What I Learned At NMS: You Have 10 Seconds
This post is by Ryan Van Etten (@ryanve), Editor/Producer of VirtualMusic.tv; he was our featured corespondent at New Music Seminar in New York.
10 seconds to engage someone—to impress them.
In his research for Futurehit.DNA, Jay Frank discovered an impressive trend: Shorter song intros lead to better sales. "2/3 of bestselling songs have an intro that's less than 7 seconds." The average intro length for Top 25 songs is 6.6 seconds. "You really have 10 seconds to engage people."
Get to the hook. "Make it impactable."
Frank stated that "people are going to come to you first through song." Through Google. Essentially, bands can expect fans to find them through song names and lyric clips because that's how fans search and discover. "Make sure you search your own song." That is, search the title before you release it suggested both Jay Frank and Ariel Hyatt. Based on the initial search results an artist can tweak their titles for SEO.
NMS NYC 2010 | Day 1 | First Movement: The Next Music Business Unveiled
LTR: Ariel Hyatt (moderator/Ariel Publicity), Jay Frank (Futurehit.DNA), Gwen Lipsky (SoundThinkingNY), Eric Garland (BigChampange), and Mike Doernberg (ReverbNation). On this slide they brought up the issue that a lot of artists are trying to monetize too early. Create, grow, and then sell.
"Don't try to sell something if you're trying to get fans because that's an obstacle when what you want is their attention." – Mike Doernberg, CEO, ReverbNation.
Even superstar Rihanna had trouble getting high in Google with "Russian Roulette" because there were already so many results for that term. What an artist can do is either make titles more unique, or, even better, tag-along existing popular search terms by using slight variations. Be clever—keep a handle on artistic integrity. Ralph Simon later pointed out that based on Google Trends, people search for 'lyrics' more than they search for 'sex.'
10 seconds. You already lost me. 28 hours later a different panel, The Creative Conundrum, critiqued the three artists who made it to the Artist On The Verge finals. Only half the panel had seen the show the night before and the rest were judging based on a 10-second video clip. Were they insensitive? Yes. They were ruthless. But were they true to life? You tell me.
Top Photo Credit: bjornkeizers/flickr.
“Make sure you search your own song.” That is, search the title before you release it suggested both Jay Frank and Ariel Hyatt. Based on the initial search results an artist can tweak their titles for SEO.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha: because yep, art is all about SEO.
C***suckers.
Write something beautiful, name it what you want, if it is beautiful it will get heard, leave the McMusic peddlers to p*** about with bean counting and SEO tricks.
Jesus H Christ you people need to find a barrel to climb into with a man next to it with a shotgun.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!! Everything about the commentary in this article is the antithesis of what music is about.
There really needs to be a distinction between music and McMusic. McLabels are truly littered with soulless little egotists wrapped up in their own internal PR, and more scarily believe it.
The Music Industry Is Dead. Long Live Music (though if the McLabels would kindly accept this and start selling bobble headed dolls sooner rather than later, then music could probably bring about world peace, stop global warming and end nuclear proliferation by 2015… go on McLabels, take one for the Planet).