Music Business Blog by Jason Feinberg

There’s less than one week left to register for the Berkleemusic online course Online Music Marketing With Topspin.

In Online Music Marketing with Topspin, you’ll develop the online (and offline) marketing expertise necessary to properly execute your campaign using Topspin’s platform. We’ll discuss best practices with social media, branding considerations, niche marketing, building and supporting your fan base, your online sales strategy and creating successful offers, effective communication strategies, optimizing your online presence, alternative revenue options, connecting with new media outlets, integrating physical marketing into your overall campaign, how to use data and analytics to guide your campaign, and many more cutting-edge marketing strategies.

OTMG’s founder Jason Feinberg is one of the instructors, and will be sharing strategies and lessons learned from over a year working with the Topspin platform. Jason (and the rest of the OTMG team) are certified Topspin campaign administrators. More information about OTMG’s Topspin campaign services can be found on the Topspin Services page.

I just published a new post over at the PBS Mediashift Blog titled “The Year in Digital Music and Predictions for 2010″

Focuses on recent and upcoming topics such as acquisitions, direct-to-consumer, ISP tax, Spotify, analytics, and more. Would love to get input from all of you as to what you think are the key digital music moments of 2009 and what’s next.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/12/the-year-in-digital-music-and-predictions-for-2010350.html

En route to SF for the San Francisco Music Tech conference (thanks free WiFi on Virgin flights!). I believe this is the 6th, of which I’ve been to all but one. A really great conference, some good discussions to be had, and most importantly, some great networking opps.

I cannot stress enough how these conferences have been such a key part of growing my business. Between SFMT, Bandwidth, SXSW, CMJ, Digital Music Forum, and
any others, I get more done In a few days than in a month of sending emails and phone calls. For those of you pondering the value of conferences, I can assure you the networking opps are almost always worth the price of admission.

So, if any of you will be at SF Music Tech let me know, be great to meet up and discuss all things digital music.

A big mix of interesting articles today…

First Impressions More Important Than Ever

25 Blogs to Stay Current in Social Media

7 Ways to Tour Without Getting in the Van (what would Rollins think about that?!?)

Warner Posts Continuing Losses

Creativity in Music Marketing 1

Creativity in Music Marketing 2

The End of Music

One of the core rules in life – and certainly business – is be consistent.

I follow that rule in many areas, but this blog is not one of them. I know it’s technically bad blog form to admit you are inconsistent, but my readers have a brain and have probably figured that out.

I could go on and on about being busy running a company, writing for a much more high profile blog, or a hundred other excuses, but the reality is that most bloggers I read do all that and more, yet find a way to keep consistent with their site.

I’ve done some research into the techniques leading bloggers to employ to keep a regular posting schedule, and figured this helps my readers as much as myself. So here’s what I’ve gathered.

• Consistency trumps frequency every time. Writing four blog posts a month at a weekly interval is better than writing two one week, being dark for three weeks, then writing six rapid-fire the following week.
• Quality trumps quantity, both site-wide and intra-post. As in, providing a little bit of very valuable advice goes much further than a long post of full of emptiness. And a handful of very valuable posts makes for a much more compelling site than a constant stream of mediocrity.
• If you don’t have anything of value to say at the moment, share things of value that you have found – other articles, links, graphics, audio, video….

None of this is rocket science, and certainly not new. But it makes me realize that with all the time I spend reading music business articles, I can easily share what interests me. And I suspect that will influence elaboration of my own, hopefully adding to the value. I also realize my life is too chaotic and full (fortunately) to “get to it later” – I need to schedule blog updates, even though it goes against so much of my free-form nature.

More to come. Soon.

My newest post is up at the PBS Mediashift blog.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/10/record-labels-are-losing-power-to-fans-artists282.html

Over the past month, I received a significant amount of feedback on my recent MediaShift article, What Will Record Labels Look Like in the Future?. People from all areas of the music industry reached out and shared their feelings on future business models, and strategies for moving forward.

Regardless of their background, practically every person I spoke with agreed on a core set of truths about the future of record labels (and the industry as a whole). The consensus is that…

Read more…

A quick note to let you all know I will be moderating the “Modern Publicity Strategies for the Touring Musician” panel at CMJ on Friday 10/23. Hope to see you all there!

Please hop on over to the PBS Mediashift Blog and read my new post, “What Will Record Labels Look Like in the Future?”

A choice excerpt:

This addresses the core problem. Labels’ traditional revenue streams are drying up and no business can flourish without sustainable income. A remapping of revenue sources is inevitable and has already been put into practice by many labels via so-called “360 deals.” Pulling from tour revenues seems to be a logical progression, especially since the new paradigm for many labels is that records exist to promote the tour, rather than the opposite which was true for decades.

To this point, Scott Perry adds, “The bank is broken, and until investing in an artist’s career is proven to be a profitable endeavor, it will be difficult for any artist to find a benefactor to fund the labor necessary to push an artist beyond their sphere of friends and into a larger network.”

Read more at http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/08/what-will-record-labels-look-like-in-the-future230.html

Interesting post with a REAL interesting graphic…

Long tail distribution can be found in many things on the internet, it is especially useful in understanding the economics of abundance. However using it to understand fans can be incredibly useful.

The Pareto Principle states that you will earn “80% of your sales from 20% of your clients”. This fits into the long tail distribution of fans, as it allows you to identify the core audience you should focus on.

read more and see graphic at…

http://www.theindiedigest.com/article/what-you-need-know-about-long-tail-fans

Great read, and a very interesting picture of the demise of the almost-giant…

“We were claiming super-unique user growth while we knew we were just getting users to bounce off our site. Our approach was not far from hiring Internet users in India to click on our home page.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10303994-93.html?tag=mncol;txt