Merchandising!

There’s been a lot of banter about the relevance of album artwork in the digital age across the metal blogsphere (starting on Metalsucks, then moving to Invisible Oranges). The conversation has generally centered around whether the fans want/need/appreciate album artwork anymore. Many folks don’t buy CD’s or vinyl any more, and those that do often just rip the music for their iPod and file the hard copy away without paying much attention to the packaging or artwork. There are of course others who view an album as a package – 10 or so songs made to be together, with cover artwork, sleeve notes, lyrics etc. – and consume as a whole.

However, in many ways, whether the music buying public want, or feel that they need artwork or not is somewhat beside the point. The fact is, aside from the artistic concerns, artwork has a very practical purpose, which means it’s unlikely to disappear any time soon.

It’s unlikely that bands are going to stop releasing songs in ‘collections’. It makes financial sense to record multiple songs in one session, not to mention that extra cost it would take to promote and market 1 song at a time. Whether you call it an EP, Album or twozzlefangler, this collection will need to be identiified by a ‘label’ – the title – so that people can identify it. But from a marketing and promotional perspective this is simply not enough. This is, after all (wether you like it or not) a product, and products need to be distinct and easily recognisable. Imagine if all that was on every washing powder box was the brand name – no logo, design, mascot, product picture, gimmick - how would you identify one from the next? How would you remember which one was recommended to you, Washomatic or Cleanomatic? Branding professionals have known about differentiators for decades, and the music industry is no different. So bands often have logos, so that people can easily pick them out and identify with them. This is our fist visual cue. But that doesn’t do a very good job of differentiating one album from the next – enter the album artwork.

Death Metal art looks like this dude

At corporate level, all the elements of the album package from the songs, to the logo, to the title to the cover image, are carefully harmonised to portray a particular theme, image, tone. This is called merchandising and it’s take VERY seriously. Merchandising can make or break a record. This merchandising is taken through to marketing – adverts, PR, press kits, live show promotion and is usually reproduced to some level as part of the live show itself.

So when you get your mate to throw together some artwork for your latest EP this is what you are doing – merchandising. It means that you have a way to visually present your collection of songs, so that people can easily identify it in a shop among a bunch of other blackened deathcore CD’s, on Amazon or iTunes Store, and when flicking through the cover flow in their MP3 library. People are more likely to remember the distinctive cover design than the obscure latin album title or your unreadable BM logo.

Read my logo mofo!

It goes further than this though. Album artwork tends to be similar within genres. If you’re a Death Metal band, you probably want to be noticed by Death Metal fans. Death Metal album covers are usually striking, disturbing and immaculately painted by some some disturbed genius. Black Metal covers are usually sparse and colourless. Next time you leaf through Metal Hammer or Terrorizer take note of which adverts you notice – somehow it mysteriously aligns with your music taste…wonder why that is?

In the digital age, where visuals are everything, I’d say that album artwork is more important than ever. Whether you spent hours gazing at it (like I did with Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time artwork when I was a teenager), or merely used it as a reminder when looking for particular album, it had an impact on you, and fulfilled a vital need.

The greatest of them all

I don’t often act on (or in many cases listen to) unsolicited review requests that arrive via Myspace mail, but the one I received from Fuck the Facts caught my eye. Firstly, they actually bothered to personalise the message, secondly they offered to give out their tracks to anyone who would review (or in any way promote) them, and thirdly they mentioned that they were self releasing. I get countless grammatically dubious mails via Myspace (not to mention the ones via direct email, blog comments, etc.) that say something like “nice profile, hows trix check us out if you get a sec , if not that’s cool” (that’s a real one from a band who shall not be named) and expect me to bother spending time listening to, and reviewing their band when they can’t be bothered to even formally introduce themselves!

By chance I also saw Cosmo Lee’s review on Invisible Oranges so I decided to check them out. The music is an amusing mix of early Dillinger Escape Plan (minus the jazz/spazz) with elements of black and death metal (most notably Morbid Angel) which could broadly be described as Grindcore. A must for fans of Ted Maul and their ilk. It’s short, violent and to the point. Excellent stuff.

What’s more interesting is the way they are releasing it. They’re doing a limited run of  500 copies of the EP on vinyl, the packaging of which is hand made. Anyone who orders it gets a code to go download the the MP3’s for free. This is enterprising and very forward thinking and anyone who’s spent any time reading my overly impassioned musings on self releasing will know that I approve. It also has a real personal touch that will make the hard copies very collectable. The download mechanism is handled by a site called Bandcamp, which is totally new to me. You can stream your music and offer both free and paid downloads (including an option to off ‘pay what you want’) and well as generally promote your band. It’s an interesting service and one that I’m going to write a bit more about – watch this space.

So go give Fuck the Facts a leg up, because this this sort of behaviour should be rewarded!

Things were going just hootingly for the music industry until someone invented MP3’s and spoilt the party. This advent was a veritable boon for the music listening public for whom music became more accessible and portable. It also became cheaper (or, in many cases free) and they weren’t tied to buying albums any more – they could choose which tracks to buy off an album leaving vast volumes of unwanted filler behind. This left the music industry, used to cleaning up by selling full, physical albums at exorbitant prices, somewhat out of pocket. The music industry has bleated, encrypted and litigated its way though the intervening decade before finally deciding to apply a bit of ‘creative’ thinking to the situation. “If they want files for these computer contraption thingies” they say, “let’s give them files”.

Several groups are developing new rich music media file formats that hope to take the act of listening to music into the multimedia age (apparently it didn’t arrive there yet). The resulting formats are, somewhat predictably, predominantly based around full albums. The music industry wants us to buy albums. Albums, they say, are meant to be listened to as a whole. Well that may be true if you’re Mastodon, but considerably less so if you’re Peter André. Reading between the lines of the industry rhetoric it’s clear the bottom line is the order of the day – albums are a lot more profitable. Each of these attempts to recreate the experience of an album in digital format and enrich it further with other extras. So the ‘race’ is on to become the next ubiquitous file format. There are 3 contenders in this valhallan battle. Here I’ll cover each separately.

The iTunes LP

To be fair to Apple, who have benefited no end from the digital revolution, there are no smoke and mirrors surrounding their attempt to digitise the LP experience (hence the name). They clearly want to sell more albums. They also realise that the music industry do also, but they have other ideas as we shall discover. Launching an iTunes LP file submerses you in a multimedia world themed around the artist and album. Along with the music (at standard ACC superior 192kbps quality) you get music videos, custom visualisations, album artwork and lyrics. All this in a swanky interactive environment inside iTunes. Although the music files will run on Apple’s iPod or iPhone range, the full multimedia experience won’t, although it may run on the forthcoming chocolate teapot known as the iPad. Inside the file is an assortment of images and Javascript that, although fathomable for someone with some web development skill, is poorly documented and probably out of reach of all but the majors.

Being the only format already to make it market (launched August 2009) would seem to give them a head start on the pack. However, this evidently hasn’t translated into a resounding success, which is perhaps a sign of the music buying public’s nonchalance regarding such a format, but more likely to be related to the fact that the music industry has something else on the burner and are thus not wasting time releasing on iTunes LP’s. Which bring me on to…

CMX

Dubbed CMX (Connected Media Experience – snappy eh?) the music industry’s apparoach to this concept was to club together and throw a bunch of their ill-gotten cash at it. Originally scheduled to launch around the same time as the iTunes LP, presumably to cut them off at the pass, this has now been delayed until ‘quarter 2 2010’. We don’t know the precise details but we do know just enough to say that it is conceptually virtually the same as the iTunes LP, however, already there are obvious flaws that hobble it out of the starting blocks. Firstly, it’s Flash based, so it won’t play on an iPod, and initially probably not on any portable media player. Given the ubiquity of the last decades must have electronic accessory it’s hard to see how CMX can catch on. Secondly, it looks likely that the music will only be playable as part of the CMX file. Which means that it won’t function in iTunes, and you can’t put them on your MP3 player either!

This is still speculation given that the details of CMX have yet to be released. However, given that Apple are unlikely to support this format, and the music industry will not be quick to forsake a format that they’ve poured a load of cash into we would seem to be at a stalemate. But there is a 3rd way…

MusicDNA

The new kid on the block it may be, but MusicDNA was created by one of the very arch-criminals responsible for this bloody mess in the first place – Karlheinz Brandenburg co-creator of the MP3. Unlike the iTunes LP and CMX, MusicDNA isn’t merely a repackaging of the digital file format into an album like experience, it has a whiff of the future about it. You see MusicDNA has smarts. It carries a bunch of metadata as per the MPEG-7 standard which carry information on stuff like tempo, instrumentation, mood as well as all the usual stuff, all captured at the point of encoding. This will allow applications like iTunes and services like Pandora and Last.fm to create weird, wonderful, and most importantly, powerful ways to recommend and playlist stuff for you. Also, the MusicDNA file is alive. It contains dynamic components that update when the file is opened. This will allow artists to include stuff like tour dates and blog posts that would always be up to date. You can copy (read pirate) MusicDNA files, and they will play just fine, however this dynamic content will no longer function, a feature which the makers say will help guard against piracy. I’m not so sure.

MusicDNA comes with a plethora of applications to encode and run, as well as the facilities for developers to build their own applications to make use of all its magical features (like iPhone and Facebook apps). It’s also MP3 backwards compatible which means it should play on anything that will play MP3’s (although I’ll believe this when I see it). Although the format made it to market (well, it’s not quite in the wild yet, but has ‘launched’) before the tardy CMX format it currently has no backing from the major labels (although a couple of independent labels are on board) and is unlikely to get it until CMX is abandoned or fails. So, short of a sudden upswell of public demand, MusicDNA would seem to be at a bit of handicap.

The question is, does the world really need a rich, album based file format? Albums are more and more becoming the bastion of hardcore fans, music lovers/collectors and audiophiles. In all cases, owning a physical copy of the album is usually the order of the day. In the latter two, audio quality is a key concern, something that none of these formats tackle. Barring the spaceage extras that accompany MusicDNA, all these extras are already available, usually offered as a DVD, with premium copies of the physical equivalents, so immediacy is all they’ve really got going for them. It’s difficult to see this becoming a Betamax vs. VHS or HD DVD vs. Blue Ray style standoff – all those formats offered features not previously available. MusicDNA is the only format with the differentiators to make it a viable alternative to the ubiquitous MP3 (and indeed AAC), but are these value adds really enough to sway the hardcore as well as change the general record buying public’s buying habits? It seems unlikely.

In addition to this, there are signs that the MP3 itself could soon become obsolete as vast numbers of music consumers are moving to increasingly mobile streaming services like (music industry sponsored) Spotify.

The final nail in these foetus’s coffins is the fact that these files will almost certainly be charged at a premium. Given that the music buying public are hard pressed to pay anything for their music, it seems a stretch to expect them to fork out more. When you add to that the fact that, due to the extra effort and expense (not to mention expertise) involved in producing these formats, smaller record labels and self releasers will unlikely bother, these formats would seem to be a lost cause.

In the end, all this talk of recreating the album experience is somewhat moot. It’s unlikely that CD’s and vinyl are likely become obsolete any time soon and simply recreating this experience in digital form is fulfilling a need that doesn’t exist for anyone other than the record labels. Albums have a place in the future of music consumption, but it’s not the form that the music takes that is going to evolve, it’s very way we discover and experience music. I’ll tackle this in subsequent articles.

Whilst recovering from the festive indulgent customary at this time of year I happened to find myself watching the 3rd installment of the Ice Age franchise which we bought as a Christmas present for my kid. The film itself is reasonably diverting which is nice, because I’ll be forced to endure it many many more times. More interesting than this animated child fodder is the fact that distributor has chosen to include a digital copy of the film on the DVD and are openly encouraging folk to stick it on their laptop and iPod to enjoy on the go. Now you may remember that this is precisely the sort of behaviour I have been suggesting for the music industry. It makes some sense to include either a digital copy with the CD/Vinyl or a promo code to download it for free – after all, the vast majority of buyers will simply rip the CD before they even listen to it. The latter option seems like a terrific opportunity for further cross sell and upsell as the download site would be crammed with advertising. Bands could even withhold hidden tracks or downloadable extras to incentivise fans to download rather than rip it.

I’ll be interested to see whether a) this becomes common practice for film and TV distribution and b) whether the (infuriatingly retarded) music industry will take the cue and start doing the same. We can only hope.

I was in the unenviable situation this past week of not having a copy of the new Baroness album. This sort of situation is not usually a big issue, but this particular time it left me in an existential quandary that lead me to yet more pondering on the nature of music retail.

You see, I want the physical copy. Specifically I want the CD. This CD would immediately be ripped directly to MP3 and unceremoniously injected onto my iPod. But having a physical copy is still important to me. I place a certain value in this, not least with a band like Baroness who have such delightful artwork.

So having not had the forethought to pre-order and finding the HMV cupboard predictably bare I was left either having to wait a couple of days for a copy from Amazon, listening to it on Myspace, downloading from iTunes or ‘borrowing’ a copy from one of those lovely fire-sharing sites. Now, I don’t want to pay twice, and I simply cannot wait. Myspace isn’t an option as I need it on my iPod so I can listen on the go. Spotify is potentially an option, but I’ll have to use my iPhone for that, and the battery only last 73 seconds, and I need that for the making/taking calls. So I’m left with the prospect of having to ‘borrow’ it for a few days while ordering off the web. What sort of a situation is this to find myself in in the digital age?

What would be really handy is if someone would sell the CD online and then give me the MP3’s to be getting on with while I wait. I don’t want to be charged extra for this, I’ve already paid for the music. However, decoupling the music from the physical product has some interesting theoretical consequences. Let’s deconstruct this situation a little.

Basically, what I want is the music. To accompany that music I would like a physical item. In this case it’s a CD, but it could be a record, tape, USB stick, a tuneful midget with the music memorised, whatever. In the modern age, there’s no real need to have anything actually contain the music for an individual. The vast majority of people don’t need CD’s any more than they need the bottle containing the beer, it just so happens to be one medium for transporting the stuff inside.

So the situation that we’re in is that people choose to ‘attach’ a CD to their music purchase. Or put another way, they buy a CD which comes (conveniently) with some music on it. But why are obsolete (in the practical sense) music containing objects the only choice of ‘thing’ that comes as an accompaniment to the music? Why not t-shirts, posters, books, shoes, branded luxury leather recliner etc.? The record companies have a vested interest in getting you to buy stuff from them, and especially walking-billboard/culture items like t-shirts. This way they incentivise people to buy from them (rather than ‘stealing’ the music) as well as getting that person in a purchase cycle with them – which is potentially the most valuable aspect here.

So why not offer MP3 + CD packages? (and thus solving my immediate need) But also offer MP3 + t-shirt packages, or with records or hats or hat stands or gig tickets or books or comics or all of the above in a single transaction. Why not sell t-shirts in shops with a memory stick with the music. Hell, give the actual CD away with the t-shirt, but without the cover or any fancy packaging.

People could just go to iTunes and buy the album, but why not just buy a t-shirt and get the album for ‘free’? Of course you could make more money by selling both, but don’t kid yourself on how many folks would bother buying a t-shirt once they’ve bought the music, and if you ask me, a t-shirt sale is more valuable than a music sale.

In the end I ‘borrowed’ the music and the bought the album on vinyl, which costs more than the CD that I would have otherwise bought. I’m struggling to see where Baroness lost out here….

No Abbath, not that sort of campaign

So your adoring fan base has swarmed to your website and signed up to your mailing list. You also got a bunch of email addresses at your last gig. Before you start firing off tantalizing epistles documenting your drunken studio antics and news of your drummer’s breakup with his girlfriend (gotta keep the groupies happy, right?) let me urge you to exercise a little restraint, and think about how you intend to use your entrusting fans’ details.

When you hear big companies talking about ‘marketing campaigns’ they’re not merely referring to the latest stupid advert aimed at coercing you to buy their shit washing powder. A campaign is usually a targeted schedule of communication and grouping of themed marketing that is being enacted for a specific reason. Marketing campaigns are rarely begun with the sole directive of ‘selling more stuff’ although that is usually the ultimate goal. More likely, a high up exec noticed that they were selling well to the under 30’s, so they designed a campaign specifically aimed at selling to that demographic. Other reasons may be a new product launch, basic product awareness (perhaps of the back of poor sales versus a competitor), acquiring new customers, or selling more to existing customers. All these goals require very different campaigns and modes of communication.

You should think of your communications to your fans in a similar context. So before sending out a single email, ask yourself, ‘what is it that I’m trying to achieve?’ Perhaps you’re just about to go on tour, and you want to get people to gigs. Maybe you’re just about to release a new EP or album. You may just be interested in striking a rapport with your fans. Maybe what you want is a bigger email list. Perhaps you want to all of the above.

The next question to ask yourself is “what does success look like?” There’s little point in a campaign that achieves nothing, and understanding the specific goals you want to achieve is vital when constructing your campaign. Some possible outcomes are:

• Gig ticket sales, or higher attendance
• Hits to your Myspace or website
• Downloads of your new track(s)
• Signups to your mailing list
• Album sales CD or iTunes
• Merchandise sales
• Beers bought for you by fans post-gig
• Mentions on other sites (blogs, review sites, news sites etc.)
• Ego boost, attention from ladies/guys/both etc.

It’s likely that several of the above are important to you. So state your objectives, and write them down somewhere, you’ll need to refer back to this when making decision about how to conduct your campaign – if something you’re doing doesn’t contribute to these goals, should you really be doing it?

The next dimension to consider is time. There are key dates in your band’s diary that are important in this endeavour: album release date, tour dates, band t-shirts get delivered, interview/review appears in some magazine. Communications to your fans should mean something to the fans and should be delivered at the right time to be relevant to the corresponding event. If the only email you send advertising your new album release is sent 6 weeks before it’s available, then that message will be lost or forgotten. Conversely, you need to give people plenty of advance warning for gigs, but you don’t want to tell them until the tickets are actually available.

So perhaps you’ve got a new album coming out, a short tour to support this, and t-shirts with the album cover on the front being sold online and at the gigs. This calls for a well structured email campaign, as there’s quite a lot going on. Before you set down a single word of an email, write down a schedule for those events and corresponding communications to the fan base. Your campaign summary may look something like this (except with realistic dates!):

Oct 1st – Recording/mixing finishes
Oct 7th – Initial teaser email send to tell the fanbase about the album
Oct 10th – t-shirts available
Oct 14th – Pressing finishes, hard copies delivered
Oct 15th – 2nd email drop with album releases date and artwork, track listing and links to buy t-shirts and pre-order album
Oct 20th – Tour dates confirmed, tickets available
Oct 22nd – 3rd email drop, tour dates, ticket sources, album, release date, t-shirt link
Nov 1st – Album released
Nov 1st – 4th email drop with links to buy album, t-shirts, tour dates etc.
Nov 15th – 5th Email drop to remind folks who didn’t buy your. Remind about the tour
Nov 17th – tour begins
…

This is the campaign you will execute to. Don’t send ANY other emails. Be wary of communicating release dates early on, or until they’re absolutely committed to, otherwise you’ll have to send out an embarrassing retraction. Early teaser emails should say something like “touring before the end of the year” or “in the shops this spring”.

The emails’ design, colour scheme and construction should be consistent throughout the campaign. Also, make sure it’s obvious what to click on or where to go to get the stuff you’re advertising (these are called ‘calls to action’ in business speak).

If you’re feeling really ambitious, you could accompany this with a purely online campaign, using your website, Twitter, Myspace or whatever, to try and coerce new punters to your Fanbridge/Reverb Nation site and thus widen your audience for the big release.

Campaigns can get infinitely more complicated than this, however it’s always important not to overstate your message or saturate your audience. Always revisit your objectives and why you are communicating with your fans, and ask yourself before sending any emails “do they really care?”

That’s quite a lot to take in. I’ll leave you to digest for a while!

CRM for Bands – Turning fans into Fanatics

CRM for Metal Bands #1: Make contact

Even more technomologically advanced than this!

While I seem to have found myself in the position of giving advice to aspiring bands on how best to use and abuse these new-fangled interwebs, I’ve yet to be particularly active in these pursuits myself. So in an attempt to ‘put my money where my mouth is’, so to speak, I’ve devised The Inevitable Nose Metal Mixtape. There’s nothing particularly new about the concept – a compilation of music from new bands – and the only ‘cutting edge’ thing involved is the use of Soundcloud (more on this in a later article). I merely intend to practise what I preach, and attempt to draw some attention to unsigned metal bands that are worthy of it.

So, demand permitting, I’m going to put together a regular mixtape of (mostly) downloadable tracks, which will also stream from this site, with ‘cover notes’ including a review of the band by your’s truly and links off to the bands’ sites/Myspaces. I’ll then employ all my best CRM, SEO and PPC strategies (and whatever other corporate marketing acronyms I can find) to drive some traffic to the mixtape.

Bands wishing to appear on the mixtape just need to commit to the inclusion of a single track, read the T&C’s and follow instructions here. The selection of tracks for the mixtape assumes a level of quality (both technically and artistically) so not everyone band submitted will make it on. There will be a broad range of styles and sub-genres but it will all be at the heavier end of the rock/metal/*core scale. Reviews will represent any tracks up on Myspace as well as the track submitted.

The first mixtape will be delivered as soon as I have 10 or so tracks of sufficient quality to release. Subscribers to my newsletter will receive notification when it’s available.

Sign up to our mailing list

However, for this to work, I need bands to submit themselves, so please pass this on to any bands that you think may be interested.

AIC+CRM=WIN

There was an excellent example of CRM building up to the release of Alice in Chains’ new album Black Gives Way to Blue. Here’s what they did:

1. Introduced some teaser videos onto the internet for the their new track thus creating buzz
2. Several days later they made the full video available
   At roughly the same time they made the track available free online for fans once they submitted their email address
3. Several weeks later these fans were sent correspondence regarding the release date of their new album, plus info about merch available
4. Soon after they advertised that the album would by available for pre-sales, and that anyone who purchased the album on pre-sale would receive another track off of the album immediately for free
5. When the album was release they sent more email with details of where to get the album and more merchandising links

The buzz around Black Gives Way to Blue was immense. Before the album was released they had sold a bunch of albums and load of merch, and fans suspicious of a band returning without their revered frontman are now singing along with the new singer and material at gigs.

Make no mistake, this is exemplary music marketing – marketing of ANY kind. AIC had a hard job ahead of them, after being away for over a decade, to convince a bunch of fans already suspicious of the whole venture that they were still relevant. Well they certainly took the risk out of the situation!

This approach was clearly tailored for the needs of a massive band, but the same principles apply to any band. The 3 basic steps are:

1. Announce your presence
2. Locate your fans
3. Talk to them

Step 1 and 3 I’ll cover off in a later article. Here I’ll concentrate on step 2 as you need to give it a little forethought before you plough into this endeavour.

So when people turn up at your gig, or website or Myspace, you need to be ready to try and grab some information about them.

Now, I’m going to talk explicitly about email in this article. In theory, any detail you can get about your fans is useful (for example Twitter/Facebook/Myspace account, address, phone number, favourite bands, shoe size, propensity to put out) but email is still the most versatile, powerful and easy to exploit, plus pretty much everyone has an email address.

Ideally you want email address and name (first, and preferably full), but just email address is fine. There are various ways to grab this info.

• At gigs. Put a sheet of paper on the merch counter to get folks to sign up for your mailing list. Consider offering an incentive for this, perhaps a free button badge, or a discount voucher for the next gig.
• Folks you run into. You’re always banging on about your band to whoever will listen, at parties and stuff, right? Folks sound interested? GET THEIR EMAIL! Wake up next to that random chick who’s wearing nothing but your AC/DC socks? Decided you never want to see her again? I don’t care, GET HER EMAIL!
• Collect it online. I saw a particularly good example of an unsigned band doing this recently. The most excellent prog-metalers Stone Circle announced via Twitter that they are giving away a free MP3 from their current EP, and more free stuff to come, to anyone who will sign up to their mailing list using a service called FanBridge. This site exists for the explicit purpose of collecting an managing email lists for bands. They offer a bunch of tool to manage your email campaigns and I’ll be referencing them a LOT in upcoming articles. Do go and sign-up to Stone Circle’s FanBridge list by the way – they will get signed soon and will probably stop giving away their excellent music.

So you’ve got a bunch of email addresses, what do you do with them? This I will cover in more detail in later articles, but for the moment, you need to store them somewhere. The first thing to do is transfer details collected in the real world to you computer, preferably into MS Excel (if you or your folks don’t have a copy, try Google Docs which has a free online spreadsheet) and save somewhere safe. FanBridge will let you upload lists of fan detail from Excel, so if you have an account this is a good idea.

For details collected at gigs, note the town that the gig was in as part of the details you collect. Later, when you’re telling folks about your tour, you won’t need to spam people in Brighton about your gig in Glasgow; you can create a separate email for each town or area.

Now, before you get too excited and start spamming your list with random photos of the band getting drunk, beware the evils of excessive email. If people don’t like what you send them, they’ll simply mark your email address as spam, and all further mails from your email address will be relegated to the junk mail folder. Before you send out any email at all, you need to plan your email campaign based on what you need to get out of it. This we will discuss in the next article. In the meantime, get collecting kiddies!

CRM for Bands – Turning fans into Fanatics

Your #1 sales reps

You’re heading out to a gig. On go the AC/DC socks and pants set (in case you pull, you’ll shake them all night long), Iron Maiden trainers with Eddie’s face on them, that cool Baroness t-shirt, denim jacket with Municipal Waste and Motorhead patches, and your beloved Megadeth cap – do you ever get the feeling like you’re one of those multi band fliers that get handed out at gigs?

All these bands are exceptional at branding (or perhaps their record label is) and although that Slayer air freshener may have represented a step too far for you, it’s big business – in fact, it’s fast becoming bigger business than the sale of the music itself. The music industry, traditionally centred around selling only music, are clambering to get into the merchandising game offering bands 360 record deals that include selling merch (and live shows, plus distribution, publishing etc.) in an attempt to bolster their languishing profits. Traditionally the bastion of mega b[r]ands like Kiss and Iron Maiden, it’s now becoming normal for even the most marginal of bands to view themselves as a brand – the era of bands as brands is upon us.

It’s worth clarifying what I mean by ‘branding’. The retail world decades ago cottoned on to the fact that a consistent approach to advertising their products led to more sales. It’s a simple psychological reality that, when someone who is given a choice of similar items, they will choose one that they are more familiar with or is more recognisable. It didn’t take advertisers long to work out that, with the right product image, you could build up feelings affinity, identification, even devotion to otherwise completely mundane or functional products. This then expands out to product ranges, then to merchandising related to product ranges. In this day and age, it’s got abstracted to the point where, in some cases, the brand is as important (if not more so) than the product (take Apple as an example of this).

The music industry was slow to get to grips with this, but fast to capitalise – and it’s getting better all the time. The heavy metal world is spectacular at this. Most metal bands have an identifiable logo, a sub-genre, an identifiable band image, and fans that will wear their t-shirts, hoodies, caps etc. This stuff all pulls together to form a band’s brand. It’s what makes you instantly recognisable to folks who know your music, but your brand image is a viral mechanism in itself – a badge of honour, sign of allegiance, a deriver of coolness (or uncoolness) – and when wielded correctly can be the single most important factor in the success of a band.

Bands like Black Sabbath or more recently Mastodon and icons like Kurt Cobain this exude coolness and create culture and identity effortlessly that people immediately attach to. Other bands have record companies pay millions of quid on creating this identity (eg. Linkin Park). But either way, it’s a powerful mechanism for spreading affinity with a band.

Now, on to the economics. Traditional musical marketing, broadly speaking, considers 4 elements (and seemingly in this order of importance):

1. The format containing the music (record, tape, CD, MP3) – the Cornflakes box if you will
2. The music itself – the Cornflakes
3. The band and their image – the Kellogg’s brand
4. Sales of other related stuff like merchandise – like, umm, those branded Kellogg’s bowls you used to get I guess

The purpose here is clear – sell more music, just as it is for Kellogg’s to sell more packs of Cronflakes. Given the dwindling sales of music (you know the reasons, I’ll not patronise you by repeating them) it’s starting to become necessary for this paradigm to shift. To maximise revenue generated by a band, all potential product lines must be considered, and their relative commercial merits should be judged within the context of that particular band – to give a facile example, metal fans are more likely to buy t-shirts and CD’s whereas Dance music fans are more likely to buy records and record bags. So if your core motivator with regards to generating cash is no longer the music, but a diverse and malleable collection of product lines, where is your focus? The band of course! The band, their music, their image and that of the label are vehicles to shift more stuff, be it CD’s, bandanas or bog roll. In fact, it’s conceivable for a band to exist and be very successful without ever officially releasing any music at all (more thoughts on this at a later date)

And let’s be perfectly clear here – a fan that buys a t-shirt is potentially more important to you than one that buys the music. Why? Well, they like you enough to wear your band’s name on their body, and walk around like a big advert. They hang around with their buddies who want to know who the hell that wondrous looking band on that t-shirt is. People are now talking about your band – the importance of this should not be underestimated. And because kids tend to like to fit in with the crowd, they’ll probably all go off and buy one for themselves, thus propagating the same mechanism. Did all these kids ‘steal’ your album from the interwebs? Probably, yeah, but what have you really lost? You’ve shifted some t-shirts that you probably wouldn’t have, which are generally more profitable anyway, and whether they bought the music or not, they’re still fans.

File sharing aside, squeezing profit, or even return on investment on physical and even digital music sales is nigh on impossible for most bands. The overheads are big, distribution and promotion hard and costly. Merchandise tends to be more profitable as the margins on each item are higher and the overheads lower. Also, when you concentrate on selling the music, you can really only sell a couple of items to any 1 individual (CD’s, collector’s packs, record), but clever branding and merchandising opens the door to sell a whole range of other items to peddle to all the adoring fanatics.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that unsigned bands stop releasing albums/EPs. The artistic merits of the album format aside, they provide a vital marketing mechanism, and a way to manage your marketing over time in discrete chunks (analogous to campaigns in marketing speak). Spending out on decent recording and some nice artwork is essential, but when looking to recoup that cost, you should place your emphasis on selling merchandise rather than CDs, and even consider giving the music away in digital form, either in part or in its entirety, to help shift more merchandise and spread awareness of your band. This depends on the band, but you should generally only consider a physical release if there is CLEAR demand for it, and always consider getting up on iTunes as the priority.

The best approach to branding and merchandising will be different for every band, and the key to success is agility – the ability to roll with what the fans are demanding – something which the bigger record companies are terrible at.

If you’re in a band, you’re agile and creative, so this stuff should come naturally to you, so get on with it!

Techniqes for getting inbound links #1: Immortal politely request that you link to their myspace

So you’re in a band. You’re probably young, internet savvy and have a profile on every social networking site going. You have mates that run various websites and your housemate knows a bloke that runs a porn site. Getting links to your site is easy right? Not as easy as you make think. Let’s examine.

In my last article I talked about the mythical, mystical term pagerank. Broadly speaking, this increases as you get links to your site, and will improve how high up in search listings your pages appear. Getting links is good. However, from a search perspective, not all links are created equal.

Now, I preface this by saying that links are generally a good thing regardless of the effect they have on search. Links increase traffic on your site, and if their source is a page that is created by someone people respect the opinion of, then the link is like gold dust – imaging if Lee Dorian posted a link to your Doom band, or Terroriser magazine linked to you from an article about Emperor. This is precisely the real world situation that the search engines use to try and decide whether your page is important or not. The logic is, if PageA is important, and it links to PageB, then PageB must have some level of importance too. Also, if PageA is about Industrial Acoustic Punk, then there’s a fair bet that PageB is too.

So your mates all have Myspace pages, just get them to link to your site and hey presto pagerank! Right? Wrong. Some sites, most notably social networking sites, apply properties to links on their pages that explicitly prevent those links from carry through pagerank. This is so that people don’t use their pages for the sole purpose of driving up pagerank. Those links may well be valuable in the real world, indeed they may be the most valuable links you get, but they will not help you at all from a pagerank perspective. Some sites that apply this restriction are:

• Myspace
• Facebook
• Bebo
• Twitter (notice this is a link? FOLLOW ME!)

This also often goes for links placed in comments on blogs or posts in forums. Another thing to note is, that if a link is too easy to get (for example comments on blogs) then the search engines are likely to view them as lower value, and carry less importance to them – so spamming every metal blog you know with links probably won’t help much (this, however, not a bad way to drive general awareness of your band, but more on that later).

One more gotcha, before I start to get to things that actually will help. That mate with a porn site? Steer well clear of any links that he offers. If the search engines start to associate you with the, shall we say, less wholesome areas of the web, then you could end up getting excluded from the mainstream search results and only appear in searches like “hard metal insertion” along with some less healthy websites.

This sucks, you’re thinking, why bother? Well, a few good quality links can go a long way.

The easiest and best technique for gather good quality links is link swaps. When you meet new bands of a similar ilk, then offer to put a link to their band’s site on your website of they do the same. The more of these, the better. You’ll only build up a little bit of link juice that way, but it all adds up.

Secondly, if you can get a mention (even if it’s a bad one!) on a metal site or blog (Metalsucks, Invisible Oranges, Metal Injection and, of course, The Inevitable Nose are all good metal sites that feature small and unsigned bands) then this will help a LOT. It’s a good idea to read these sites regularly and make decent contextual comments (eg. “I love this video, but really, Mastodon are not of their best form at the moment” rather than “Mastodn suxxx LOLLLLLFAIL”) to build a bit of rapport with the writers. Then, send across your music, once you have decent recording, as they usually have email addresses listed. If you know they’re local to you, then invite them to your gig. Don’t spam though – use considered and informative correspondence and be personable!

Finally, be linkable. If your page looks good, contains useful information, then people will want to link to it.

2 more points to make and then we’ll move on, because this is getting pretty long! Links all have at least 2 properties: the link itself and the anchor text. I’m going to talk about both these.

The anchor text is the text that actually displays in the browser to be clicked on (“click here”, “visit the band’s myspace here”). Google uses this text as a strong indicator as to the content of the page to which it’s linking, so if you have any influence over what this text is then you can use this. Most links will simple be your band’s name – this is a good thing, this will allow you to build up a pagerank against your band name as a search term. But if you can get a few links that also mention your band’s genre (eg. “listen to this amazing acoustic death metal band”) then this will also really help you get a foothold against that genre for search.

With regards to the link, remember that I made a point of saying that pagerank is generated against single pages? This is important. If some sites are using your Myspace, and others your band’s website, then your link juice for each page is less overall, making it harder for any one of your pages to rank. It’s a good idea to decide which page best represents your band and will best convert folks stumbling across your band into fans (more on this later) then promote that link alone. That way, sites are most likely to link there.

OK, that’s it for this lesson kiddies. I’ve really only scratched the surface, but don’t get daunted; if you only apply the rules I’ve thus far mentioned, it will help you a lot.

SEO for Metal Bands #3

SEO for Metal Bands #2

SEO for Metal Bands #1