In broaching the subject of data gathering and marketing for musicians last week, I quickly realized that this was going to be bigger than one post would allow. Unless one is talented enough to compose enormous articles that remain fresh and coherent throughout – as can Judy Gombita, for example – one should make like a dubstepper and Break. It. Down.

As luck would have it, this is also the approach that you should take with your data gathering.

Break down the walls of your fan data — Image Credit: Ross

Bite Size Data

Unless you’ve been diligently collecting and organizing your fan data for years, which I imagine is akin to the 1%, it’s likely you have one large block of unsorted data, knocking around with several other scraps. Taken as a whole, these form your overall audience database.

And take them as a whole is exactly what we’ll do first, before going on to break it all down again. This time, however, we’ll be doing so in a more productive manner.

Building Your Audience Database

Follow these steps to build your initial database. If you already have this in good order, please move on to the next section, ‘Music Marketing Segmentation’.

1. Gather every piece of fan data that you’ve collected on one place, in an easy to read format.

2. Start a spreadsheet in Excel (or a free equivalent, like Open Office‘s Calc or Google Docs) and type out each relevant category across the top row of this sheet. For every recurring piece of data you have, e.g. First name, last name, E-mail, location etc, you should have a category for it on your sheet. Discard any infrequently occurring data like nicknames or feedback. If it’s pertinent, we can record it later in a general ‘Notes’ column.

3. Transfer all the data, once you have all the column headings you need, over to your new spreadsheet. Yes, this is the particularly tedious part… don’t worry, I can wait….

4. Done? Congratulations! Have a cup of tea to celebrate and come back in half an hour.

5. Now begins the fun… data gathering and filling in the blanks. Add any ‘would like to have’ pieces of information to your column headings. Examples might be income, job title or industry, type of relationship (friend, family, or some more complex measure of acquaintance that we can work on). Don’t stress too much on these, as we can add more later, but DO think about the type of information that you’d like to know about your fans. What would help you connect to them more effectively?

6. Once you’re happy with the skeleton of your database, it’s time to add as much flesh to the bones as possible. Thankfully we live in an age of seemingly constant sharing, so ~~stalking~~… researching your fans to fill in any data blanks is more viable than ever before. Start with a basic Google search of names, focusing on social networks to begin with as they have more standardized information layouts. If you’re still drawing some blanks, delve into blogs they frequent, pseudonyms that they use for online handles, or combination searches involving other data that you already have.

Once you’ve exhausted as many avenues as you can think of to complete your data set, accept any omissions and save the sheet in a couple of safe places, one hard drive and one accessible remotely, if possible.

Et voila, your information foundation is set!

Remember to use the header categories that you’ve laid out here for all future data that you collect from people. This keeps everything complete and aligned with what you have identified as important things to learn about your fan base.

Music Marketing Segmentation

Types of segmentation — A preferable form of segmentation

As I mentioned earlier, we only built this up so that you can break it back down again. This time we’ll do it in an orderly fashion, however, by segmenting the market for your music.

Having gathered all this data about your existing fans, you can use it to make your communications to each of them more targeted. This benefits you because you can offer more clear and relevant news and offers to each segment of fans. It benefits the fans as well, as you aren’t just blasting out general announcements to your entire list, hoping that some of of will stick.

Segment Suggestions

You can slice and dice your database into segments in many ways, subject to your targets and the data that you managed to gather.

Here I’ll offer up five segmentation suggestions to get you started. If you start to play around with these, you should find that you begin to understand your data set and develop your own segments.

1. LOCATION: Where people live is one of the easiest and readily available pieces of data that you’ll have to hand. It is also one of the most potentially valuable, allowing you to identify clusters of fans for tour plans, geographical trends, and areas for potential street teams or fan meet ups (if coupled with number three on this list). Location is a solid place to start to feel out your data and get comfortable manipulating it into groups. If you need to add broader categories such as East coast, Midwest etc, feel free to create another column and segment in this way as well.

2. AGE: How old your audience is can help you to infer many follow on points, such as their spending power, media preference, musical tastes, and much more. Although some of this will be an educated guess, it also gives you a platform from which to ask these questions the next time you engage them. You can also combine with other data, such as location, to identify audience diversity in various regions. This can help with anything from merchandise choices to venue decisions e.g. if much of your audience in Detroit is under 18, you’ll know you need to find a venue without drinking age restrictions.

3. FAN STATUS: You can add an extra nuance to your data by assigning your own ranking of fan level. This can be based on any number of factors, including number of gigs attended, purchases made, length of relationship, feedback received, or some combination thereof. Digging this deep will allow you to tailor communications to the appropriate sections of your fan base. For example, to crowd fund a limited edition vinyl release you will probably only approach ‘super-fans’, where as sending brand new fans only a special offer for your older material will avoid a pointless communication to long term fans who already have those releases.

4. PREFERRED GENRE: Understanding the types of music that individual fans enjoy gives you the chance to hyper-target new material, right down to releasing an individual song especially for that group. It can also help to refine set lists when combined with location and age related data, target recommendations of similar artists when you try to help out other artists, and perhaps even influence the way you write your next material. I know, I know, you write what’s in your heart. But it can’t hurt to have an insight into what your fans like as well, can it?

5. INFLUENCE LEVEL: This may require further research, or you may simply have a good feel for those of your fans who are influential over the tastes of others, but either way, knowing who to approach to spread your music is a valuable piece of data to have available. Though there are sites like Kred that can help you to ferret out influencers in a certain field online, your most likely route to segmenting in this way is to assign a simple rank for each person, based on recommendation behavior you see online (or lack thereof… perhaps you use a null value, in cases where you simply cannot tell). Does the person regularly share music, post YouTube videos that get likes on Facebook, or write about their tastes online? All are indicators that they should be added to a segmented group that you can go to when your hot new tune needs that extra push.

Over To You!

Have you already worked on something similar to this? How did you segment your data and what results did you see?

For those of you just starting out, does this seem like a valuable exercise? What questions are lingering for you?

Marketing

Music Marketing Matters: Small Audience, Big Data

July 23, 2012 Steve Leave a comment

Music Marketing Matters is a weekly feature that delivers ideas, case studies, and actionable advice for artists to market their music more creatively. For more on its inception, click here.

Big Data is upon us!

Before you grab the nearest pitchfork and medieval torch to hand, fear not.

Far from being some hideously mutated Star Trek character gone Frankenstein’s monster – although that probably happened at some point, didn’t it TrekHeads? – Big Data is merely the moniker given to the flood of information that has poured forth from the digital era. It is often a catch-all phrase, used to refer to the oncoming storm of making sense of more data than we can realistically hope to deal with.

On second thoughts, you might want to keep that pitchfork handy…

Facts About Fans

As an artist, if the previous talk of marketing in these pages has irked you, the presentation of data gathering and analysis is likely to be akin to the red rag to (a particularly talented) bull. Hopefully, disarming flattery will calm your creative soul. If not, how about this:

There are dollars floating in that data.

Or at least key information about your fans that will lead you to dollars. Does that quell some of your apprehension?

The reality is, as I’ve highlighted often in this series, that the music industry is rapidly moving on from tried and trusted ways of making money. For many artists they didn’t prove so trustworthy, but at least they were the devil you know, right? Well the devil you don’t know may actually turn out to be the guardian angel of your music career, if you can put in the time to set up some smart incentive and reward mechanisms to capture core information about your fans.

Who makes up your music audience? — Image Credit: Anirudh Koul

Data can help you to make better decisions about where you play, what you play, what you release and how you release it.

It is increasingly becoming the currency of everything we do online, as consumers and not just fans of music, and it can help you play the long game of forging a slow but steady growth for your artistic career.

Getting Started With Data Gathering

As this is such a huge topic – and one that must certainly be taken in bit-sized chunks – I’ll be publishing an additional Music Marketing Matters later this week on specific mechanisms that you can install to crank up your data gathering efforts. These will be aligned with specific targets for several levels of artist, so that nobody gets left behind in getting at least some starter info bubbling away.

In preparation for these more detailed action posts, ask yourself the following questions about your current web presence:

Do you have an e-mail list that you could segment by various criteria, such as age, location, musical preference?

Do you have a handle on who are your biggest fans? What they’ve bought, when they’ve seen you, their favorite songs?

Can you pinpoint communities in which your most active fans participate?

Are you gathering information about your audience via multiple channels i.e. more than just your website?

Do you understand how to approach different sections of your fan base in different ways, subject to the point above?

If you answered no to even one of these questions, there will be something for you in these forthcoming articles on data gathering for musicians. If not, I probably want to pick your brains for content!

Stay tuned, we’re about to go deep, deep into that devilish detail.

Miscellaneous

One Habit of Highly Successful Artists

July 16, 2012 Steve Leave a comment

I was planning to have the third installment of Music Marketing Matters here today, but this seems as salient as any point I was going to make. Artists need to strive for what’s in the heart, rather than focus on what the head knows from the past.

Stephen Covey understood this and followed his own heart to become an extremely successful, influential author, guiding generations of individuals towards their dreams with his ‘Habits‘. He passed away today, sadly, but not without living up to his own advice to “leave this world better than it was when you got here.”

For all the smarts, tips, and advice one can offer an artist to get noticed, none of it will come to much if that passionate creative streak isn’t allowed to take the lead. That has to be something at the core of every highly successful artist.

Rest In Peace.

Marketing

Music Marketing Matters: Price Points & Transition

July 9, 2012 Steve 3 Comments

Music Marketing Matters is a weekly feature that delivers ideas, case studies, and actionable advice for artists to market their music more creatively. For more on its inception, click here.

Price is a key component in the marketing mix, with music marketing being no exception. And yet, for the past decade, those who control a majority of the pricing mechanisms in the recorded music business have clung on to unfeasible price points for their outdated product.

Music Price Points: A State of Flux

Historically, the price of a standard, single CD album release could be as high as $18. Most leveled out between $12-15, but the larger retailers could and would push the price to that upper breaking point. Moreover, if music fans couldn’t find the CD they wanted so badly readily accessible in their area, they would pay those prices. Supply and demand: limited supply, rampant demand.

As we all know by now, MP3’s changed all of that. A price point of $18 (or more) nowadays represents only one of two things:

1) A super-deluxe edition of a release, bursting with physical extras and bonus content or,

2) A massively out of touch retailer who will shortly be shuttering their music section.

Manufacturing plastic discs is more expensive than moving another copy of a digital file. When the marginal cost of a sale tends towards zero, it becomes impossible to justify applying the pricing mechanisms of physical products to the now dominant digital sales environment. At the other end of the scale, enormous artists like Lady Gaga and Radiohead offer their releases for cents, or nothing, causing further confusion in the marketplace.

What is the true value of digital music?

Setting the Right Price

Thumbs Down Music Pricing?

The right price is, of course, the minimum amount you can set that both elicits an impulse to buy and provides you with some level of profit. Set too high and the former takes a hit, limiting sales. Set too low and your music becomes a ‘loss leader’, with you eating the cost of creating the music in the hope of longer term success.

Price setting for music is a lot tougher than it sounds and has no clear rules.

Follow the industry standard of $7.99 to $9.99 and the chances are you price out a lot of potential new fans, unwilling to risk traditional amounts on what is an unknown quantity. Follow the recent trends towards budget pricing – $2.99 to $4.99 – and you have a much better chance of convincing newcomers to throw a few bucks in your direction, yet you now have to sell at least twice as many albums to hit the same amount.

What to do? In my opinion, this is where your creativity must come to the fore.

As we examined in last week’s ‘Diversify Your Product’, there is far more potential for your artistic offerings than just the music, so why not bring that to your marketing mix? Adding value with varied product offerings is one of the only ways to justify to your end buyer that their purchase decision satisfies. Ignoring the moral argument of art’s value to the world, which is for another day, this is a matter of psychology. Give your buyer a compelling reason to find the right price point and shell out their hard earned green.

Some suggested levels to guide your price setting:

Entry level: Your lowest acceptable price. Bare bones, just the music (perhaps not even all of it, if you can stand to separate out tracks into smaller album ‘nuggets’), worth-a-shot pricing.

Sweeten the deal: Add a dollar to the entry level, offer some simple yet intriguing extra. A bonus track, access to video content, insights into the making of the album. Given the small price increase, this is likely to be digital content and something that you can easily provide at little extra cost.

Fans, friends, and family: As you move away from the entry level prices, your buyer in the mid-range is more likely to be the core of your audience. Good fans and your acquaintances who are happy to support your music at a more traditional price point, but the majority of whom will not be buying deluxe. Here you start to introduce physical products, if you can afford to do so, giving buyers the full release, art, and anything that you can relating to it. As this price point covers a lot of your audience, who might have different listening preferences, you will probably be offering several different product option at this level.

Invest in art: Some can afford to spend more and will happily push the boat out just to give musicians they like that extra boost. If your highest price point is $9.99, though, that’s all they will be able to chip in. Offer your next package at $5 to $10 more, subject to the make up of your later pricing, and throw in some significant personal extras, such as handwritten lyrics, a personal video conference performance of the release, extra merchandise. This is the level at which you start to emphasize just how much difference this extra investment means to your career as a musician. You can also play around with quality of download from this point upwards. Being an audiophile may yet bounce back as a purchase consideration.

Deluxe: Not everything from the recording industry’s past is a heinous assault on the wallet of fans, the deluxe expanded editions of albums being a case in point (those that came out at the same time as standard editions, of course). Some dedicated fans are truly interested in listening to acoustic versions, alternate takes, making of commentary, and all manner of other extras that cost you very little to offer, yet mean enough to others for you to achieve this upsell.

Super Deluxe (and above): What ya got? Plan out as many additional product offerings as you can and go to work to satisfy those with money to burn and the passion to spend it on your work. Introduce packages with all available merchandise types, content extras, access to future performances, meet & greets… whatever you can stretch to that will give the buyer a truly special experience. Even if you get no takers, this is a relative value effect for those considering the lower price points that you have offered.

Over To You…

Pricing is more of an art than a science, so the creativity that you bring to offering a variety of price points will experience varying degrees of success. As ever, your contributions make the difference, so please weigh in with thoughts here in the comments section.

As an artist, what have you found to be the most compelling price points for those who buy your music? Were these acceptable to you as the creator?

As a fan, what price music? Would you pay more if your favorite artists offered a better product at a higher price?

Case Studies, Marketing, Success Stories

Music Marketing Matters: Diversifying Your ‘Product’

July 2, 2012 Steve 9 Comments

Last week I got a bee in my bonnet – yes, my part time job is subbing for Little Bo Peep… what of it? – about the lack of creativity in marketing music.

Rather than just whinge and whine, though, I thought I should probably make an effort to turn things around.

“Be the change that you want to see in the world” and all that motivational malarkey…

Music Marketing Matters

And it matters especially on Mondays, which is when I’ll be publishing my contributions to moving music marketing forward.

I have two simple goals for this series:

1. Provide ideas to market your music that offer something new and are practical for you to act upon,

2. Highlight examples of artists who are pushing the envelope in marketing their creations.

Today I can hopefully deliver on both of these, with a look at Amanda Palmer’s recent ~$1.2 million Kickstarter haul and what you can adopt from her methods.

Diversify Your Product

Whether or not you agree that music is a product, if you are striving to be any kind of career musician then you need to accept that it is vital to market your art according to similar principles that govern product and service marketing.

Standalone products are only sufficient if they have vast mass market appeal, which is something that rarely applies to music (how many artists have made the big time with just one release, on one format?) So it falls upon you to offer your fans a wider variety. Not only variety in ways to experience your music, but also the live experience, the fan experience, and even varying the type of art that you make available.

Music Product Diversity - Even more than a record store — Image Source: Mela Sogono

Circling back to the curious case of Amanda Palmer, this million grossing Kickstarter campaign was a tour-de-force of artistic diversity. Here are some concrete actions that you can pull from her success:

Format diversity – Know your audience. In many cases they will vary from pure digital downloaders to geeky speccy nerdy collectors (these are the folks that you especially need!). You need to offer a cheap and easy format for the former, a beautifully crafted limited edition vinyl for the latter, and anything in between that caters to what you know to be attractive to those purchasing your wares. Put out informal polls on social media, talk to your fans, ask in an e-mail newsletter… whatever it takes to find out what diversity people want and how you can give it to them.

Build in real world connections – It’s all too easy to be pulled into the digital world and build relationships exclusively with fans online. Palmer offered tangible real world connections to fans in cities across the world, baked into the decision to purchase her new music. Play to the themes of your music and match as many physical events to it as you can afford to deliver. Sound expensive? Cut your cloth accordingly and tailor events to where your fans can gather. Also note, people will often pay more for a real event… and they will feel more invested in your music for having done so. This is especially true if you make a visible effort to make the event special for them personally (song dedications, personalised gifts, private meet and greets…what else would you include?)

You are more than music – Heresy, I know, but you have a lot more to offer. What’s more, your fans know it and are more likely to part with their cash if you serve it up for them. Don’t panic, music is still at the core of what you do. But offer art work, lyrics/poetry, personal inspirations in the form of unique merchandise, video content, the work of others that you admire or with whom you have collaborated, and you start to stand out from the crowd. You also have something to offer at higher price points, providing those who want to spend more a reason to do so. Look at Palmer’s art books as just one compelling example. For bonus points here, make some of the alternative products you offer limited edition. Those who snag them will feel an extra sense of accomplishment as your fan; those who do not will be on increased alert for the next time.

Make it community-based – What characterizes Palmer’s online successes (and they are very much in the plural) in particular is the sense of belonging that she evokes in fans. They remain fanatical (in the positive sense), yet there exists a kinship, a degree of equality, in their relationship with her. True, she has built this up over many years, but it can and should be applied right down to the level of brand new artists building fan bases in small towns.This is also a concept that can be applied to your product diversity. How can you make your live appearances more of a communal affair, rather than limit them to artist broadcasting? Playing more intimate gigs like house parties or word-of-mouth outdoor gatherings brings you closer to your audience. Bringing in fans to help you organize such events, with special access for them and a few friends, makes your music more communal. In the short term, these tiny events placed alongside larger, more standard shows, breed a healthy symbiosis between attendance of the two. Longer term, you’re making memories for fans on a one-to-one level, and their emotional investment is far more likely to yield a financial one.

Expand into other audiences – Less related to product offering, but nonetheless a useful action point to take from this example, is the idea of branching out into the audiences of other artists and creators. Collaboration is often a smart way to do this, as it breeds unique creations that are of interest to both sets of fans. Reciprocal offerings are another, with a contribution from one artist to your next project and you providing something for them in a similar fashion. Palmer offered books, art work, scripts, photography, and all manner of extras from fellow creators, ensuring cross over into many new networks.

Admittedly, Amanda Palmer has an established base of fans and can already reach many more people than most independent musicians. But it was the diverse offerings and alignment of them with fan passions that helped her to move from a good Kickstarter campaign to a phenomenal one. $1 million is out of reach, but a healthy return on your investment in music is not.

Take away: Understand your fans’ desires, create a wide range of ways to cater to them at multiple price points, then deliver with passion and flexibility across as many networks as possible.

Over to you…

What did I miss? Are there better ways to diversify what you offer to your fans?

Does the notion of having to go beyond the provision of music offend you as an artist?

Let’s go at it in the comments section here. We’ll learn from one another and possibly have a good old scrap in the process!

Above The Static |

Monthly Archives: July 2012

Music Marketing Matters: How to Win Data & Influence People