Music consumption has changed a lot over the last 20 years and that means how you promote your music and build an audience has changed too. Last year, streaming music made up 43% of music revenues and this is only set to grow. These services are now so easy to use they are significantly helping to drive music discovery. So, if you’re an indie label or artist who’s just starting out, what do you do?

Having spent the best part of 10 years in digital music marketing in the UK, doing campaigns for the likes of David Guetta, the full roster of Ministry of Sound artists and even LazyTown(!), Anne-Marina our principal consultant had some thoughts and we’ve decided to make those tips available here…

Making Your Music Available

First off, this is no longer a day and age when you should be wasting money pressing promo CDs. If people ask to buy your music after a gig, you want to be directing them towards iTunes and Spotify etc. There are now lots of digital distribution services like Distrokid that help musicians to publish their music online through multiple different services.

To give your music that extra boost, put it up on YouTube for free too. When you do this, make sure you categorise your music properly so that users will be able to find it and the various algorithms that power the recommendation engines can recommend your music to the right audience.

Demographic and Behavioural Targeting

Once you’ve got your music available, and have a couple of gigs going, it’s time to open your music up to new people. You can do this via demographic and behavioural targeting both on Facebook and Google AdWords. Both these platforms have a plethora of data on their users, knowing all about their tastes in music, so it’s pretty simple to narrow your audience down in the first instance, and then expand out to similar audiences. You can also use this data to target people who might be looking to book a band, by targeting people who recently got engaged for example.

Your Band Website

This doesn’t need to include every last gig you’ve ever done, or the full history of the band (unless it’s quirky), but there are some key things you want to make sure are quickly visible through a quick scan: – Contact Details to book the band – Embedded video to listen to some of the music on YouTube – Links to download your music via iTunes / Spotify – Upcoming gig listing

If you want some tips on what your website should contain, take a look at our case study of the STEPS website – 5 Key Ideas To Improve Website User Experience. Your website is also pretty important for building up your own fanbase data, it’s important not to rely on 3rd party social networks for all of your interactions with your fans.

At Your Gigs

The final piece of the puzzle, once you have people coming to your gigs, you need to make it simple for them to close the loop and purchase your music. So make sure any signage you have at your gigs has a “Download on iTunes”, “Listen on Spotify” and your website URL. The last thing you want to do is to engage people at the gig and not make it easy for them to become fans. All in all the key thing is to make use of the channels with the biggest audience and ensure you have a joined up marketing strategy (across social and web). If you need some help with it, drop us a line – info@g67.com.au

Digital Strategy

5 Key Ideas To Improve Website User Experience

By Anne-Marina on

May 4, 2017

- Digital Strategy

Website user experience is very important regardless of your industry. Research has shown that 88% of users will abandon a site that does not have a good user experience (Source: InvisionApp).

But what makes a good user experience? There are some core principles that always apply, regardless of who your audience is. With that in mind, I decided to take a look at what those principles are and do a little case study. UX is just one of the areas you should be investigating as part of your music marketing plan. It’s important because when you are trying to promote music online, if your user experience fails, your fans will abandon their purchase, leaving you missing out on revenue.

This year has seen the return of British pop group STEPS, and it’d be fair to say I’m a little excited about that, so I decided to use them as the basis for this months case study. As this is just an example, the objectives below are purely placeholders for the purpose of this review.

URL: www.stepsofficial.co.uk

Core Site Purpose: Drive users to purchase or stream their music

Secondary purpose: Drive users to purchase tickets to concerts

In not surprising news, their return has had a pretty big impact on their website traffic:

I love graphs that look like this, but the question is, they’re driving people to their website but is their site optimised to make the most of that traffic?

Let’s explore the 5 main areas that would impact and improve their site user experience:

Responsiveness

51% of web traffic is now from a mobile device (Source: GS Stat Counter), so your site should be optimised for users to browse on that device without having to pinch and zoom. Sadly, the STEPS site is non-responsive. Now, while a lot of STEPS fanbase are likely (at least) in the 25+ category, that doesn’t mean we’re so old that we only browse websites via desktop. Making the site responsive will reduce their bounce rate, and get more people listening to their music.

Ensuring your users are always sent somewhere useful

Linked to from their secondary menu, the band have a link to an audio player – which is an awesome idea – but unfortunately it takes the user to a ‘page not found’ error 😔 Making for sad steps fans all over the world. The lesson to be learned here is first to make sure you have a custom 404/page not found page and also that you put some useful content on this page. Direct your users back to something they’ll like or that drives to your primary goal.

Have a link that drives to your primary objective above the fold

If trying to drive music purchases or streams is the main idea, make sure you give users the option immediately when they hit the screen. Don’t make your users look hard for your main goal, make it easy for them. Develop your content hierarchy and use tools like contrast, size and colour to assist users in determining what the most important action on the page is.

Keep users within your world

Rather than driving users away from your website, give them as much of the experience they desire right there within your own domain. Don’t link off to your social channels too heavily as this will only drive users from your website. One way to do this, and help achieve the primary objective listed above, would be to add a Spotify streaming embed within the website.

The music business has changed since STEPS disbanded in 2001. If you take Lisa from STEPS word for it, the internet wasn’t around 15 years ago. I’ll give her a little creative license with that, though it’s not quite true (if you want to know more about how the internet has changed in the past 20 years, check out our ‘What Is Digital Strategy’ video on YouTube).

Nowadays, streaming is important, making up 51% of revenue for the music business in the USA (Source: RIAA). For STEPS to drive those streams from an audience, which, let’s face it, is on the top end of the millennial scale, you need to make it as simple for them as possible. So embed a Spotify player and let users stream direct from the website.

Take an Agile approach, and test and roll and test again

One of the joys of the internet is the ability to test out changes and see real time impacts, so generate your hypothesis, make an incremental change and monitor the results. Make sure you’re not changing too many things at once, and that you allow your changes to get to ‘statistical significance’, which is a fancy way of saying that you should let enough users interact with the change to make sure you’re not getting results based on a small subset which may have behavioural anomalies.

These 5 main areas are principles that apply to your User Experience regardless of what your industry is, or who your audience is. Always put yourself in your users shoes when you’re designing your site. Don’t be afraid to ask them for feedback – no one knows what your users want more than your users themselves. Then run a Net Promoter Score poll to help determine how the site is improving over time.

Now that you’ve done all that, reward yourself with a listen to STEPS latest single:

Lead image from UX Mag.

Mobile Apps, Product Management

Stream your music in your crowd sourced ride: #uber #spotify

By Anne-Marina on

November 27, 2014

- Mobile Apps, Product Management

Ever felt frustrated when you were about to leave for a big night out and had to switch off your music to get into your taxi to get there? Well, now you don’t have to. Uber and Spotify have teamed up so that you can take your playlists straight into your Uber ride with you.

If you’re not familiar with Uber, it’s basically a ridesharing service that uses your phones GPS to locate you, find their nearest registered driver, and direct them towards you – even if you’re not sure where you are. You don’t need any cash, payment is taken straight from your registered credit card. Once you’re in, you control the music, and even the volume – all from your mobile phone. Isn’t technology great?!

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Digital Strategy, Music, Product Management

How to Market your Music Online

Digital Strategy

5 Key Ideas To Improve Website User Experience

Mobile Apps, Product Management

Stream your music in your crowd sourced ride: #uber #spotify

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Digital Strategy

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