Last night i caught Muse at the ACC, the third time i’ve seen them in Toronto. Here’s why i love them so goddamn much:
- They can pull off their live show with 3 guys in the band. Yes, they tour with a 4th member, but i saw them before they were huge at the Kool Haus and had a 4th and it was equally impressive.
- Matt Bellamy’s pipes. The boy can sing live.
- Dominic Howard’s drumming. While it’s not technically too crazy, besides Chad Smith there are no other drummers in rock that get me as excited about what are fairly simple grooves.
- The Visuals. Lighting & risers that lifted them up & down choreographed with the music = very cool.
- They’re British.
Yesterday i got a random question from someone on Facebook who discovered my earlier post about social media for bands. I thought she had some interesting questions so here’s the transcript of our Q&A:
Ok! well the first question that i have is what do you do for a living? Is your blog something you do for fun?
A: I do online marketing/web application development & iphone app development on the side. My blog is for fun and to occasionally piss off hypocrite conservatives & Apple haters.
How do you think the internet has changed the music industry?
A: Its been bad for big pop artists, especially those who may have a lot of label money but make terrible music. On the other hand it has been great for indie musicians because no longer do you need millions of dollars to spread the word about your music. It also has changed the artist / fan relationship in some ways. In many cases fans have a direct line of communication to the artist via Twitter / Facebook etc…
Do you think there are any negative aspect to this method of promotion?
A: It takes a huge amount of persistence. There is no “silver bullet” to success. So i think for bands just starting out it can be hard to know where to start etc…I think it’s also really easy to give up early on when you don’t see results. You also have to be careful to maintain ‘an arms length’ relationship with the fans while still being accessible. Getting too close to your “coo coo for cocoa puffs” fans can end badly.
Do you have any tips for local bands who are looking to use social media to promote themselves?
A:
- Start by eating your own dog food. Follow/subscribe to artists on twitter/facebook that are already doing it and get a feel for what is working for them and how they are using the tools.
- Don’t give up, it’s gonna take time to build momentum.
- Use a service like ping.fm to make it easier to update all your social media profiles in one fell swoop.
- Use a service like www.artistdata.com to post your tour schedule once, and syndicate to hundreds of tour schedule websites across the internet.
- Find a good Twitter client. On Mac/iPhone i recommend Tweetie. Also there is a cool iphone app called Boxcar that will send you notifications on your iphone when you get @ replies or DM’s from fans which leads to my next tip:
- Do whatever you can to respond to every fan question/comment.
- Give your music away for free on your website. The bad news is people could be downloading your music for free anyways. The good news is digital content has a distribution cost of $0. Take advantage of this. People will still buy your music but more importantly you will make more money from touring due to a growing fan-base.
- Most of all: make amazing music. It doesn’t have to mainstream pop. In some ways it is easier to build a following if your music is unusual!
In your post about tips on using social media for bands, you said never spend a cent on traditional advertising. What was your reason behind this?
A: You only need to do this if your music sucks or you were signed to a major label and now need to pay back their investment in you asap. TV & print advertising is horrendously expensive. Making a music video with the objective of having it show up on MTV is a waste of time & money. Even MTV seems to have realized this as there is hardly any music on these stations anymore.
The one thing i think that’s worth spending dollars on, is getting mentioned by tastemakers. If you can get a tastemaker to plug you in in an authentic way to their fanbase, it can have huge upside.
And what about bands using YouTube? Do you think that this form of social media is a good way to promote their music and upcoming projects?
A: Absolutely. Get a cheap flip mino camera and take it on the road with you. If you have a mac iMovie is great for putting together quick video blogs. I’m sure there is something equivalent on Windows. Fans love this stuff. Also, if you have the resources you can stream your shows online via ustream for free (assuming you have the hardware required). Indie bands like Enter The Haggis are doing this and it’s a great way to boost the return your band gets from playing a show.
Pirating music is easy thanks to the internet. Just read a story about how the Canadian Government is currently considering making some changes to our Copyright Act legislation, which would see levies placed on iPods. Now, i’m not making a living from music so it’s easy for me to make this statement but i really think the business model of making a living exclusively from music sales is over.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. People are still buying music. However the upside of your music being freely available should be used to your advantage and not seen as a threat. Giving your music away for free (in digital format only of course) costs nothing to deliver, but the upside is you are spreading your music to a larger audience. You need to make it easy for a hardcore fan to share one of your songs with their friend.
So how do you make money from your music if it can be had for free? Get creative and offer your albums in several formats. Digital download, CD, album + DVD of making of, signed album by the band etc etc. Just look to bands like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails & Josh Freese for further examples.
The bottom line is free music + social media presence = more discovery = more fans = more money for the artist.
Sons Of Maxwell, the guys that put this video together are a small Canadian band from Nova Scotia. Was this a display of marketing genius? Definitely. Has it got them tons of press and views on Youtube? Absolutely. Will United make things right? Maybe. But will it help them win new fans & help take the band to the next level? That i’m not so sure about, at least not the way they may have wanted.
This video is catapulting them from playing pubs in Nova Scotia to coverage on CNN overnight. I just don’t think this is necessarily a good thing for a band because it turns you into a meme, which (as we have seen) have a limited shelf life. This video is going to cast a shadow over everything they do, shows, interviews etc – for the rest of their careers. I guess if they are going the Weird Al Yankovic path that’s ok, but didn’t you start a band to be known for the music?
If you do some searching online, you’ll find blogs & articles by pro audio engineers and audiophiles expressing their frustration over the lack of dynamic range in music today. This has also been referred to as the loudness war. So what is dynamic range anyway? In basic terms, it’s the different between the softest and loudest parts of an audio recording.
It used to be music was recorded to recreate the excitement of the live performance. That is to say, it had a “wide” dynamic range. Want to hear it loud? Turn up your stereo. You can test this by putting your stereo on a low volume, and comparing a modern rock recording vs a Beatles album (don’t use something that has since been remastered). Pretty big difference.
Around the mid 80’s was when things began to change, probably due in part to the competition between radio stations, and bands trying to ’sound the loudest’. Fast forward to 2009 and almost every modern song you hear has close to zero dynamic range. The purists are furious about this because of what is lost in making music artificially loud. Does anyone really care though? For the most part, not so much.
So what’s happened is over the course of the last 25 years or so, we’ve been trained to equate “loud” with “good”. And since the average person doesn’t know anything about dynamic range, we’ve collectively gone with whatever radio, MTV & iTunes tells us is cool.
While it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to keep making albums louder and louder, it’s also unlikely that we will go back to doing things the way they were 25 years ago. Like it or not, dynamic range may be gone for good.
If you have never heard of them before, Enter the Haggis is usually described as a celtic rock band, mainly because of the bagpipes, pan flute & fiddle. They have been featured on Regis & Kelly, Canada AM (video at the bottom), PBS and Breakfast with the Arts (A&E). Back in the early days, ETH made a name for themselves on the celtic/irish festival circuit for their modern/high energy interpretations of traditional celtic & irish songs, but on the past few albums they have been evolving tremendously, taking some exciting genre-bending risks along the way.
Now, i should mention their last album “Soapbox Heroes” – was probably my least favorite ETH album (sorry guys hehe). The production was slick, the musicianship was exemplary as usual and there were a few catchy tunes like new monthly flavour & one last drink, but something was just lacking for me overall. I do not feel this way about Gutter Anthems at all. I cannot stop listening to this album, check my last.fm profile for proof! This album is a very special musical creation and while i don’t usually talk about album reviews here, today i make an exception.
Here are some of my personal favorites:
Litter & the Leaves: a ridiculously catchy nod to Dropkick Murphy’s, Green Day & Freddy Mercury
Cameos: A great poppy folk song many will find reminiscent of Great Big Sea.
Death of Johnny Mooring: A hard rocker that tells the story of a Canadian fiddle great who was killed outside a bar one night in 1974. The vivid imagery in storytelling is prevalent on other tracks as well (check out “Noseworthy & Piercy”!).
DNA: One of the catchiest, radio friendly songs on the album. Love the REM/Goo Goo Dolls’ish guitar melodies.
Lights & Cars: Lush vocal harmonies, the ending reminds me of “They Stood up for Love” by Live. Check it out, i’m not crazy.
Murphy’s Ashes: Rush would be proud of this prog-rock instrumental accomplishment. As a musician myself i can tell you shuffle + hard rock is not an easy thing to pull off but when it works (as it does here) it’s awesome.
Suburban Plains: Fans of Paul Simon’s Graceland or world music should dig this tune, featuring some masterful drumming/percussion and African inspired guitar lines.
These are just my personal favorites, but every track is strong. I think that’s part of what makes this album so special. Like classic ‘rootsy’ albums that came before it such as “Crash” by Dave Matthews Band, Gutter Anthems is a melodic tour de force which i HIGHLY recommend everyone should check out.
Update Jan 16 2010: Check out my Q&A with a reader which elaborates on this post.
Have you heard of Joe Purdy? Me neither. He made a healthy six-figures last year from his music, bought a house & sold more than 650,000 tracks on iTunes. How?
A good friend of mine was over for dinner last night and we had a chat about his band’s marketing efforts for their upcoming album, and here are some of the ideas that came out of our discussion:
- Maintain a blog/podcast, Twitter account, Facebook group, Myspace presence and any other worthwhile social media tools out there (don’t neglect them!)
- Advertise all the above at shows, in interviews, on the band’s website…EVERYWHERE!
- Give away mp3’s of your music for free (from your website), and encourage people to share it with their friends using the above tools. Maybe even seed it on Bittorrent.
- Never spend a cent on traditional advertising. It costs way too much to cut through the noise these days and the ROI is small.
- Use social media to ‘rally the troops’, crowdsource & interact with your fans – keep them engaged!
- Make damn sure all your music is on iTunes & Amazon. Even though they may have a few mp3’s they got for free from you your true fans will buy your music.
- Have a consistent ‘branding’ from the myspace page to the live show
The bottom line is, these days people have too much choice, and to make matters worse there is too much noise in the world. This means people aren’t listening to you. They are however, listening to their friends and people they trust. The key is finding people who have the Otaku for your music and making it as easy as possible for them to do your marketing for you.
I almost forgot – above all else, make amazing music.
What an awesome show. Even though it was a corporate event they didn’t half-ass it and played hard for at least 90 mins (i didn’t keep track). Full photoset here.
I’m in San Francisco this week. I was walking past the Apple store on Stockton street and caught a little bit of the Secret Machines in store appearance.
This is so smart. Even if you’re not a Weezer fan, you’ve definitely had a laugh at one of the references in this video (unless you live under a rock). Viral marketing at it’s best.
If you have never heard of them before, Enter the Haggis is usually described as a celtic rock band, mainly because of the bagpipes, pan flute & fiddle. They have been featured on 
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