My Space - Friends in High Places
MySpace is a social networking site offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos but most importantly music and videos. MySpace is hailed as the next generation of marketing, advertising and promotion but with a difference, the marketing engine behind Myspace is dependent on the users networking skills. The downside is that MySpace.com is dependent on the user developing their own market base and do to this you need to take the marketing responsibility into your own hands. Below are a few tips on making the right moves to generate a decent market base on MySpace.
- In your design layout of the site the best rule is to keep it simple. There are so many MySpace sites out there and keeping similar layouts will help your users to find what they are looking for easily. Keep video and large file sizes down to a minimum as they will slow the site down.
- The name of the game is to get an audience (friends) but it is equally important to get the right friends to match the product you are selling. For example it would be pointless creating classical music contacts for a R&B project. Remember that this is a marketing exercise and there is no point spending a lot of time on friends that are not interested in you or your product.
- There is a magic number of friends you need to kick start your audience so, the first few hundred are crucial. As such you need to make these first friends stick to your site and offer contributions and comments on your page. This will present a genuine fan base to encourage more high profile friends you aim to attract.
- Get active, do not just build your MySpace site and hope they will come. Talk to all of your contacts in your email address book move onto blogs and chat rooms and print your MySpace address on all correspondence to get traffic to your site.
- Create incentives to keep you audience entertained. For example release one new track or mix per week and ask for feedback. You will need to spend a few hours every day emailing people to seduce them into your world.
- Do not go for the hard sell – it will turn people off. You need to engender trust and respect and this will take a more soft sell approach.
- Be consistent and patient – remember that you are not a huge brand and will need to work from the ground up to gradually generate your audience.
Tuesday 3 July 2007
Thoughts On Music
Digital Media Vs Music - The multi Media soundclash
The commercial landscape for the talented musician is changing, once there was the near monopoly of opportunity for musicians and producers to showcase their works - the major record company. These lumbering giants of creative administration once had a stranglehold on the career prospects of the commercial musician and the A&R and marketing functions of the major record company was seen as the only way to get your music heard. Companies such as Sony BMG, Warner Bros, EMI, Polygram and Universal all treated the music marketplace as their kingdom and the subjects were seen as disposable heroes of the hour or minute or in the case of the low budget low priority artist - the second. What this did to the prospects of maintaining a sustained career in the music industry was to create an eternal bottle neck of talent at the HQ of the record company and an opportunity for different business models to come to the fore.
The advance of digital media emerged to create a balance of opportunity and the development of MP3 technology ushered in a new media to enable musicians to reach their audience with exciting new channels to take their music to their public with little interference from the traditional music industry. MP3 technology fairly recent (the first MP3 mass uptake of music sharing begun with Napster in 1998 but the technology dates back to 1987) and this technology revolution began to signify the demise of the traditional music industry. With the opening up of music on demand over the web the power began to shift from the record label administrators to the creators/musicians. The only problem that still remained for the creative music producer or artist was to find methods of advertising and marketing in better ways than the record label.
The traditional areas of marketing and promotions that the record label claimed as its domain was soon to be challenged by new forms of media that enabled musicians to ride the new wave of marketing and promotions by the use of digital media. The market was opening up for a new form of communications that would enable the musician to short circuit the functions of the record label by establishing alternative routes to the music marketplace, all that remained to be challenged was a new methodology to reach out to music buying public.
The commercial landscape for the talented musician is changing, once there was the near monopoly of opportunity for musicians and producers to showcase their works - the major record company. These lumbering giants of creative administration once had a stranglehold on the career prospects of the commercial musician and the A&R and marketing functions of the major record company was seen as the only way to get your music heard. Companies such as Sony BMG, Warner Bros, EMI, Polygram and Universal all treated the music marketplace as their kingdom and the subjects were seen as disposable heroes of the hour or minute or in the case of the low budget low priority artist - the second. What this did to the prospects of maintaining a sustained career in the music industry was to create an eternal bottle neck of talent at the HQ of the record company and an opportunity for different business models to come to the fore.
The advance of digital media emerged to create a balance of opportunity and the development of MP3 technology ushered in a new media to enable musicians to reach their audience with exciting new channels to take their music to their public with little interference from the traditional music industry. MP3 technology fairly recent (the first MP3 mass uptake of music sharing begun with Napster in 1998 but the technology dates back to 1987) and this technology revolution began to signify the demise of the traditional music industry. With the opening up of music on demand over the web the power began to shift from the record label administrators to the creators/musicians. The only problem that still remained for the creative music producer or artist was to find methods of advertising and marketing in better ways than the record label.
The traditional areas of marketing and promotions that the record label claimed as its domain was soon to be challenged by new forms of media that enabled musicians to ride the new wave of marketing and promotions by the use of digital media. The market was opening up for a new form of communications that would enable the musician to short circuit the functions of the record label by establishing alternative routes to the music marketplace, all that remained to be challenged was a new methodology to reach out to music buying public.
Monday 2 July 2007
Monday's Tidings
Monday 2nd July 2007
Woke up to new beginnings today, kind of like the horoscope prophecy but with more specifics. My darling wife bought me a new peschy moulton bike for my birthday.....
Woke up to new beginnings today, kind of like the horoscope prophecy but with more specifics. My darling wife bought me a new peschy moulton bike for my birthday.....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)