6 Things Bands Should Do Online

6 Things Bands Should Do Online… 6 simple things bands and artists can do to maximise their digital communications potential.

Spotify Royalties: Some Real Statistics

Spotify this week has once again been the focus of artists’ ire, as more than 200 labels chose to withdraw music from the service.

A post on Digital Music News revelaed research from NPD Group and NARM that claimed:

“access has been deemed ‘most detrimental’ to monetization across nearly all demographic categories”

What is lacking is a transparency from music streaming services that will allow people to decide fro themselves.

So, in a (small) attempt to make the money you receive for a ‘stream’ of one of your tracks a little less hidden, here’s a very basic breakdown from some first hand experience.

I signed up with Routenote, a digital music distribution service, a couple of years ago. It has been in the last few months that I’ve used Routenote to it’s potential, managing to get some of my old band’s tracks on Spotify (you can listen here if you like!).

*click the image to see a bigger version

In August we had 61 plays and earned $0.35016
In September we had 52 plays and earned $0.30396

So for just over 100 plays, we earned ourselves two-thirds of a dollar.

Now that might not seem like much to you, but that 100 plays as 100 more than we would have had otherwise.

To put it another way, the 100 plays is the equivalent of us selling 20 CDs at £3 each that are then only listened to once, straight from the disc.

That would net us £60 profit (our overheads from making the CD were covered years ago), a lot more than half a dollar.

It would seem to make NO SENSE to an outside figure who is interested only in the money at hand.

Why would you spend months creating something, only for its potential value to be made obsolete by uploading it to the Internet and making it publicly available for free?? ARE YOU NUTS?

Perhaps.

The presence on Spotify helps, in my mind, to establish your footprint digitally. If you don’t get on the platform, someone else will, and they make take your potential audience with them.

It makes sharing your music with others easier too. Back in the day, you’d carry 100′s of CDs to gigs, that nobody would buy; now they can listen to you on Spotify and you save your back.

You might end up on a playlist of similar artists, stumbled across randomly by a Spotify user who happened to like your tracks.

Like many elements of our digital lives, there is an element of luck involved, if you are to succeed.

Think of ‘viral’ videos for example. The brands and people involved were lucky that they caught a wave of cultural phenomenon that their content played so well into.

Similarly, that job you got through Twitter? You wouldn’t have it if you’d made a cup of tea and watched the TV instead of checking your stream.

That half dollar may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it is half a dollar that has meant the band’s music has been listened to 100 times more than it would have otherwise been.

It has yet to lead to a sale or download, that much is true. But, if it does, that simple 5 minute process of uploading some tracks will have been made worthwhile.

Foursquare Expertise

Foursquare have announced the latest update to their offering: Expertise.

Expertise is a reflection of how often you check in at particular types of venues and rewards you with levels according to how many times you visit a particular type of place.

You can see from my ‘Fresh Brew’ badge the data is already being rolled out.

We’ve already got all this great data on your expertise from your past check-ins, so the exciting part now is identifying the ways we can use it to help people make decisions in the real world. For instance, if you’re at a wine bar, it’s much more useful to see a Tip from a Level 8 wine expert. Or, if a karaoke buff always goes to a specific place, we can make sure that it comes up first when you’re looking to sing your heart out. There are lots of ways to use the community’s expertise to make the world more interesting, and foursquare will keep getting more useful the more you and your friends use it.

This added tweak is very GetGlue, which rewards users similarly according to how many times they check-in to a TV show or artist profile with different ‘levels’ of fan sticker.

What’s cool here is that Foursquare adds another layer of usefulness to their product. A tip is no longer just a random piece of advice from a user who went to that bar once, it’s now quantifiable by the amount of times the same person has been to that bar and really knows the best table, most appropriate wine and tastiest food.

It’s a simple, yet effective, way for Foursquare to add an extra little bit of value to their product and continue to drive for that stickiness that all social networks are looking for.

Retweet.co.uk

Retweet.co.uk is a new tool from the creator of Spotify’s best playlist sharing service ShareMyPlaylists.

Retweet’s aim is to measure the reach of your tweets so that you can find out how many people may have seen the content you’ve created.

This is a question we’ve been asked by brands since Twitter’s evolution as a digital marketing tool: “So, how many people actually saw that tweet?”. Of course it’s much more meaningful to track click throughs, via bit.ly for example, but regardless, it’s a way of working out how well your community reacts to certain types of content being shared.

A very simple interface makes this extremely easy to understand, and the pulling in of data seems pretty seamless.

It shows you the content of the tweet, the users who retweeted it, the total number of potential impressions and each user’s percentage share of that total, as well as each user’s number of followers.

A neat function is the ability to see your most retweeted tweets, again a great way of seeing what content flies, and likewise, who you most retweet can tell you what content you’re finding useful, funny or informative.

Of course, Retweet doesn’t replace the total number of clicks as the better form of measurement of impact, but it is useful to demonstrate how just one or two retweets from the right people can share your content much wider than just your own network.