Are Musicians Bad at Promoting Their Own Music On The Internet Or Is The Audience Just Jaded?
April 19th, 2010 by Mike McCready
Let’s say you don’t work in the music business. Let’s just say you’re an average fan and a musician somehow gets your attention long enough to convince you to listen to their music. You listen. You hate it. Maybe it’s just not your style. Maybe it’s just plain bad. Either way, you’re less likely to give the next musician the chance. And you’re even less likely the time after that and so on until finally you’d rather kiss your sister than listen to another artist try to convince you to give their song a spin.
We live in an attention market where someone first has to get you to pay attention before they’ll ever get you to pay money. For some people, attention is an even scarcer commodity than money is. With as much stuff, information, and people bombarding us all day long something has to seem pretty compelling on the surface for us to bother. For you, the title of this post was compelling. For many others it wasn’t and these words will go unread.
But my point is, we just conducted a bit of an experiment at Music Xray I think you’ll find interesting. Each of our artists showcase their music for free in what we call a Song Presentation Pack and that looks like like this: http://present.musicxray.com/xrays/1569/public (no, they don’t look like that link. You have to click on it).
We ran a contest and the top three artists to get the most views of their Song Presentation Pack over a 3 week period won $150 to spend on Music Xray.
There were a few hundred entries. The artists lit up Facebook and Twitter and their blogs, but not much happened. The winning song had fewer than 200 views/listens.
Now, these are the possible reasons:
1. Artists just weren’t motivated by the contest or prize (possibly but probably not the case since these are artists who are pretty engaged with our site).
2. Artists are really bad promoters (possibly but not all of them and having a contest should reveal those that are pretty good at it).
3. The audience is apathetic and harder to engage than ever because they’re jaded and attention is scarce.
Now, I’m not saying number 3 is the answer and our experiment wasn’t scientific, but the evidence is there and my gut tells me it could be the case.
With so many DIY musicians out there, how can any of them distinguish themselves?; even the good ones if the audience is jaded and won’t give them the time of day? Is it as true now as it’s ever been that most artists need professional advocates, evangelists, publicists, labels, mass exposure events and to partner with people who can help them get to the next level?
What do you think?
This week’s new opportunities: http://eepurl.com/s1jv
Posted in Marketing, Music, Music Industry, social media, Uncategorized | 9 Comments »
sounds about right to me.
i run a blog and we’ve got a soundcloud account to distribute free tracks (legally!), DJ mixes and other giveaways. in general, any given post will get maybe 5,000 views; if there’s a free track embedded in the post, maybe 1 in 5 (if it’s a known artist) of those will actually press ‘play’; the figure will be closer to 1 in 10 if they’re a new / unknown quantity.
i can see why. as a DJ, producer, blogger, and music fan, I see and get sent loads of music. I become irritated if I have to download a .ZIP to check out a tune. that takes time, dammit! let me stream it! and it had better be a streaming app where you can skip to the middle of a track – i don’t have time to sit through a load of intros (more pertinent with dance music where an intro might just be 32 bars of drum). it starts to become like work. you can’t even stream everything on your regular round of blogs – you’d be there all night.
so as an artist you really need something to elevate your music above the mire, to even get people to listen to it. Of course, the most effective thing is word of mouth – a friend who tells you to listen. After that? A combination, I feel – a good backstory, a gimmick (look at Die Antwoord for both of these), a good manager, good PR, music that hits a bit of a zeitgiest (Rusko) shrewd business sense (hello Diplo) and all the rest of it.
I actually released a free album last month and am blogging about it as the weeks go by – what we’ve done to get exposure and whether it worked. You can read it here – http://bassmusicblog.com/tag/diaryofafreealbum
cheers, sorry for the essay!
ed
I definitely agree with the idea that the potential audience for new music is hard to engage and that their attention may well be scarce. But I respectfully disagree with the idea that this means they are necessarily “apathetic” or “jaded.”
Very few people, even people who actively like music, have any inherent interest in musicians they don’t already know. I don’t consider these people jaded as a result. I just think they know– either from experience or simply through intuition– that most unknown musicians don’t make music that sounds very good to them. The more these musicians are coming at them entirely independently, DIYishly, the less most people are interested.
Musicians have always had a very high bar to get over to engage people’s attention and gain their trust. I mean, look at how most people feel about opening acts at concerts they go to. These are music fans active enough to be at a concert, and yet most of them can barely stand to listen to an opening act.
With the barrier to entry obliterated by the internet, musicians who are unknown to most people have flooded the market. Lack of interest on the part of the audience is — unfortunately for the musicians– built into the landscape. I don’t think it’s that people are notably jaded; I just think they have no inherent reasons to be especially interested.
Every promotional technique that comes along that works for the first couple of bands that use it will eventually be copied by all bands and then fans will tune them all out.
MySpace got overwhelmed by bands promoting themselves.
Now on Facebook I get so many event invitations I don’t really look at any of them.
And I’ve noticed that now I am getting email newsletters from bands I don’t remember signing up for. Then it hits me that I must have signed up to get a free download. So I expect that before long giving out a free song in exchange for a fan’s email won’t work very well anymore. People will tune out those, too.
I tend not to pay any attention to any band that hasn’t already been favorably reviewed/recommended by several people. And even then chances are I won’t save the music. In fact, because I needed more hard drive space, I recently went back through my iTunes library and dumped quite a few songs I know I’ll never listen to again.
Is there a solution? Probably doing what artists/bands have always done. Get some local gigs and start blowing people away. If there is enough buzz, chances are people will start to check you out. Since it is generally harder to be a great live act than to record something, I think playing live and getting rave reviews as a live act will then encourage people to check out your recorded music.
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I think Suzanne makes the point – everything that worked initially soon becomes tired and tuned out – and the time it takes for that process to happen is getting shorter and shorter.
I think we’re about to settle into a new phase of social media marketing where it is less about how many followers you have and more about how deep the relationship is between you and your followers.
We’ve seen the growth explosion and the manifest desire for popularity but as we all begin to appreciate the signal to noise ratio – who really cares if you have 5,000 twitter followers if no-one clicks or re-tweets your links. Likewise – having 500 Facebook fans who ignore your content is less valuable than 5 who really dig your shit and who genuinely talk about it.
It’s reminiscent of the old financial sales model – you start with your friends and family and grow out from there – and if you’re not good enough for your friends and family to genuinely support you – then – well – there’s a difference between a hobby and a profession – I suspect a lot of dreamers are going to learn that lesson sooner rather than later.
Very good comments. Thank you all for that. To Andrew’s comment, it’s about engagement. I agree. It’s about influence. It’s about adding genuine value. It’s not an easy problem to solve. For the audience, it’s about having effective filters.
I think it’s harder for fans these days because they are indeed bombarded by a million bands on every social network website…
Plus, there are just so many things to do and so many distractions…
So… probably your #3 is the answer….
P.S. As an artist, I have a small group of very dedicated and amazing fans, and I am forever grateful!
(this comment is more apropos to Bands and Artists — I’m just a songwriter, lol) Part of the problem/solution might be a focus on targeted marketing, as bands develop a bold image/brand. Just putting a song on the internet and having it stumbled, digged, reddited (yes, I make up words, lol), myspaced, facebooked, reverb-nationed, mixposured, gigmastered, etc… isn’t going to draw a fan base. Well, it might over long period of time if the artist continues to put up good songs and an occasional visitor happens to like the music. There are so many cookie-cutter artists that look alike, sound alike, dance alike and market their music – alike. An artist should build their own brand, define and enlarge their unique image, and market their music to a focused group that finds interest in that genre. Live performance is the best way, IMHO, to connect with a loyal fan base, and the band’s website is best used as a networking tool for the fans. Now, Music Xray is a fantastic tool to connect with industry professionals who can channel a band into the right market and increase exposure, but the band has to do the work to develop a stand-out product. (Lady GaGa, anyone?)
sounds about right to me.
i run a blog and we’ve got a soundcloud account to distribute free tracks (legally!), DJ mixes and other giveaways. in general, any given post will get maybe 5,000 views; if there’s a free track embedded in the post, maybe 1 in 5 (if it’s a known artist) of those will actually press ‘play’; the figure will be closer to 1 in 10 if they’re a new / unknown quantity.
i can see why. as a DJ, producer, blogger, and music fan, I see and get sent loads of music. I become irritated if I have to download a .ZIP to check out a tune. that takes time, dammit! let me stream it! and it had better be a streaming app where you can skip to the middle of a track – i don’t have time to sit through a load of intros (more pertinent with dance music where an intro might just be 32 bars of drum). it starts to become like work. you can’t even stream everything on your regular round of blogs – you’d be there all night.
so as an artist you really need something to elevate your music above the mire, to even get people to listen to it. Of course, the most effective thing is word of mouth – a friend who tells you to listen. After that? A combination, I feel – a good backstory, a gimmick (look at Die Antwoord for both of these), a good manager, good PR, music that hits a bit of a zeitgiest (Rusko) shrewd business sense (hello Diplo) and all the rest of it.
I actually released a free album last month and am blogging about it as the weeks go by – what we’ve done to get exposure and whether it worked. You can read it here – http://bassmusicblog.com/tag/diaryofafreealbum
cheers, sorry for the essay!
ed