Thanks, Trent & NIN community.

My group just distributed our debut album as a free download beginning in May. We got a feature on a prominent file sharing blog and have already had over 55,000 downloads of the complete album!

I still have a lot to learn about monetizing our exposure and growing a community of fans. From an artistic point of view, though, we never would have gotten access to that many ears trying to squeeze money out of listeners right out of the gate.

Independent artists have the advantage right now of being able to catch the wave of free distribution/file sharing while the establishment industry tries to sue it out of existence. Get it out there before the suits figure out a way to saturate the free communities with their latest pre-fab, over-hyped shite!

TR posted:

Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace - it's dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don't autoplay). Constantly update your site with content - pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any - Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

If you don't know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don't get it - find someone who does to do this for you.

This is really good advice for ANYONE who has content they want to promote, music or otherwise. Well I'd say a tiny bit of very low-key Flash might be OK. It is useful in a very few cases of content delivery, namely, photography. But yes you can do without it.

If you can't design & maintain a Web site, pay someone to, or trade something with them that you CAN do. And while hiding behind the curtain can be mysterious & alluring, it doesn't work for 99% of artists out there. Maybe just one... I forget his name. And even he changed his ways. You need for people to see you and be able to identify with you, and want to engage with you in some way online. Not 24/7, but if you're just a shadow they don't see as an actual person, you're doomed. That doesn't work anymore. You need the Twitter/Facebook/Web site/forum/blog etc. Otherwise people forget you and move on to the next more-interesting more-interactive guy.

Should bands find a booking agent? Is it a good idea to go digital (like Line 6 pods) instead of having cabs onstage? Is a major label deal a good idea if you're offered one?

This is so true. Because as a new band, the only ones buying your EP or Demo are people that have heard you before. You want to spread music to the ones that don't know who you are. And why would they pay for something that they have no idea what it is?

Well spoken!

urbanwilliams posted:

Should bands find a booking agent? Is it a good idea to go digital (like Line 6 pods) instead of having cabs onstage? Is a major label deal a good idea if you're offered one?

a- if they can afford booking agent, yes. If no, it's on themselves and/or their friends. b- i still dream of using Line 6 if i ever happen to go on stage as an actual musician. My bet would be yes. c- It's good if you're ok with whatever they have to offer you (and not just you offer them). It also means you may get fucked after some time.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/09/2009 06:01AM by perchee.

Nice follow up Trent. I was looking at the beastie boys site last night and wondering... besides the online sales and premium content how is 16 bucks for a set of flacs that people can find online worth it?

Yes, for new bands I feel that you should give away as much as you can. (i had a hell of a time initially talking to by bandmates about this model a couple months ago, lol. but we're solid on it now)

Allow me to offer some solid new media marketing advice, as this is my forte. You do indeed have the power to market yourself at a level that can nip at the heels of the big boys. No you won't have the funding behind you, but the internet is such a magnificent tool for quick information propagation. If a person can use search engine optimization to get their site on the front page or google, or 4chan can use the power of the masses to pull pranks on the net, you can use the same forces to promote yourself! Here are some of our ideas:

1. Create a web site. This is simple and done in minutes. Put a player on there and give average bitrate copies away for free.

2. Social Media. Create a myspace page, a facebook page, a twitter account, and upload your music in video form to youtube. Dump it all out there as soon as you get it since you should be creating new songs constantly anyway. (we usually have more ideas that we can work on at once and record them quickly to come back to later.)

3. Give away your music at shows! I'm serious! We considered prospectively giving away as many copies as possible at shows but it will just get expensive. Here's the idea to tackle it.

-go to a shop and have say 50 to 100 cd's duplicated. Just decent copy's you recorded in garage band or pro tools. A nice rule of thumb is no less than 10% of the crowd. Sign them all, and set them on a table during the show. Announce the table.

-have a computer there with the mp3's on it, advertise in your flyers that you will transfer the songs to people's mp3 players, iphods, or phones! Announce during the show to stick around if they want it done this way. Nice and personal. (will need third party help eventually)

-Give people a way to order a mastered version. Let them sign up to a list and/or make sure they know they can order one online. If they like the music, they can place an order online for a full cd with sleeve, artwork, and pro-level disc.

4. Viral marketing! This is my favorite! Leave cd's with question marks in permanent marker on them laying around with your music on them. Leave usb thumbdrives in restaurants that say open me. (256 meg ones are soooo cheap in bulk) Get as creative as possible to make the fans feel like they've found you.

-You don't even have to put track names or the band name! Crazy? not quite. The people who like you will wonder who the hell this band is!? So they'll google you! If you have your lyrics submitted to lyric sites, as well as on your own site, and your site is properly search optimized they will "find" you. (even though you brought them right to you) That kind of feeling of accomplishment with discovering a band leaves a lasting impression, and word of mouth spreads quickly that way!


That's all for now, just wanted to quickly add some ideas to this. Trent Reznor has yet again got it right in the new age of media. You also may wonder why i would tell you these ideas? (which some of you will inevitably thing are stupid, and that's ok) Because nothing is sacred. No idea can be kept a secret for long. And someone, somewhere, is always having a similar idea. Better to share it and just hope you follow through better than the rest.

Jonathan Taufer
jonathantaufer.com
revizzle.com
willpower101.com
Find me on twitter/myspace/facebook/google

In some ways, the same basic approach could be adapted to work for creative industries other than music, too, I think. I know the traditional ways of marketing pretty much anything creative are becoming less and less successful as time goes by. I guess I'll let everyone know if any parallel approaches work for me now that I'm ditching the traditional routes and taking my studio/gallery/boutique back to the internet where it started.


On a sillier note, I half expected to open the thread and see a first post that just said something like, "Go fuck yourself" or "Get a real job."

Really good points on how to create a fanbase.
As a music consultant here in London sync'ing music onto TV, I know that sync departments at major labels have very much become the new A&R in many respects anyway. Bands and managers worth their salt will want to know what opportunities may be available within TV, Film and advertising before doing a deal.

I have seen first hand how getting a track onto a great commercial can really perpetuate the bands career. One I was responsible for was a Citroen ad featuring an ice skating robot with The Egg track walking away, on the back of the ad this reached number 3 in the UK charts and created over 2 years of high profile festival dates, support slots and headline tour shows for the act. Being aligned with the right TV spot can lead to great things, equally it can do damage if it's a poor brand, show, film etc so bands beware what you agree to.

In short- get yourself teamed up with a good music consultancy, or in house music person at advertising agencies and TV stations, all this can be done without any label or manager.

Forgot to say, follow my threads here-
[twitter.com]

Oh and it bears mentioning of this site:

[www.Bandcamp.com]

Which essentially enables artists to do just as Trent has suggested, only in one fell swoop.

Set your own price? Check!
Do that per song? Check!
Do that in various formats? Check and mate!

Plus it's a nicer front to introduce your music to people than myspace.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/09/2009 06:13AM by Firewalker.

Hello, first post here. Hope everyone will be OK to me as my motives and observations are quite different than usual. Though I do like NIN,I can't say that I'm an avid listener, the reason I started following Mr. Reznor on Twitter was my being interested in this, for me unusual, approach to fans.

Mainly because I run a website about a REALLY famous musician whose PR people and record company are doing NOTHING to communicate with people interestested.

So, if questions are to be responded, mine is the following: how to convince a person (or have them convinced, as they'd probably rather die than communicate with a "fan" and think all "fans" are probably either drooling girls or brain-dead freaks) who TRIED and FAILED in new media that this is "it"?

Some background. This person is well-known and member of a band that's ridiculously famous, in constant spotlight; but they do their own thing, very lo-fi on the side. At the point I got interested in their work, there was this transition between web 1.0 and web 2.0 going on; and there were a bunch of AWFULLY executed fansites and an official site with a really odd history to itself (the webmaster got to be the webmaster by having hijacked the domain name, posted unreleased material and blackmailed the record company, more or less) was down.

The official site eventually came up again, with a fairly good design, content mostly copied and pasted from the previous amateur-attentionwhore-run-one and the news were updated with a fairly good frequency from February to August 2004, after which the site got updated once in 2005 and once in 2007, which is insane knowing how many things this person, whose name and gender I'm not revealing, is contributing to music.

In the meantime, I had started my own website, which is still going strong after almost five years and is updated all the time. Another site, which initially attracted more people, was up at the same time as mine, but they lost interest in their project come 2007.

With all this going on, I ended up being the only person providing the actual news on this musician to people. At that point, I didn't think about it much, as the band in question decided to make a break and the musician was nowhere to be seen, though information on their collaborations were arriving almost constantly. Though this artist has a Myspace (yuck) too, that one wasn't updated either, there was a point they completely disallowed comments, including comments on photos (which were, hmmm...3 or 4?).

Last year, however, through a really, really incredible story, it was revealed that the artist would publish a new solo album after a longish break. Ironically, at that point, their registered domain name expired (which happened in 2009 as well..come on!) and, though it was renewed, the actual website was wiped off.

Now, this was crappy. On the old website, there was some old material unavailable elsewhere and new people interested in this person's work kept on coming to me and asking for that material. As it's freeware and probably the first freeware of the free album kind, I put it up on my site, alongside a disclaimer that I'd remove it once the official site is back.

posted:

If you don't know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don't get it - find someone who does to do this for you.

Heh. I wish some people realised this.

The official site never came back, but totally unexpectedly, the person started a blog. They were having so much trouble handling it that I thought it was funny and sad at the same time, they were using some really, really anachrone words for blogging-related terms, their posts were enormously long, constantly getting deleted, rewritten up to 4-5 times, posted in an odd order and, there was no other content. The best thing: the link to get this person's new album was INVALID. The valid link existed...on my website! The record company would send the actual news...to me! I actually refered about 10 000 people to get the album, via various retail stores, as the official merchandising site would kick them off, and the staff of the record company's prefered merchandiser wasn't responding to mails. Actually, to this day, some people have not received the album, though they paid for it, and their orders for the back catalog items are on hold.

Oh, and comments on the blog were disabled, too. Instead of that, I would make a post about the person's blog post on my website, with a short excerpt and a link, and people would comment there, on my site, asking me a bunch of questions that I was not able to provide answers to, nor I had ways of forwarding those questions.

As of now, the person hasn't made a single blog post in almost six months and, as I have previously stated, their domain expired and was down for ten days before I emailed the record company and asked them if they're going to renew it, eventually. Myspace page isn't used for anything either and nobody's logged onto it ever since the day of the particular album's release.

On the other side, the community I have created is going really strong, which I love. At the same time, the responsibilities are horrible, as I get the blame if event-related news (and these events occur on the very opposite side of the world, in a time zone that isn't

At the same time, everything I'd done for the community was alongside the lines from the original post in this thread: interaction, constant updates, addressing people and helping them out, attempting to broadcast from a live gig, offering as much video as possible and trying (very hard, as I have no clues and no one to supervise what I do) not to ever go against this person's possible interests, privacy and such.


What to do in a situation like this?
My mother says that it's not a good idea to "throw pearls before a swine", but I don't think this particular person is a "swine", just enormously confused and, for whatever their reason is, not motivated and not understanding their own fanbase. Either that, or they think this is yet another blackmail and that this is all done for the sake of inflating my ego or willingness to be paid (which I would never want).

That was it, I apologise for my little rant.

Thanks so much for the great post Trent!

But how about for people that want to make it in the business. I don't know if you'd remember, but I'm the one that asked you about that at the Mass show. I did shoot you a PM like you asked but I guess it got lost in the multitude of them that you probably get.

I'd be interested in hearing your advice about making it in the business (and mostly) touring aspect of the music industry!

This 'revolution' will also need a mentality change from (established) musicians: not taking your audience for granted but working for attention. Less about the ego/image but focus on the music. Hopefully, this will also separate wheat from the chaff.
Potential consumers are a lot better informed, they know that there is more an artist could offer than a plastic disc. When consumers feel respected the return in loyalty will make the difference for the artist...

I think the way NIN has been releasing music is great, I get to hear the material for free and then I have the change to choose the package and format I want to buy it in. The problem I see here is the new age of music that we are in. As I am no longer the teenage/early twenties group that marketing directs itself to, my opinion no longer matters. I am still the type who wants a physical copy of material in my hand. I am a dieing breed. Sure, I only listen to music in a digital format, but, the current driving force for musical purchases don't want the packaging on their shelf to go along with that .mp3 file. So the free digital download is enough for the upcoming consumer.

On the flip side, if you do not offer the music for free download, someone else will, so you might as well just gain the respect and admiration of the fan. Bringing them to you, on your own website, will give you the opportunity to market a current tour or other merch. I am glad you make the point of forgetting about fame and fortune, as those contradict artistic freedom and integrity in many cases. To be realistic though, without some level of fortune, I have seen bands conform to the 9 to 5 world, and forget about making music. So it sounds like I am saying that there is no solution here, and well, I don't know that we have found one yet.

I would say, do what you love, expose your self as much as you can in any way you can, hope to get noticed by other well respected musicians in "the scene", away from the viral labels, and with some luck you will get to tour with them for even greater exposure. Don't forget your box of shirts and albums on the road either. Buying a CD of a new band I have never heard before after seeing them open for another band is instant gratification. Oh, and don't be a douche to the people who want to have a chat with you after the show, they are who make you relevant.

This is it.

Thank you, Trent.