Never Forget: It’s Your Data
A Warning To Artists & Labels
Knowing who your fans are may be the most important information that any artist or music marketer can posses. If you know the fans, then you know where to find them to share news, sell tickets, downloads, etc. Where they hang out on and offline is also the most likely place to find new fans.
But all too often artists and music marketers are not capturing who the fans are or that information is being controlled by gatekeepers.
When your fans sign up for your email list, you own the data. When they become your friend on MySpace, MySpace owns the data. When they buy a ticket through Ticketmaster, they own the data. When they but through your fan club or fan ticketing site, you own the information. This is how the band Mobile was blindsided when MySpace took back their URL. This is why EMI is about to launch its own download and fan hub to gather data.
Can you imagine Apple…
Coca Cola or any smart brand helping to build someone else’s
marketing list? Yet artists and the music industry do it every day.
Nurturing your own web site and email list are the best defense. Is
your email sign up on your front page of? Make signing up for emails
and joining your fan club or street team easy. Start selling tickets
from your web site. Spend most of your energy building traffic to
places where you control the data. Social networking and other sites
that control your data need to become conduits funneling fans to your
site; not their final destination. – Bruce Houghton
Brilliant advice, Bruce. The Mobile incident should serve as a cautionary tale to a lot of bands out there, as should the waining popularity of MySpace in general . . . even if the band maintains complete control over their MySpace contacts, what use are they if 90% of them have migrated to another social service?
The boys at http://www.bkwld.com/ create social interface within a band’s website, with lots of tools for fan interaction. I’d strongly suggest bands check them out.
This is very true and very important for artists to remember! All the various social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter are excellent portals for communicating with fans – it is important to be on all of them to cover your bases. It is also important to pull email addresses from your website. This is a modern example of having a solid marketing mix and constantly assessing how it is working for you!
So glad you posted this. About a year ago, I decided that every time a friend request was exchanged between myself and another MySpace, Facebook, etc. user, I would always send them a note back thanking them and also including this… “I’d like to include you in my group of friends outside of {social network}, please reply with your email address if you are ok with that”….and the majority of those people do reply with their personal email address. But I have accumulated a large email database from this one simple habit. Thanks for sharing this!
Great advice.
My favorite example of this is all the bands on mp3.com who were getting MILLIONS of plays and lot of attention. Once in particular got signed to Interscope, had a big launch on radio, etc.
Sold about 200 copies the first week.
That wouldn’t have happened had somebody let the MILLIONS of people who downloaded know the album was available. And they could have saved a ton of money on radio, which obviously wasn’t very effective in doing the job.
David Hooper
http://www.musicmarketing.com/music-marketing.html
Thanks everyone for your comments.
Allison, I’m going to feature yours as part of a series called “What Is Working?”
Would you – and all Hypebot readers – leave a comment here if you have anything to add or any other tips that are working for you. Let’s share your success with with Hypebot community.
Hallelujah! Amen. This is exactly what my book talks about and what I teach muisicnas when I speak to them Social Networking + Internet Marketing = Success and sadly a LOT of artists forget part 2 of this equation and then are confused about why they are not sellling any albums as David Hooper points out. I represented an artist who got over 1,000,000 plays on his MySpace page but it wasn’t until after he started recording personalized video thank yous that he started to sell music and build not only trust but also a stronger fanbase – it took effort and now it’s paing off… and Allison also (kinda) points out that on MySpace its a lot of bots and not a lot of real people – Kudos for asking for thier emals!