Street, Musicane, BlastMyMusic, Project Opus, Snocap, GoodStorm

Marketing your music with music player widgets

The most versatile widgets for purely marketing purposes are probably Reverb Nation’s Tunewidget and Indie911’s Hoooka. Both of them allow you to share your videos and music, but overall Tunewidget seems like a better choice with a clear layout and more functions. The thing I really like about Tunewidget is that it shows all the essential information in a very sleek package and it actually encourages people to press the play button with smooth visual cues. You can input your upcoming shows, band information, a picture and music videos to the widget. The listeners can also sign up for your bands mailing list and share the widget on their own websites. As far as I know Tunewidget is the most versatile widget around for independent artists at the moment, proving that music player widgets have indeed come a long way from playing only single songs to functioning as “portable” websites.

Now, you might be asking yourself how to best utilize the widget. I suggest you start by thinking about placement. First of all make the widget the main music player on your own website and try to convince your fans to place it on their own websites, blogs and social network profiles. The next step is researching social networking sites and creating your artist/band profile on the ones that have most potential to get your music heard. Wikipedia has a nice list of social networking websites, but I don’t recommend just blazing around and creating a profile on every one of them. It’s a long list, so for the impatient ones I have created a narrowed down version with my recommendations.

Getting the most out of your widget

• Choose only one widget, which you will use in your own website and every social network you have a profile on. This way you can create brand awareness and make it easier for your possible fans to recognize your widget out of the many.
• Create a profile in every social network that in your opinion are best for promoting your music and your image, and place the widget in all of your profiles (if possible). However, I would advice you to avoid creating a profile in too many social networks. Instead try to concentrate on the five most important ones and manage them everyday by making new connections, participating in conversations, answering questions/fan mail and customizing the visual layout if possible. Of course if you have the resources and time do join in as many social networks as you can handle, but remember that an unmanaged profile doesn’t get you too far, and in some cases it may also create a negative image of you or your band. If you don’t interact with your fans, especially in the early stages, you become non-existent in their eyes.
• When using many different services, always create your profile with the same username and nickname if possible. This makes it easier for your fans to find you and also will help you with branding.
• Put the music player widget in spotlight by placing it in the center of attention. When a new visitor views your social network profile the first thing he/she should see is your widget.
• Go viral and encourage your fans to share your music player widget. Basically the widget is the ultimate ad for your music and your image. It catches attention and the person clicking it is not redirected anywhere. Everything that the potential fan needs to know about you and your music is right there in the small box.
• Reward your fans for sharing your widget. This is just a crazy idea, but you could for example give a special concert via webcam for those fans, who place your music player widget on their own websites, blogs or social network profiles.

Social networking websites

MySpace

Still one of the most important promotion tools for your music, because of the sheer amount of users.

Facebook

Massive amount of active users. There are some useful extra applications to promote your music with, such as iCast (by iLike), which allows you to send bulletins across many social networks simultaneously. Create your musician profile at Facebook Pages.

Bebo

The next generation MySpace offering musicians their own special pages. Customizing the visual layout is pretty easy and overall the profiles look much cleaner than on MySpace. Discovering new music is also made fairly easy with the Band Surf feature, which displays other similar artists while you’re viewing band profiles. Bebo also shows charts of the top 1000 major label, indie label and unsigned bands or you can just browse the charts by genre also.

imeem

One of the best music focused online communities around. Basically like MySpace, but with more features and more attractive visual design.

Last.fm

The best on-demand online radio with great social networking features. This is the future of discovering new music. Submit your own music to Last.fm here.

iLike

A social network inside other social networks meaning that you can integrate your iLike profile to many other social networking websites such as Bebo, Facebook and Hi5 (MySpace and Orkut coming soon). Instead of collecting fans separately on each social networking website, you can now collect fans to one destination through many different social networks.

Virb

Very similar to MySpace, but visually more attractive and more customizable.

Reverb Nation

A social music network offering street team management tools and useful widgets to embed on other sites. I especially recommend using the Tunewidget, which they modestly call “the mother of all widgets”.

Fuzz

A mashup music service, which connects artists and fans. The promotional tools you get in Fuzz are not so revolutionary, but the service has a clean and functional interface.

PureVolume

A music promotion platform that resembles Fuzz a lot. Both services offer a blog, a music player and a list of upcoming shows, so they are pretty much the same service with just different layout and design.

iJigg

A great way to promote and discover new music. Post your songs to iJigg, embed and share the music player widgets and collect votes from listeners.

Online music distribution

CD Baby

Pioneers of selling indie music online. CD Baby sells your CDs and also covers digital distribution with a 9% cut of all the digital distribution income your music generates. In the case of CDs they keep $4 for each sold CD. The strong point of CD Baby is its popularity.

Jamendo

A free music distribution platform offering an embeddable audio player and a buzz team, which will spread your music to other like minded people. As for the revenue model Jamendo shares (optionally) advertisement revenue with you and provides your fans a chance to donate money to you. When you upload your music to Jamendo you have to choose one of Creative Commons licenses, which means that people can copy, distribute and transmit your music freely.

Magnatune

Distributes and markets your music (CD’s and digital music) through various channels and gives you 50% of all gross income they make with your music. When you make a deal with Magnatune your music is licensed with a predefined Creative Commons license. The deal is non-exclusive, which means that you retain the right to use your songs for other purposes. A good incentive from Magnatune is that they also try to license your music to games, movies and commercials.

Prefueled

An online music store, which distributes music also through entertainment hubs placed that are placed in airports, hotels, music stores etc. These hubs are great way to reach those music consumers who are not yet familiar with online music stores. Go here to sign up for Prefueled Unsigned.

Tunecore

Distributes your music to the biggest online music stores such as iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster etc. Charges $0.99 per song (one time charge), $0.99 per store per album (one time charge) and $9.98 per album maintenance and storage (per year). You 100% of the royalties generated by sales of your recordings.

Emubands

Very similar to Tunecore, but cheaper. Charges a one-off payment (£24.95 to £49.95) per release depending on the amount of tracks and passes on to you 100% of the royalties generated by sales of your recordings.

Online music licensing

Pump Audio

An online music licensing service that licenses independent music to television, advertising, film etc. The deal is non-exclusive, you get 50% of the revenue your music generates, 1-year term, no submission fee and you retain full ownership to your songs. To me Pump Audio looks very attractive, because they work with many high profile ad agencies, TV networks and production companies from all over the world such as Nike, IBM ad MTV.

YouLicense

Describing itself as “an online music licensing marketplace”, YouLicense is definitely worth a try. They license your music to films, television, commercials, websites etc. and take only 9% commission for the service. You also retain full ownership to your songs since the deal is non-exclusive.

Rumblefish

Licenses your music to film, TV, video games, advertising and marketing campaigns, podcasts, video blogs, background usage etc. Non-exclusive licensing agreement, 1-year term, you retain full ownership to your songs and you get 50% of the net licensing fees.

BeatPick

An online music store and licensing service. BeatPick splits earnings 50/50 with their artists and the agreement is non-exclusive.

Alexa, a web information company, is a great tool for finding the most popular websites on the Internet. In addition to showing the most visited websites globally, Alexa provides also traffic rankings by country, by subject and by language. Although Alexa’s information is not 100% accurate, the service still provides an accurate enough overview of the most active websites. Using Alexa you can gather important information for optimizing your online visibility specifically in each country.

Targeting the most potential regions

The popularity of different social networking websites and music promotion websites varies greatly by region. For example here in Finland the most popular social networking website is IRC-galleria, which is totally unknown in any other country, because the website is in Finnish. The most popular social networking websites that support English language are YouTube, Facebook and MySpace (according to Alexa). In my humble opinion it is very important to know which social networking websites are the most popular in the countries you are trying to market your music in.

For instance, if you want to create an active fan base in France it is good to know that Skyrock, which is the 25th most popular website globally, gets over 60% of its traffic from France, which makes the service the second most popular website in France. Another good example is Google owned Orkut, which is the 10th most popular website globally. Orkut gets over 60% of its traffic from Brazil and it is the most popular website in Brazil. This information is crucial if you want to market your music specifically in Brazil.

I can say for sure that this kind of regional marketing approach takes a lot of effort, but if you do have the time and energy I truly recommend it. It might be a good idea to first start with larger social networks and find out in which countries you have following and only after that start optimizing your music marketing approach in the potential regions.

These Fuel Tank entertainment hubs are the thing that sets Prefueled apart from its competitors. Basically they are just computers in a stylized box with a touchscreen display that are connected to Prefueled online music store and allow you to transfer music onto your portable music player using USB, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection. The entertainment hubs are placed in key destinations (hotels, airports, music stores etc.) and they offer an innovative way to reach those music consumers, who are not yet familiar with online music stores. Although Internet is a familiar environment for the new generation of music consumers, there are still a lot of elderly people who don’t have a clue about MySpace, Last.fm, iTunes or any other music distribution service.

Even though Prefueled sells content from all four major record labels and thousands of indie labels, the most interesting feature is their community for unsigned artists. You can choose to sell your music through Prefueled’s online music store and entertainment hubs or you can also decide to give your music away for free. If you choose to sell your music, the revenues are split 50/50 after Prefueled has deducted credit card fees and paid royalties to copyright holders and copyright organizations. I read through the terms and conditions for signing up and as far as I understood there weren’t any unfair or tricky terms. Bear in mind though that Prefueled has some audio quality requirements for unsigned artists, so don’t be surprised if your home studio recordings are disapproved.

Prefueled’s online social community (Prefueled People) doesn’t offer any groundbreaking functions and it’s basically just a more polished version of MySpace. On the time I was writing this blog post there were only 900 registered users, so the community has to grow exponentially before it offers any real promotional value for artists. As for the market regions, the company is first targeting only Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark) so it might take a while before you see the entertainment hubs outside Europe. However, in my humble opinion Prefueled is worth a try since it has a certain amount of hype around it and the entertainment hubs offer an alternative way to distribute your music to the people on the streets.

Fans are artist’s lifeblood. They are the ones, who will eventually finance your career, one way or another. Normally there are just so many middlemen taking a share of the artist’s revenue that fans end up paying more than they should. I think this is also part of the problem with music piracy. So, forget middlemen and go straight to your fans. Explain them your situation and give them a good incentive to sponsor your new album or single.

Sellaband has a good concept based on appealing to your fans, but the problem with their service is the amount of money that needs to be collected through fans and “investors” before anything is done. $50,000 is a too big challenge for most unsigned bands. So far there are only 10 bands out of 5560, who have been able to gather the required amount. It depends on the band, but I would say that even with $10,000 you could already finance the recording, mixing and mastering of your album in a smaller scale professional studio.

Guidelines to encouraging your fans to sponsor you

• Do background research on how much money does it take exactly to finish your album/single in a professional studio. It’s better to say that you need $9,567 than $10,000, because when you have an exact amount of money as a goal, your fans are more likely to believe that there are no “extra” costs included in the amount. Let your fans know exactly what their money will be used on.
• Many people don’t trust Internet to be a safe way to transfer money, so remember to be professional when you approach your fans. It could be wise to set up a bank account and a PayPal account dedicated only to your band.
• Offer something exclusive to every sponsoring fan. For example an exclusive live concert, a webcam concert in the style of Sandi Thom, a special digipack version of your album, exclusive chat with the band on messenger, etc.
• Let your fans be also investors rather than only donors. Offer them a revenue share from CD sales and digital music sales. If you are planning to give your music away for free and using it mainly as a promotional tool, you can also let your sponsoring fans to get a share of music licensing income.

A band called Ten Year Vamp is a good example of appealing to fans to get album production costs covered. They have decided to give fans a chance to be part of the whole record producing, promotion and selling process by letting them to be the producers of their next studio album. Basically the concept is similar to Sellaband’s, but it’s taken a bit further. The band offers seven different kind of sponsorship packages ranging from $25 to $2000, and there are various exclusive benefits depending on the package. The most expensive package is targeted to corporations, which offers couple of interesting exclusive benefits such as “8 minutes of advertising time on a Ten Year Vamp Video Episode” and “Text Images and Links on our website and mailing lists for your website or business”.

I can say for sure that pulling out this kind of fan sponsoring project takes a lot of time and effort without any guarantee of success. So, if you believe in yourself and you have enough extra money in the bank, don’t bother your fans.

More and more music consumers, who want to get music on their mp3-players, head to BitTorrent websites or use peer-to-peer software. In many countries it is illegal to download copyrighted content from these services, but apparently that factor is not stopping their growth and the increasing user amount. I’ve said many times that recorded music should be used primarily as a promotional tool and the next idea requires exactly that kind of methodology.

Create BitTorrent files of your songs and albums, and share them on your own website and on the largest BitTorrent websites such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova, TorrentReactor, btjunkie etc. When you release new music make sure you also make it available on peer-to-peer networks and BitTorrent trackers. That’s where many people will first search it from, when they first hear about your music from their friends or radio, read a review of your newest single/album or see your music videos on YouTube. There are not so many ways to promote your music inside BitTorrent websites and peer-to-peer networks, because people usually know exactly what they are searching for from those services. However, they still offer an alternative and easy way for people, who are accustomed to using those services, to get your music.

If you want to try to promote your music with the help of BitTorrent technology you could always try a Firefox plug-in called AllPeers, which integrates social networking and torrent file sharing. The service seems like a very potential way for artists to share and promote their music, because you can add friends and send them your own torrent files. AllPeers allows you to make also private torrent files, which means that you can choose the people you share your files with instead of sharing everything with everybody. However, the service’s amount of users has to go a bit more up before it can offer any real promotional value for artists.