Headliner.fm is a platform for trading recommendations with other artists on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. You “buy” recommendations using a virtual currency called band bucks, which can be purchased outright for real money or earned by recommending other artists.

Creating a promotion is deceptively simple. You start by writing the recommendation and adding a link:

I say “deceptively” because I managed to botch my first one, to the tune of 48,043 band bucks. You’re supposed to put your link in the URL box and then click “shorten URL,” which appends a bit.ly link to the message. I wanted people to see where the link went, which makes it more likely to be clicked, so I didn’t shorten it.

My heart sank when I saw that my first recommender’s status update was missing the link. I immediately withdrew the promotion, which only removes it from the pool of promotions artists can accept. I still had to pay for every pending recommendation, even though some were scheduled weeks ahead!

The rest of the options are relatively straightforward. Choose your networks, genres of artists who can recommend you, and any particular artists you’d like to add. To restrict the promotion to a certain city (US only), start typing its name and hope it appears in the drop-down box. You can set the campaign to run for 3, 7, 14 or 30 days.

Surprisingly, you can’t choose how many band bucks to allocate to a promotion, which makes it difficult if not impossible to split test multiple campaigns. Weak!

My Results

I’ve run four promotions over the two months I’ve been using Headliner.fm. The first three are identical (beyond the missing link in the first), hyping a “best of” set I made available for free download through Christmas:

Depeche Mode and Postal Service fans, grab this Color Theory best-of album now, while it’s free! http://bit.ly/ctbohl2

The fourth references a fan favorite from my Depeche Mode tribute album:

Color Theory covers the Depeche Mode classic “But Not Tonight” http://bit.ly/zUbjk8

In total, I reached 111,318 “new fans,” as Headliner.fm optimistically refers to those who could potentially see the status update. Those 111K exposures generated 67 clicks, 8 likes, and 1 comment.

You read that right: out of 122 status updates recommending my music, potentially reaching 111,318 people, exactly one person commented.  I would expect dozens if not hundreds of comments, even just “thanks for the link” or “not my cup of tea.” And eight likes – that’s it?

What are these artists’ recommendations worth when their fanbases are so disengaged?

The overall clickthrough ratio of my four promotions was 0.06%. Contrast that with a long-running ad I’ve had on Facebook that’s pretty much identical to my fourth Headliner.fm promotion. It’s averaging a CTR of 0.16% (at $0.16 CPC), and each one of those clicks is a like on my Facebook page!

Based on my results, I don’t think Headliner.fm is worth paying for.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to!

Simply by connecting Headliner.fm to SoundCloud, I got a six month pro account for free. I have yet to receive my monthly 300,000 band buck allowance, but I started out with over 100,000 band bucks! Check out all these bonuses (click to enlarge):

It’s a lucky thing too, because to put it nicely, I’m not finding many artists on Headliner.fm that I can genuinely recommend.

Suggestions

I know I’m coming down hard on Headliner.fm, but I really do love the concept. Here’s what I suggest:

1. Measure influence accurately. One small tweak to the formula would account for the all too many artists with artificially inflated like/follower counts: The band bucks an artist receives for a recommendation should be equal to the number of exposures multiplied by the artist’s Klout score, expressed as a percentage. For example, if my Klout score is 50 and I recommend an artist to 10,000 of my fans, I earn 5000 band bucks (10,000 x 0.50).
2. Let us cut our losses. If a promotion isn’t delivering the results I hoped for, I should be able to cancel it, effective immediately. Watching my band bucks drain away on that first campaign, due to – let’s face it – a design flaw (accepting a promotion without a link), made a lousy first impression.
3. Review every promotion. I’m often asked to post a status update saying “check out my new song” – with a link to someone else’s song. Amateur mistakes litter the requests feed, making it even harder to find acts to recommend.
4. Make campaigns flexible. Why limit them to 3, 7, 14, or 30 days? Let me set a daily, weekly, or monthly budget, or set a band buck ceiling. How about “set it and forget it campaigns” that continue running until they’re cancelled?
5. Dump MySpace. This one’s a no-brainer. It’s hard to take any MySpace partner seriously in 2012. If you want to include a third social network, make it Google+.
6. Tailor updates to individual networks. Nothing screams “spam” like Twitter hashtags on Facebook. On the other hand, a Facebook or Twitter update referencing a big name band (using @bignameband) exposes my promotion to a vastly larger audience. Let us customize our promotions using each network’s API, to maximize our reach.
7. Embeddable players. Make a Facebook-embeddable player a la Bandcamp with a prominent “buy” button, that measures plays (partial vs skips), shares, and mailing list signups. People are more likely to listen if they don’t have to click off-site.

Until some of these changes are implemented, or I get my promised 300,000 monthly band buck allowance, I’m done with Headliner.fm.

Have you had better luck? Any other suggestions? Let’s hear about it in the comments!

What Artists Should Know About Headliner.fm is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com

Jango offers free Pandora-style internet radio. Type in an artist’s name and it generates a playlist of related songs. Jango Airplay lets artists buy their way into the recommendation engine, promising guaranteed airplay alongside your pick of big names.

I’ve been running Jango campaigns pretty much continuously since the service launched in March of 2009. My songs have been played 270,000 times, 23% of which were unpaid “organic” plays. It cost me $1841.50 out of my own pocket, plus at least that much in affiliate earnings from my previous articles on the topic.

What’s my return on that investment? There’s no way to know.

Jango reports 25,000 likes and 9800 fans, but those terms have little meaning. A like on Jango is a simple thumbs-up that has nothing to do with Facebook, and most of those “fans” are unreachable. An average of one email address per day has been shared with me since that feature launched in early 2010, but those 700 email addresses alone don’t justify the expense.

The reason I stick with it is because I’ve seen so many Jango listeners become genuine fans. They friend me on Facebook, reply to my email updates, comment on my YouTube videos, and yes, buy my music. With the possible exception of Facebook Ads, I’m convinced Jango is the best passive promotion out there.

Others are skeptical. This site’s top Google search term is “jango airplay scam.” Some suggest that while the service does what it claims to do, any form of pay-for-play is payola (I address that argument here). Conspiracy theorists claim that the entire service is a fraud, and that the comments and realtime listener feed are faked (despite the fact that many comments clearly apply to a particular song, and that you can message listeners directly from the feed).

Jango could go a long way towards dispelling these concerns by finally fixing the weakest aspect of the service: artist-to-fan communication.

When I send out a mass email to 9800 fans, I typically get only one or two responses. With a response rate of 0.0002%, it’s natural to wonder if anyone is really out there.

The problem is that the listener’s inbox is tucked away in a drop-down menu. The vast majority of Jango users almost certainly don’t realize they have an inbox.

I suggest Jango eliminate all social networking features and share new fans’ email addresses by default, unless a box is unchecked. Then add a full-featured fan management system like ReverbNation’s FanReach, with an export function and full analytics including open and clickthrough rates.

While I’m making suggestions, I’d love to see a percentage of likes for each song, which would make it easy to tell the hits from the misses, and simplify running a focus group.

To their credit, Jango has added plenty of new features since I first wrote about it. Highlights include:

1. Custom promo module. You can now choose exactly what listeners see when your song plays. I’m using the “Facebook Likes” module, which connects directly to my Facebook page. It also includes a custom text link, plus icon links to web profiles and stores (you can see it at the top of this post).

2. Band Central. A new mini-site showcasing Airplay artists, sorted by genre, geography, or “popularity.” You’d think popularity would mean the number of fans, but it’s actually based on PopScore: a much-maligned metric of quality algorithmically derived from fan response.

3. The Jango Airplay Blog and how-to support links. The staff is much more accessible and social, and the site’s inner workings more transparent, than when the service first launched. The blog and how-to’s are full of tips and strategies, plus contests and weekly top 10′s. For example, one post walks you through creating a spoken audio intro for your songs. Great idea!

4. Royalties. This isn’t exactly a feature, but after much speculation I can now confirm that Jango does pay royalties. I received a whopping $13.23 from Jango via SoundExchange last quarter. Based on that low figure, my guess is that they only pay royalties on free “organic” plays, not paid plays through the Airplay program. Hey, it’s more than I got from Last.fm!

Though there’s still plenty of room for improvement, Jango is better than ever. I’ll continue to report back with my results, recycling all money earned through my affiliate link into plays.

Why I Still Use Jango is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com

Running a Facebook ad campaign is confusing. You bid for ad placement, but the price you pay bears little relation to your bid. What’s the difference between reach and social reach, connections and clicks, CPC and CPM? More importantly, is there any way to tell how many people played, downloaded, and shared your song, or signed up for your mailing list? (answer: no, there’s not)

ReverbNation’s new Promote It tool addresses those shortcomings, and then some. You pick a song, photo, and budget, and it automatically generates dozens of optimized Facebook ads based on past Promote It campaigns, and continually optimizes your campaign based on the performance of those ads. New fans click through to customized landing pages that track not just clicks and likes, but plays, downloads, shares, wall posts, and mailing list signups. As I’m quoted as saying in the press release, “It’s the ultimate ‘set it and forget it’ fan-making machine!”

I was invited to try it out and provide feedback during the beta period, and I’m flattered that some of my suggestions made it into the final product. So far I’ve run six campaigns. Let’s walk through the creation and performance of my latest and most successful one.

As of this writing, there are two types of campaigns available: promote a song, and promote your Facebook page. Soon you’ll also be able to promote a show or release. Most of my experience is with promote a song, so let’s continue with that:

Setting up your Promote a Song campaign requires nine simple inputs:

1. Which Song Would You Like to Promote? You should pick one that grabs the listener in the first 5-10 seconds. The song I chose starts right in on the first verse, with no instrumental introduction whatsoever.

2. Pick 5 Similar Artists. Since I was promoting a Depeche Mode cover song, I picked the band and its members’ solo projects: Dave Gahan (lead singer), Martin L Gore (songwriter), and Alan Wilder (long-departed yet still beloved keyboardist/producer) – plus Erasure, since half of that duo was in the original line-up of DM.

The product manager for Promote It told me that artists who have between 50,000 and 500,000 likes work best, and my results bear that out:

The Dave Gahan ads performed so well that they completely crowded out the rest. Perhaps it’s because Depeche Mode has millions of casual fans, but only the most serious ones keep up with the lead singer’s solo work, and are therefore more motivated to check out my cover.

3. Write Ad Text. You can choose to author one of the ads yourself, or let Promote It generate them all. Since my custom ad was outperformed by the auto-generated ads, I won’t bother sharing it with you.

4. Choose Picture. Your choice here can make or break the campaign! My previous campaign was identical to this one, except I used a close-up of yours truly. The results were pathetic. It should come as no surprise that a photo featuring 1) a world-famous band and 2) an attractive female does a better job of catching the eye.

5. Geo-Targeting. Choose between local (your state), national, all English-speaking countries, or global. Theoretically you should get the best results from global, but national did just as well for me in my limited experience.

6-8. Name Your Campaign, Sync with Facebook, Start Date. Pretty much self-explanatory.

9. Budget. Choose between $25, $50, $100, $250, or $500 on a one-time, weekly, or monthly basis. I recommend you experiment with successive $25 campaigns until you find a winning formula, and expand from there.

My $50 campaign lasted six days. Here are the results (click to enlarge):

I was most pleased with the 44 mailing list signups, but 57 likes is nice too. There’s sure to be some overlap between those two figures, but in any case, that’s a lot of new fans who will be hearing from me on a regular basis.

How does Promote It compare to running Facebook ads directly?

It really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you just want to boost the number of likes on your page, direct ads have a serious advantage: you can structure them so that a click is a like.

But if you’re looking for the kind of things we musicians tend to care most about: song plays, downloads, shares, and mailing list signups, there’s no way to know which is best. Facebook doesn’t provide that information.

And no, you can’t just take the best performing Promote It ad and copy it over to Facebook. ReverbNation doesn’t share the text of its auto-generated ads with you, perhaps for that very reason.

But who says you have to choose? I use both.

How is Promote It working for you? Please share your results in the comments. To see it in action, check out this short video.

What Artists Should Know About ReverbNation’s Promote It is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com

Quality graphic design is expensive. I paid $500 just to license the cover image for my last album, plus $600 for the rest of the design. That’s fine every couple of years, but now that I’m releasing songs individually, I need a cover design every month or two. I decided to give 99designs a try, and the results far exceeded my expectations. For $145, I got 96 custom designs from 33 different designers. Sure, some were amateur, but a solid half were usable, and a handful were excellent.

Sound too good to be true? Yes, it does. In fact, I hesitated to write this article. More on that later.

Contrary to what you might expect, 99designs doesn’t have an in-house design team. They host a design contest on your behalf, in which anyone can participate. As with any contest, there are winners and losers. That’s right – only the winner gets paid, though you can buy extra designs by selecting multiple winners. In my case, 95 of the 96 designs were done “on spec” i.e. for free. And you thought the music industry was cutthroat.

It takes all of five minutes to launch your own contest:

1. Choose what you want designed. Prices start at $95 for a Twitter background, all the way up to $495 for a web site. “Print & Packaging Design” starts at $195, but since I only needed one image for digital release, I selected the “Other Graphic Design” category, starting at $145.
2. Write the design brief. This is where you spell out to the designers exactly what you’re looking for (see mine here). I made it clear that my contest wasn’t intended to be a one-off gig, but the start of a working partnership. Perhaps that’s why I got so many entries.
3. Set your price. There are three tiers to choose from: gold, silver, and bronze ($595, $295, and $145 respectively in the ”Other Graphic Design” category). You can also name your own price, as long as it’s above the bronze package minimum. Presumably, the more money you offer, the better designers you’ll attract.
4. Choose your preferences. Several other options are available. You can make the contest blind, so that only you can view the entries. You can guarantee the contest, ensuring designers that the prize money will be awarded. If you don’t, you’re free to back out at any time for a full refund. Finally, you can pay extra for a shorter than 7-day contest, or for extra visibility on the site.

Within a few hours, the designs started rolling in. I planned to just kick back and revel in the artistic brilliance, but corresponding with 33 designers quickly turned into a full-time job. Here’s how to keep your contest running smoothly:

1. Eliminate hopeless causes. Some designers simply aren’t up to par, and though it seems cruel, you’ll be doing them a favor by eliminating them outright. I was seriously racked with guilt over the amount of work people were putting in, and figured the least I could do was provide plenty of feedback. That only encouraged them to try harder, which was ultimately a waste of everyone’s time.
2. Steer the process. Provide ongoing feedback for all the designers on the main contest page. Believe it or not, I had to remind everyone that album covers are perfectly square (or at least in iTunes). After receiving dozens of entries featuring hands, I declared that theme officially played out. In retrospect, I should have insisted that designers get my approval on rough designs or photos before proceeding.
3. Check for copyright violations. I used TinEye reverse image search to see if potential contenders matched other images on the web. If you’re the least bit suspicious, ask. If you’re not happy with the answer, eliminate. The best design in the world isn’t worth a lawsuit. Stock photos are acceptable, if clearly presented as such.
4. Screen the designers. Grab some clues from their 99designs profile and Google away. Do they have a dedicated site hosting their portfolio? Look them up on Flickr, deviantART, Facebook, even Twitter. How responsive are they to your feedback? Is this someone you’d hire again?
5. Get outside feedback. 99designs has a slick polling feature. You can create as many polls as you want to gather opinions privately, or solicit them publicly on your blog, Facebook, or Twitter. My fans made it abundantly clear which design they wanted, and as luck would have it, I was leaning that way anyway! Even if your mind is pretty much made up, a poll builds awareness of the release and gives fans a chance to participate in the creative process.

Why wouldn’t I do it again?

Shortly after launching my contest, two graphic designer friends voiced their disapproval, claiming that 99designs and other crowdsourcing sites erode the basic fabric and cost structure of the industry. One thing’s for sure: the format is absurdly inefficient. I shouldn’t be able to pay $1.50 per design, should I? That’s why I hesitated to write this article.

On the other hand, it’s a free market economy. If the risk isn’t worth the reward, don’t enter the contest! How is it different from pitching a song for a tip sheet, or entering a remix contest?

Then there’s the whole outsourcing angle. The winning designer in my contest is from Romania, where $145 is a decent week’s salary (EDIT: turns out they only receive $100, but the point remains). Should I pay four times as much to keep the money here in the US?

Tough questions for sure, but for now, I’ve got no reason to launch another contest. I’m happy to hire the winning designer, or several of the “losing” designers, first. Click on one of the thumbnails below to view their contest entries, and feel free to contact them directly. If you decide to launch your own contest on 99designs, please use my affiliate link.

How I Got 96 Album Cover Designs for $145 (and why I’ll never do it again) is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com

Two months ago, I began implementing Ariel Hyatt and Carla Lynne Hall’s strategy to increase my Twitter following, as laid out in their book Musician’s Roadmap to Facebook and Twitter. The basic idea is to follow potential fans in the hope that they will follow back. I discovered that the more selective I am in choosing who to follow, the more likely I am to connect with people who may become genuine fans. I’ll share my process and results below.

Optimize your profile. Every potential follower will first scan your profile to figure out who you are and why you followed them, and decide whether or not to follow back based on what they see. Be sure to include a short “elevator pitch” that accurately describes your sound, a link to your site, and a reference to a related band or two. I describe my music as “electronic indie piano pop for fans of The Postal Service, Depeche Mode, and Owl City.”

Follow related bands’ followers. In my case, that means finding the official profile of The Postal Service, Depeche Mode, or Owl City and following their followers. With any luck, they’ll click through to my profile, spot my reference to the related band, follow back, and maybe even take a listen.

But I don’t just follow anyone! I prescreen each potential fan to ensure they meet the following criteria:

1. At least 20 followers. I learned this the hard way! After my first indiscriminate following session, I received several direct messages asking “do I know you?” People with low follower counts are likely tweeting only to close friends. The idea here is to get noticed without invading anyone’s privacy.

2. No approval required. Along the same lines, I don’t send follow requests to users who keep their tweets private. It strikes me as rude. If I click on the follow button and see “pending (cancel),” I immediately cancel. Perhaps someone more bold than me will experiment with a request-only strategy and share their results.

3. Last tweet less than one week old. There’s no point in following inactive accounts. While our main goal is to attract potential fans, we might as well narrow our focus on people who can help spread our message. That means active Twitter users with public tweets that reach a respectable number of people.

4. No egg icon. While we’re on the topic of respect, no self-respecting Twitter user keeps the default egg icon as their avatar. If they can’t even bother to upload a profile photo, they’re not worth following.

5. Following 30-300. If a user follows less than 30 people, they won’t follow me. If they follow more than 300, they won’t notice me.

6. English speaking. I realize that users who Tweet in other languages could very well speak English, and even spread my message in their native language. Still, it’s disingenuous to follow someone when you don’t understand what they’re saying.

7. No businesses. Businesses are on Twitter to promote their brand and services. Even if they happen to follow related bands, they’re not likely to evangelize. Stick with personal accounts.

8. No back-scratchers. Many profiles state something along the lines of “follow and I will follow back.” My mission is to find new fans, not to artificially inflate my numbers with people who don’t care about my music.

9. No Beliebers. Justin Bieber takes up 3% of all Twitter traffic. If I see him mentioned in a user’s profile or tweet stream, I immediately unfollow. Beliebers have a nasty habit of retweeting anything even casually Bieber-related, including desperate pleas for the little man to follow them back.

These are guidelines, not rules. If I come across a person that interests me, I’ll follow them regardless. If someone meets the criteria but rubs me the wrong way, I won’t. Go with your gut.

I keep at this until I follow 50 new users, which takes about 20 minutes. To check my progress, I use the find function in Chrome to search for the word “following” on the current page until I see 53 hits (three instances of the word appear naturally on the page before you start following anyone).

Unfollow non-followers. After two days, I use JustUnfollow to unfollow the users who aren’t following me back, usually about 40. This step is crucial because 1) Twitter only lets you follow 2000 users unless a higher number follow you, and 2) high following counts coupled with low follower counts look amateur. After unfollowing, it’s right back to following related bands’ followers, ad infinitum.

Beliebers or no, your Twitter stream will quickly become cluttered. To counter this, create a list of users you actually want to keep track of, and bookmark that page. While it’s important to interact with your new followers, it’s tough to stay on top of more than 150. I have Twilert send me email updates that mention me, my band, or my latest album at 4 pm daily, so I don’t miss out on anything of direct concern.

Hey look, it works! On March 18, I had 700 “organic” followers, the natural result of using Twitter since December of 2008. Eight weeks later, I’m approaching 1000.

On the flipside, I’m following almost 400 users, four times more than when I started. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a chore. 20 minutes every two days may not seem like much, but it sure ain’t passive promotion.

If you’ve got any ideas to further refine the process, please share them in the comments! And if one day you discover I’m following you on Twitter, I hope you’ll recognize the high honor it confers and follow back.

Prescreen Your Future Fans with Twitter is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com

“Garbage in, garbage out” is a common saying among mastering engineers. The quality of the source material limits the quality of the final product. Most of my clients have no problem following my simple preparation instructions, but they stop there. They figure once each mix sounds as good as they can get it, they’re done. In fact, there’s a higher level of refinement that pays huge dividends. I’ll break it down in this mastering engineer’s guide to final mixdown (which I promised in an interview back in January – sorry for the delay!).

1. Choose a reference. Find a major label track with the tonal balance you’re looking for – ideally something that hasn’t been totally decimated in mastering, since you’ll be comparing it to your unmastered tracks. If you followed my earlier advice on using a reference during the mixing process, you’ll want to use the same track here.

2. Load in your tracks. I’m assuming that you’ve already rendered all the tracks for your release as stereo 24-bit or higher .wav or AIFF files, with no processing on the master bus, and that they peak under 0 dB. If they hit 0 dB, that means they’re clipped. Lower the gain on the master bus by 6 dB and try again. Once you’ve got clean mixdowns, fire up your DAW and put each of them and your reference on separate channels, like so:

My reference track and six mixdowns

3. Trim each track down to a representative clip. We’re going to use the loudest section of each track as a stand-in for the entire mix. In most cases, this means trimming all but 15 seconds or so of the chorus. Be sure to solo each channel before you hit play so you don’t blow your ears out! In fact, turn down your reference track by 12 dB right off the bat, since it’s already mastered. You’ll end up with something like this:

A representative 15 seconds of each track (note the timeline at the bottom)

4. Match volumes. Bounce between the reference and your mixdowns, adjusting volume levels until everything matches. Be sure to make the gain adjustment at the clip level, not on the channel, so you won’t lose your settings when we…

5. Line up all the clips onto a single channel. Alternate between reference and mixdown, like so:

Reference, mixdown, reference, mixdown...

6. A/B compare your mixdowns and reference. Hit play and close your eyes. How does each mixdown sound immediately after the reference track? Bright? Dull? Muddy? Boomy? Take plenty of notes, and keep fine-tuning the volume of your clips.

7. Back to the drawing board. Use your notes to make adjustments to your mixes. Import your reference track into each of your projects if you haven’t already. If a mix is too bright, an easy fix is to lower the hi-hats. If a mix is too bassy, ensure the low end is rolled off of non-bass instruments and/or turn down the kick and bass (I detail the process here). If a mix is too muddy, look at cutting some 200-400 Hz, raising some rolloff frequencies, or thinning out the arrangement. Don’t forget to scan the entire track for consistency – not just the chorus.

8. Render, remix, repeat. Open back up our project, shuffle the clips around, take more notes, and keep adjusting your mixes. When they sound consistent, remove the internal reference track clips and shuffle them some more. Eventually you can eliminate the reference track completely. I can’t stress enough how important it is to take frequent breaks! Continue to fine tune your mixes until they match to the best of your abilities, preferably over the course of several days.

Reference, mixdown, mixdown, mixdown...

You may be wondering, “Did I just master my album?” No, but you made your mastering engineer’s job a lot easier (easier still if you passed along the final volume levels of each of your clips). You minimized the amount of EQ your ME needs to use to create a consistent tonal balance, which means less phase coloration. It means that instead of correcting problems in your mixes, your ME can focus on finding the density and punch that best serves your music on a broad range of playback systems. It means no nasty surprises when you hear your mastered release for the first time, because your ME didn’t have to cut 10 dB off the highs to tame that hi-hat you couldn’t get enough of. It means better sound, and ultimately, better sales.

A Mastering Engineer’s Guide to Final Mixdown is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com

I measure my success as a recording artist by the growth of my mailing list. The best way to get someone to subscribe is to offer something in return, and a great song is a powerful incentive. Here are ten techniques to negotiate that delicate exchange:

1. The classic squeeze page. You’ve probably stumbled onto one of these before: a fine-tuned infomercial-style pitch with a clear call to action and no exit links. The sole goal of the site, often just a single page, is to generate conversions. In our case, a conversion means “squeezing” an email address out of a potential fan. Seamus Anthony describes the method here and demonstrates it using his own music here. It may do the trick for first-time visitors, but returning fans have no clear path to explore the rest of your content.

2. The homepage squeeze. Identical to the classic squeeze page, except for a small link that takes you to the rest of the site. Returning fans are forced to opt out every visit – an annoying speed bump. Then again, if the free song is rotated often enough, it may encourage repeat visits. Theoretically, a site could use cookies to bypass the squeeze page for return visitors, but I don’t know of any service or WordPress plugin that does it.

3. The “free mp3 download” page. This is my current strategy, but there’s definitely room for improvement. An SEO friendly “yourbandname.com/free-mp3-download” URL and clever use of keywords can pull in traffic from Google searchers trying to freeload your music. While a simple “free mp3s” link in your site’s navigation isn’t distracting for repeat visitors, it’s easy to overlook. Still, I’m not going to force my fans to jump through hoops every time they want to post a comment.

4. The fan club. Thomas Dolby offers two full EPs exclusively to registered members of his forum. This soft sell approach encourages die-hard fans to join the conversation, but I doubt it pulls in much new blood. If your focus is to satisfy your existing fanbase, fan club exclusives offer a surefire way to retain their love and devotion.

5. The widget. Your mailing list service should provide a widget to gather fan addresses (I use ReverbNation’s FanReach, but FanBridge is another great choice). You’ll obviously need it for the squeeze page of your site. If you’re still sporting a MySpace page, you’ll want to embed it there as well. On sites where you can’t embed a widget, you can link directly to the signup form. ReverbNation and FanBridge provide every artist with a landing page to send potential subscribers to (for example, mine is here).

6. The Facebook page. As far as I know, you can’t embed a mailing list widget directly onto a Facebook page. Fortunately, RootMusic and ReverbNation have Facebook applications to run their all-in-one profiles, including mailing list signup, in their own tab. You can also build a custom HTML landing tab in Static FMBL, which isn’t as hard as it sounds. I’m using Facebook ads to direct potential fans to my FMBL tab, which encourages them to download songs from the Band Profile tab, courtesy of ReverbNation’s My Band application. Embedding a mailing list widget directly on my FMBL tab would streamline the process, but it’s beyond my technical abilities.

7. Viinyl. The slogan for this new service, currently in beta, is “one song, one site, one URL.” I’m auditioning it at colortheory.viinyl.com. It’s slick, simple, and direct, allowing the listener to focus on the featured song with minimal distractions. On the flipside, it doesn’t offer a clear path to the rest of my content. Whether or not that’s a fair trade remains to be seen.

8. NoiseTrade. Speaking of fair trades and horrible segues, NoiseTrade isn’t as streamlined, but it offers a high degree of control. Artists typically give away an entire release in exchange for an email address and a Facebook or Twitter update linking back to said release. Fans have the option to tip up to $100 (you get 80%), so it’s essentially a “pay what you want” model.

9. Tweet for a Track. A variation on the same theme, Tweet for a Track does pretty much what you’d expect. Fans enter their email address, which is passed on to the artist, and then share a link back to the song’s TFAT page on Facebook or Twitter. You can see it in action here. The catch is, they charge a minimum of $24.99 to share your fans’ email addresses with you.

10. Bandcamp. The backbone of my entire operation. Bandcamp offers up my discography to the world for sale, streaming, and sharing. Even if you don’t have anything to sell, you can host as much music as you’d like for free download in a variety of audio formats. You choose whether or not to require an email address on a per-song basis, and it doesn’t cost a penny if you stay below 200 downloads per month. Another great feature is their Facebook-embeddable widgets, which play right from the news stream.

Getting folks to subscribe is the easy part. The hard part is holding on to them! Nurture those new fans by communicating with them on a regular and consistent basis, and don’t think about selling anything until you hit 1000 subscribers.

10 Ways to Trade a Song for an Email Address is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com

2010 was the best year yet for Color Theory. I released my eighth and best full-length album, The Sound, followed by my best EP, The Silence. More people bought and stole my music than ever before – both great things, as I explain in this short interview with Hypebot. Along the way, I shared my experiments and experiences with you here:

• I launched my first street team mission and created a step-by-step guide to launching your own
• I detailed what it takes to get your song into Rock Band, and decided that authoring is best left to the pros
• I made a case for simple song structures
• I crowdsourced the tracklisting of my album on Jango
• I created a $99 personalized CD
• Helen Austin showed us how she gets so many film and TV placements
• I ran down the best WordPress plugins for passive promotion
• I shared my experience with song evaluation service SoundOut
• I argued against the traditional fan funding model

I hope that my successes and failures have helped you promote your own music, or at the very least, entertained. I’ve got a boatload of crazy schemes planned for 2011, and you can count on me to share any successful strategies with you. In fact, I’ve already got a half dozen article ideas ready to go! The trick is finding the time to flesh them out. In the meantime, here’s a guest post I wrote for The Musician’s Guide: How Would Brian Hazard Spend a £500 Song Release Budget?

Here’s to a new and improved, bigger and better 2011!

2010: The Year in Passive Promotion is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com

Let’s be honest. You don’t need the money.

Anyone can make a record for next to nothing these days. Almost any other hobby is more expensive: photography, mountain biking, even video gaming. When a teenager singing into a webcam gets exponentially more views on YouTube than your latest “professional” video, the answer isn’t more money.

You’re just not there yet.

(hey, don’t feel bad – I’m not either)

Tracking at Abbey Road Studios won’t get you there. Hiring T-Bone Burnett to mix your album won’t get you there. A full-day mastering session with Bob Ludwig won’t get you there. 10,000 pressed CDs with 18-page inserts won’t get you there. A $5,000 promotion budget won’t get you there either.

No matter how much money you throw at your project, we’re all limited by a stubborn principle called free market pricing. People are only willing to pay what a product is worth to them, not what it costs to produce. The intrinsic value of music is in free fall, and people won’t pay for it if they’re just not that into you.

So why are musicians flocking to fan funding (also known as “crowdfunding”) sites like Kickstarter, Sellaband, Slicethepie, PledgeMusic, and artistShare in droves?

My guess is that they figure “why not give it a shot”? Well, I’ll tell you why not, and offer a better option.

1. It’s dishonest. I’m simply not willing to pretend it costs thousands of dollars to put out an album. If you can’t sell 100 CDs at $10 to pay for replication, make CD-Rs at $2 a pop, produce them on-demand, or go digital-only. Effective promotion doesn’t necessarily come with a price tag. And really, why should your fans pay to promote something they already bought?
2. They own you. By entering into a partnership with your fans, you become accountable to them. Until you follow through on your promises, you no longer call the shots. As Hugh McLeod explains in Ignore Everybody, “The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will. The best way to get approval is not to need it.” While some may actually like the added pressure, it comes with a loss of control.
3. You could fail. Publicly and humiliatingly. Everyone will get their money back while you walk away empty-handed. Your fans may conclude that either your goal was too ambitious, or just maybe, your music isn’t as good as they thought is was. Your failure functions as a reverse testimonial. And then what? Are you really going to dump the whole project? If not, why hold it hostage in the first place?

We’re all adults here, right? If your project is so promising and you can’t scrape together $1500 from your “real job,” you could always write up a business plan and get a loan from the bank. Then again, they may just chuckle and offer to raise the limit on your Visa.

Fortunately, there’s a way to reap all the benefits of fan funding with none of the downsides: take pre-orders.

You can still create tiers with personalized extras, like phone calls with the artist, studio attendance, or a custom song. If you accept payments directly, you earn an extra 10% that would otherwise go to a third party. You can create a plan that scales with your goals (“if we reach 100 pre-orders, I’ll press CDs and all digital album sales will include physical CDs as well”). Or you can wait to add tiers until you reach certain milestones, so you don’t promise anything you can’t deliver. Best of all, you’re not locked in to anything. You can adjust your approach as you go based on fan response.

Taking pre-orders puts free market pricing on your side, by allowing you to create only what you need to fulfill demand. Best of all, there’s no “goal” to reach, so you keep every dollar. Risk is no longer a factor.

When is fan funding a better choice than taking pre-orders? What can an artist do on a fan funding site that they can’t do on their own? Let me know in the comments!

An Argument Against Fan Funding is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com

You know your song is great, but is it a hit? Will it inspire listeners to share it with their friends, hand over their email address, or maybe even open their wallets? You need feedback from average music fans who have nothing to lose by being honest.

SoundOut compares your song to 50,000 others from both major labels and indies. They promise to tell you how good your track is with guaranteed 95% accuracy (I’m still trying to wrap my brain around what that means). Starting at $40, they compile the results of 80 reviews into an easy-to-read PDF report. Top rated artists are considered for additional publishing and promotional opportunities.

The head of business development invited me to try out the service for free with three 24-hour “Express Reports” (a $150 value). I used the feedback from my Jango focus group to select the best and worst tracks I recorded for my last album, along with my personal favorite, an 8-minute progressive house epic. You can download all three of my PDF reports here.

Summary of Results

I can describe the results in one word: brutal. None of the songs are deemed worthy of being album tracks, much less singles. In the most important metric, Market Potential, my best song received a 54%, my worst 39%, and my favorite a pathetic 20%. Those numbers stand in stark contrast to my stats at Jango, for reasons I’ll explain in a bit.

Despite the huge swing in percentages, the track ratings only vary from 4.7 to 5.9, which implies Market Potential scores of 47% to 59%. For better or for worse, those scores are weighted using “computational forensic linguistic technology and other proprietary SoundOut techniques.” Even the track rating score is weighted! I would love to see a raw average of the 80 reviewers’ 0-10 point ratings, because I don’t trust the algorithms. The verbal smokescreen used to describe them doesn’t exactly inspire confidence (isn’t any numerical analysis “computational”?).

Perhaps to soften the blow, the bottom of the page lists three songs by well known artists in the same genre that have similar market potential. Translation: your songs suck, but so do these others by major label acts you look up to. Curiously, two of the same songs are listed on my 39% and 20% reports, which casts further doubt on the underlying algorithms.

Detailed Feedback

I found the Detailed Feedback page to be the most useful. It tells you who liked your song based on age group and gender. I don’t know exactly what “like” translates to on a 10-point scale, but it makes sense that 25-34 year-olds rate my retro 80′s song higher than 16-24 year-olds, since the former were actually around back then.

The track positioning chart maps your song relative to 1,000 others in the genre, based on rating and consensus of opinion. It’s a clean and intuitive representation of how your song stacks up to the competition. Still, it would be nice to know what criteria (if any) was used to select those 1,000 tracks.

Review Analysis

The Review Analysis section is utterly useless. The elements listed change from song to song. The only element that was consistently judged excellent is guitar, which is quite generous considering there’s no guitar in any of my songs.

The actual reviews are no better or worse than the comments on my Jango profile. They ranged from overly enthusiastic (“THIS SONG WAS GREAT I REALLY LIKED IT IT HAD A GOOD BEAT TO IT I MY HAVE TO DOWNLOAD IT MYSLEF”) to passive aggressive (“this song wasn’t as bad as it could be”). At the very least, the reviews prove there are real people behind the numbers.

Unfortunately for me, they don’t appear to be fans of electronic music. Not a single reviewer mentioned an electronic act. Instead of the usual comparisons to The Postal Service, Owl City, and Depeche Mode, I got Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston(!), and Alan Parsons Project.

Scouting for Fame and Fortune

As puzzling as the mention of guitar in the review analysis was, it was a comment about my “20% song” that convinced me to review the review process. It said “the lack of vocals is a shame.” Those seven words reveal a key flaw in their methodology: reviewers only have to listen to the first 60 seconds of your song.

If you’re considering giving SoundOut a whirl, I highly recommend trying your hand as a scout on their sister site, Slicethepie. In just five minutes, you too can be one of the “real music fans and consumers” reviewing songs for SoundOut. You’ll start well below the minimum wage at $0.02 per review, but top performers can level up to $0.20 a pop.

Hitting the play button starts the 60 second countdown until you can start typing your review. If you don’t come up with at least a couple quality sentences, it nags you to try harder. The elements in each track are not explicitly rated. Instead, the text of each review is analyzed, as evidenced by the scolding I received when one of my reviews was rejected:

“A review of the track would be good! You haven’t mentioned any of our expected musical terms – please try again…”

I didn’t appreciate the sarcasm after composing what I considered to be a very insightful review mentioning the production and drums – both of which are scored elements. This buggy behavior may explain my stellar air guitar scores. Perhaps my reviewers wrote “it would be NICE to hear some GUITAR” and the algorithm mistakenly connected the two words.

Even though I only selected electronic genres when I created my profile, I heard everything from mainstream rock/pop to hip hop, country, and metal. Reviewers are not matched to songs by genre. Everyone reviews everything, which opens us all up to Whitney Houston comparisons.

Conclusion

Can you tell if a song is great by listening to the first minute? No, but you can tell if it’s a hit.

If you operate in a niche genre, searching for your 1000 true fans, SoundOut may not be a good fit. For example, my best song doesn’t pay off until you hear the lyrical twist in the last chorus, and my “20% song” doesn’t have vocals for the first two minutes. With that in mind, how useful is a comprehensive analysis of the first 60 seconds? Less useful still when the data comes from reviewers who aren’t fluent in the genre.

While I have some reservations about their methodology, SoundOut is the fastest way I know of to get an unbiased opinion from a large sample of listeners. Use it wisely!

What Artists Should Know About SoundOut is a post from Passive Promotion ©2012 Brian Hazard | http://www.passivepromotion.com