Music Business Blog by Jason Feinberg

I am so excited that I can finally tell the world about a big part of what I have been up to lately. For a while now I have been a big believer in the company Topspin. Their software platform and methodology is very forward-thinking and I am confident it can be a big part of the overall marketing strategy bands needs to incorporate moving ahead.

It does not (necessarily) replace a label, iTunes, Amazon, management, or marketing team. What it does is gives artists and online marketers new tools that open up massive opportunities in the direct-to-fan space. This is a core part of almost any artist’s career, and I am excited to be a part of helping write the blueprint for what this will mean in the future.

Having said that, I am proud to announce I am one of a small group of people who are now officially Topspin certified! See the article below…

http://topspinmedia.com/2009/06/congratulations-topspin-class-of-june-2009/

My third post for the PBS MediaShift blog is now up at http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/04/how-bands-can-avoid-making-7-big-seo-mistakes119.html. It details seven key areas of search engine optimization that often cause trouble for artists when building sites.

The seven mistakes are:

1) Site Built Fully in Flash
2) Site Built With Images Only
3) Lack of Keywords in Content
4) Relying Solely on Meta Tags
5) Poor Link Strategy
6) Overlooking Alternate Search Types
7) Ignoring the Logs or Not Utilizing Analytics

For in-depth details of these issues, and more importantly, resolutions to solve them, visit http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/04/how-bands-can-avoid-making-7-big-seo-mistakes119.html.

My newest article has been published over at the PBS MediaShift Blog.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/04/maximizing-the-sxsw-experience-with-social-media091.html

It’s all about using technology and social media tools to get a better SXSW experience. Hopefully something useful in it for everyone – if you’ve never been it’s a major jumpstart, and if you are a veteran you might learn some new tips to get even more out of it.

So I am sitting in my hotel room in Seattle, preparing to hit the road with one of my favorite bands, The Murder City Devils. Anybody that pays attention to any of my social network profiles (like twitter) know that I have been talking about this band like mad for the past two months. Part of that is because I built their website and am managing the online marketing campaign surrounding the tour and re-issues; the other part is that this band freaking rules and if you are unfamiliar you may want to check them out. Highly recommended if you are into bands ranging from The Dead Boys to Zeke, from At The Drive In to the Misfits.. They were primarily in existence from 1996 – 2001, and have played a handful of shows since.

Until now. Tomorrow starts a 9 show / 8 date west coast tour. And I am going along with the band.

Starting Thursday, be sure to check out http://www.themurdercitydevils.com every day for a blog entry and video update showing video from the road, each show, behind the scenes, and assorted mayhem. I am basically traveling with the band, video camera in hand. As a fan of the band, this is an amazing opportunity, and as a new media marketing guy this is an excellent way to use my skills. Win-win situation.

I’ve had this link open in my browser for a few weeks. STILL working my way through it. The title says it all. Pour a glass of Ovaltine, engage your pocket protector, get in your most uncomfortable carpal tunnel inducing position, and read away…

Categories include:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Personal Branding
Social Media: Strategy for Social Sites
Twitter
LinkedIn

and more…

http://www.techipedia.com/2009/internet-marketing-posts-2008/

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/12/how-to-use-twit.html

Guy Kawasaki is one of those guys who just gets the Internet. He makes tons of money and has many great ideas. Here’s a post of his on how to rock Twitter like a superstar. Even if you or your band does a handful of these things you’ll see some tangible improvement. Sample:

#6 – Make it easy to tweet on your behalf. Twitterfeed is a service where any RSS feed can automatically appear as your own tweets. Bloggers do this, for example, so that their blog posts automatically appear as their tweets.
…
Then my new book, Reality Check, came out, and I made an offer of a free copy of it to anyone who signed up for the Alltop Twitterfeed. Another 280 people signed up—bringing the total to approximately 450 people.

We counted, and these 450 people had a total of 140,000 followers. This meant that whenever we announced a new topic, the 140,000 followers of 450 people received notification. These 450 people had followers in common, so their tweets didn’t reach 140,000 different people (see next section), but this was the Mother of Retweeting.

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/12/how-to-use-twit.html

The one and only Ian C Rogers has posed a thorough detail of his keynote from the GRAMMY Northwest MusicTech Summit 2008 here. It’s a fascinating look at the future of the industry from someone (and a company) that is certainly in a position to be discussing it. One of many, many interesting nuggets:

As such, it’s hard to deny there’s a power shift going on from label to artist, and therefore the artist’s closest business partner, the artist manager. This isn’t to say labels aren’t valuable. A lot of people like to line this debate up as label vs. independent, but that’s not how I see things. What I see happening is artists having a choice, and labels needing to prove their value. It’s no longer the de facto dream of every musician to “get signed”. Instead of doing a 360 deal with a label artists are able to do a 360 deal with themselves and choose their business partners based on who is going to add the most value. If you’re an unknown pop-punk band from Orange County would you benefit from the marketing and branding help Epitaph Records could provide? Hell yeah. If you’re Joe Purdy would you benefit from what a major label adds? Perhaps, but what would you give up in the process? Artists now have some leverage in their ability to earn a living without making the leap.

Read the whole thing here (with slides): http://topspinmedia.com/2008/11/grammy-northwest-musictech-summit-keynote/

Dave Allen has a fantastic article on his blog about vinyl, analog, digital formats, and tying it all together to a new generation. Real good stuff, check it out.

Excerpt:

Digitizing music has made music more affordable and provided ease of use in portability but at the huge expense of having the emotional range, the highs the lows the rumbles, removed in the process. What we have been hearing on CD is a compressed version of a digital slice of the possible range of sound available to our ears. At live shows the bass sub woofers in the PA system allow you to literally ‘feel’ the bottom end, on CD or MP3 that experience is simply not available to you. Yet, when you play a vinyl record through a great hi-fi system you can experience it in a recording.

Read more here.

http://lateralaction.com/articles/kurt-cobain-startup-success/

REALLY cool article about innovation, marketing, and the music biz. To sum up:

1. The first key is always a new and better approach, or a fresh and innovative way to do the tried and true. If the “do it the way it’s done” crowd tells you you’re wrong, crazy, or stupid, you may be onto something.
2. You can’t ignore the realities of market demand and human psychology, but often the market doesn’t realize what it wants and the mind craves something new.
3. Create things that people naturally want to market for you.

WAY more and worth reading here: http://lateralaction.com/articles/kurt-cobain-startup-success/

In marketing the Dirty Heads, we’ve used multiple avenues to reach multiple types of fans. This is a core element of any marketing campaign – segmenting your audience into different groups and approaching each of them in the most engaging way.

Thanks to our friends at Slide the band is reaching the younger Myspace demographic in two interesting ways.

First, they are a featured “action” in the Superpoke! application. For those of you unaware, Myspace has similar functionality as Facebook in that you can install widget applications. This one is wildly popular with millions of users having sent billions of actions to their friends. In regards to Dirty Heads, they are in the featured artist section and you can “go Driftin’” with the band or your friends (Driftin’ being a song on the new CD Any Port In A Storm).

Second, their single “Stand Tall” is a featured track on their Slideshow application, which allows users to generate embeddable Flash slideshows using the Dirty Heads songs as the soundtrack. I love the idea of people uploading pictures that mean something to them, then enhancing it by adding a song that further expresses that emotion (or even just adds life to the slideshow).That is crowdsourcing, my friends!

So for some interesting ideas on how to reach the socially active, tech savvy 14 year old in your sights, check out Slide. And why not enter to win a snowboard, car stereo, and autographed Dirty Heads CD by clicking here.