Music Business Blog by Jason Feinberg

In conjunction with NARIP, I will be conducting a teleseminar about online marketing and distribution. Basically everything one needs to know to create and implement a marketing + promotion strategy using every element of new media.

Full info is here – www.narip.com


The National Association of Record Industry Professionals Presents
Secrets of Online Music Marketing Revealed!

Call in to this special NARIP Teleseminar

Wednesday, July 9 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. Pacific (3:00 to 4:00 p.m. Eastern)

To assist with your online music marketing needs, NARIP has scheduled this special teleseminar. Start an online marketing plan in one session. Boost the effectiveness of the plan you already have. A great plan doesn’t have to be complicated. A good one can be just one page long. Spreadsheets, graphs and numbers are not necessary.

But you NEED a plan. Lack of a good plan destroys more careers than lack of talent. Good marketing is simply getting your work to the largest number of people at the lowest possible cost.

Jason Feinberg, a top expert and leader in online music marketing and president of On Target Media Group, will lead this unique teleseminar.

Plus, we welcome your questions about online music marketing in advance. Please email any questions to NARIP at info AT narip DOT com.

You will learn:

• Most important parts of online music marketing strategy
• An easy way to begin your online marketing campaign
• Your complete digital toolbox: what you need… and what you don’t
• Branding made simple… and effective
• How to use social networks, blog, MySpace & YouTube
• Sites seeking content – excellent marketing opportunities for you
• How to build a brand and get more fans
• And much more…

BONUS:

One participant will be selected from our session to win one (1) free hour consultation with Jason Feinberg (valued at $300).

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

JASON FEINBERG, PRESIDENT, ON TARGET MEDIA GROUP
Jason Feinberg is president and founder of On Target Media Group, an entertainment industry Internet marketing and promotion company. Jason is responsible for business development, formulating and managing online marketing campaigns, and media relations with over 1000 Web sites and media outlets. In four short years On Target Media Group has defined itself as one of the industry’s top online marketing and promotion firms with clients including Warner Bros Records, Universal Music Enterprises, EMI America, Capitol Records, Concord Music Group, Tenth Street Entertainment, and many more. OTMG has run online marketing campaigns for Ringo Starr, Mötley Crüe, Carole King, JJ Cale / Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Primus, George Benson / Al Jarreau, Poncho Sanchez, and many more. When not running OTMG, Jason teaches in the Music Business program at Musicians Institute in Hollywood.

SOURCES FOR MORE INFO
www.otmg.net

WHEN

Wed, July 9 – 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. (Pacific) – agenda below

WHERE
Near your telephone – call in from anywhere in the world!

REGISTER NOW
$25: NARIP Members BEFORE Friday, July 18 at 5:00 p.m.
$45: Non-members BEFORE Friday, July 18 at 5:00 p.m.

This price includes the one-hour teleseminars, the opportunity to email in questions (info@narip.com), chat live with Jason after each session, and an MP3 file of the session.

NOTE
You will receive call-in information (telephone number and pass code) when payment is received.

________________________________________

Wednesday, July 9
12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. (Pacific)

Agenda

Creating an Online Marketing Strategy

· Social Networks
· Grassroots / Fan Efforts
· Widgets / Flash / Embeddable Code

Passive vs. Active Online Marketing

Web Presence: Official Site, MySpace, Social Network Pages, etc

· Critical Information
· Designing With the Fan in Mind

· Creating A Sales Machine

Awareness: How to Inform Existing Fans and Create New Ones

· Different Online Marketing and Promotion Avenues
· Editorial Coverage
· Audio/Video Placement
· Blogs / Podcasts / Music Tastemakers
· Online Radio
· Online Retail

Distribution: Making Your Product Available Physically and Digitally

Essential Sites and Tools for Independent Labels and Artists

Ultimate Goals

· Sales: Physical, Digital, Merch, Tickets
· Artist Branding
· Fan Data Acquisition (Email Lists, Demographics, etc.)

· Additional Revenue Opportunities

Go here to sign up – www.narip.com

So for the past couple weeks I’ve been rebuilding (from scratch) my marketing company’s website.

It’s coinciding nicely with a new office, a new marketing coordinator, a new services overview PDF, a very cool sales piece mailing, expanding our client services, and a few other big initiatives. I look at it as On Target Media Group v3.0.

My experience in designing websites goes back to 1994, when I started college and got my first UNIX account. Lynx was the text-based browser you could use via a terminal shell, and my life changed around October when Mosaic Netscape was released. It was lewd, crude and rude, but you could embed images and god-awful blinking text! Hand-editing HTML files was the only way (still the best) and my preferred editors were emacs, vi, and pico.

Things have come a long, long, long, long way since then – I am building our current site using a big mash up of Drupal 6.0, PHP scripting, MySQL databases, Flash audio/video components, Web 2.0 sharing technology, and many other neat little tools. For those of you still using traditional HTML-based sites, I really urge you to look into CMS – content management systems. This blog is run on Wordpress, one of the most common and useful CMS out there. They range from simple to insane, free to thousands of dollars, and it’s important you choose one that suits your needs, from the standpoints of a developer, a user, and an administrator. Some are overkill, some are limited. There’s also the arguments about procedural versus object-oriented – I have a solid background in programming both styles and understand the benefits and limitations of each.

So, in less than a week I’ll surely make an announcement (and send a big email to all my clients and web contacts). It’s exciting – I have added so many features that both clients and the media have requested, and the amount of time it took to develop it is a fraction of what a similar-level site would have taken in the past. Oh, and so far it has cost less than $100 – everything has been free except some Flash components that I found smarter buy than to try to re-create myself. Gotta love open-source development!

Been MIA for a bit, a last-second office move will do that to you. We now have twice the space as well as a new employee, good times if not a touch chaotic. Love having an official conference room now. Also love the mural of New York City that takes up almost a full wall in the reception area. I can almost see the Brill Building if I squint.

About to re-launch the company website, which has taken a lot of work and planning. Been designing, coding, and managing websites for years and I’ve done it both the hard way and the smart way. There’s a very good lesson in building a website that people, businesses, and artists tend to overlook – you are designing it for your users, not yourself. Having said that, I am adding (or enhancing) features such as RSS feeds for all press releases, thorough media sections with all digital assets for our artists in one logical place, embeddable content, media players, client reporting tools, and a much easier system to enter new data which will allow the site to be much more of a living creature. It should all add up to a better experience for our users, which will in turn add to more coverage for us and happier clients. It’s a win-win-win.

Saw the Cure at the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday. These gents still put on one of the greatest live experiences around. They understand what the fans want to hear, they pace it well, the performance is very strong, and seeing them at an outdoor venue is about as good as it gets. Staring up at Los Angeles twilight while Robert Smith wails away on “Prayers For Rain” is a surreal experience at minimum. So glad bands like this still know how to keep things moving. New material is great and has its place, but ultimately fans want to hear the songs they grew up on, have strong memories associated to, and have been a part of their lives. A band like the Cure has such an amazing repertoire (and vast catalog), they really played something for everyone.

Alright, back to work and to regular blogging schedule!