A wealth of ideas for self-promotion on the Internet

The rise of digital-age DIY music-making has seen a parallel rise in self-marketing. E-mail, web sites, blogs, streaming audio and video, social networks, mobile apps and other internet-based channels have provided independent musicians direct access to millions of ears and eyes. But the lower barriers to entry have also overwhelmed listeners in a flood of music and promotion. Record labels that once served as gatekeepers of publicity and distribution are now distinguished more by size and budget than actual guardianship of access.

Inexpensive digital audio recording has made every musician a studio head, and YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud, Bandcamp and Sonicbids has turned them into publicists. Being good at making music is admirable, but getting it heard requires a level of savvy few musicians come by naturally and a level of self-promotion even fewer musicians are willing to undertake. Today’s opportunities for connecting with fans dwarf those of yesterday’s envelope-licking home-brew fan club. Mastering the current crop of techniques and in-spots, and keeping current (MySpace, anyone?), is essential to expanding your footprint and growing your career.

Unfortunately, while the opportunity is large, so is the complexity. Riding to the rescue is an ecosystem of advisors that can help you hone your independent promotion. A number of books, including Jay Frank’s Hack Your Hit, Ariell Hyatt’s Music Success in Nine Weeks and David Nevue’s How to Promote Your Music Successfully on the Internet provide techniques for harnessing the power of the Internet to make connections with listeners.

James Moore’s entry in this genre is a plainspoken guide to the rich promotional channels of the Internet. He spends a little time outlining Band 101 basics (recording, biography, photos, press releases, etc.), but the heart of his book is about building your presence on the web and using a variety of viral techniques to expand your fan base. On the plus side, Moore’s done a lot of research and provides a lot of detail; on the negative side, it may prove overwhelming to the average musician. Frank’s and Hyatt’s approaches were lighter on detail, but broken into bite-sized tasks that are more easily digested.

Moore provides advice on building websites (including some rudimentary help with search engine optimization), optimizing your use of Facebook, Twitter and other social sites, digital distribution, blogging (and leveraging blog aggregators like Hype Machine), managing mailing lists, podcasting, crowd funding and more. He offers Internet-age spins on classic marketing techniques, helps you weigh various sales models (including the value of free), and ventures off the Internet to briefly mention film and TV placement and royalties.

The last third of the book is a collection of guest-authored articles, resource listings and interviews with industry players. There’s a lot of valuable information here, but even more so than with the earlier parts of the book, you’ll have to spend some time breaking down the advice and mapping it to your own career. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but for musicians who want to spend their time making music rather than marketing their wares, the lack of spoon-feeding may inhibit developing any real marketing inertia.

Both approaches – bite-sized tasks and deeper detail – are useful in teaching musicians marketing. The latter, in this case Moore’s approach, is more likely to have an impact as background reading to the task-oriented books of Frank and Hyatt. Moore’s book should make great tour-van reading, providing food for thought and ideas for discussion, rather than highly-structured, actionable items you can tick off a list in short order. You’ll need the latter to get you started, but you’ll want the depth of Moore’s suggestions to keep you going. [©2013 Hyperbolium]

Modern music marketing begs ethical questions

In his revelatory first book, Futurehit.DNA, music industry insider Jay Frank explored the impact that modern recording and digital distribution technology are having on popular music. Rather than guiding readers to creating more artistic music, he took on the mercenary’s role of advisor-to-the-would-be-popular. He explored the ways in which modern listeners discover and consume music, and his insights as the former head of Yahoo! music yielded useful ideas for garnering listeners and the public recognition (e.g., chart action and sales) that goes along with all those ears.

In this follow up, Frank ups the promotional ante and lowers the moral barriers. This collection of ideas is even more mercenary in nature, and though it will help you maneuver around a lack of a label, industry experience or contacts, it does so in part by teaching you to use, and in several instances, game, Internet-based promotional channels. Frank builds upon the premise that the average music listener is not a fanatic, and that their music discovery is viral- and marketing-induced. As in his debut, he provides interesting analysis of how the music discovery curve has changed, and how artists who want to be discovered need to adapt.

Growing an audience with mechanisms other than music and live performance is a task many musicians are loathe to undertake, and the book’s focus on non-musical mechanics is sure to alienate a few. But the ease with which all musicians can distribute their music on the internet has made it more difficult for any one musician to be heard, and working out-of-band is a basic necessity to a modern music career. Many of Frank’s ideas – networking with fans and artists to grow your fan base, giving away music to expand your business, treating your most ardent fans as your most passionate customers, using contests to build a mailing list, optimizing your website for search results – are standard marketing fare.

Where he gets clever, and some would say less ethical, is in recommendations for juicing your YouTube placement by watching your own videos, pumping up your sales figures (and thus your chart placement) by buying your own songs at digital retail, and even buying Facebook fans (the latter of which he disclaims “I’m not for that, but it is a consideration”). One could see these as digital versions of practices common to the pre-Internet record industry, but their availability to all doesn’t make them any more savory. Still, Frank may be right that this is what it takes to succeed in today’s mainstream.

Hack Your Hit isn’t as uniquely informative as was Futurehit.DNA; other titles, including Ariel Hyatt’s Music Success in Nine Weeks and David Nevue’s How to Promote Your Music Successfully on the Internet, cover similar ground. What distinguishes Hack Your Hit, for better or worse, is Frank’s knowledgeable perspective as a music industry gatekeeper and his willingness to let readers draw their own ethical line. With forty tips, many very simple and quick to implement, musicians are bound to find a few ideas that will help them along the road to a larger audience. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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