marketing – Metaverse Musician

secret to convert facebook friends to fans with a Fan Badge on your profile linking to your page

It is hard to underestimate the impact that social networking has had upon the music industry. With over 350 Million active users, and a six month growth of 70% in the first half of 2009, facebook is destined to be the dominant social media site for some time.

Most bands and musicians are probably aware of the value of facebook pages as opposed to profiles. Accordingly, most musicians maintain pages in addition to their personal profiles. But facebook does not automatically make others aware that a personal profile may also be related to a fan page. But how does one create an awareness of a page’s existence?

The process I describe herein will allow the artist to permanently and prominently display a link to a given page from their profile. Further, this link will appear in the profile’s sidebar, so it can be seen whether the Wall tab or the Info tab is currently being displayed. Better yet, the link will also contain the page’s ‘profile’ picture, leading to recognition for your page’s graphical brand.

By making it easier for people to find your page, you should collect new legions of fans.

It is hard to underestimate the impact that social networking has had upon the music industry. The entire market is being reinvented with the demise of traditional record companies, and the ascendancy of direct band-to-fan marketing. While a successful marketing campaign would use multiple outlets, it seems clear that the most important social media site at this time is facebook. With over 350 Million active users, and a six month growth of 70% in the first half of 2009, facebook is destined to be the dominant social media site for some time.

Personal Profile vs. Band Page

Individuals register a personal profile with facebook. Publicly-known brands, companies, figures, and most germanely musicians, can also register a Page. A Page is similar to a profile, but comes with some additional benefits. Among these benefits are the ability to advertise the page, and a relatively unrestricted number of fans (as opposed to the hard limit of the number of friends any given profile accommodates). Other benefits of the Page include:

info tab tailored to your business type
additional widgets such as a music player
review section
ability to share page administration tasks
analytics on page interactions

Making others aware

Most bands and musicians are probably aware of the value of pages as opposed to profiles. Accordingly, most musicians maintain pages in addition to their personal profiles. But facebook does not automatically make others aware that a personal profile may also be related to a fan page. How does one create an awareness of a page’s existence? A person can become a fan of a given page. In doing so, facebook will by default display this linkage upon the Pages section of the Info tab of the profile. However, there is no way to force facebook to display an artist’s own page in preference to the other pages which are displayed therein. What is displayed there is a small random selection from all the pages of which one is a fan. As such, there is no guarantee that the artist’s own page will be selected for display at all.

The process I describe herein will allow the artist to permanently and prominently display a link to a given page from your profile. Further, this link will appear in the profile’s sidebar, so it can be seen whether the Wall tab or the Info tab is currently being displayed. Better yet, the link will also contain the page’s ‘profile’ picture, leading to recognition for your page’s graphical brand. You can see an example of this on the left sidebar of my personal facebook profile.

Two elements

There are two elements to pull together to obtain this benefit. The first is that we need the ability to place arbitrary content on our profile’s sidebar. The second is to create the desired linkage to place in the sidebar. The former we will accomplish with an application called Custom Profile Box. The latter we will accomplish with a native facebook tool called a Fan Badge. The following is a step-by-step tutorial on these objectives.

Custom Profile Box

Our first objective is to add the application ‘Custom Profile Box’. This application will create an element that we can fill with arbitrary content. We will later fill this element with our page link Fan Badge, and then move it to our profile sidebar.

From your personal profile, on the lower left select ‘Applications’, then select ‘Browse More Applications’.
In the ‘Search Applications’ field, enter “Custom Profile Box”.
Click on the desired ‘Custom Profile Box’ application in the search results.
From the application’s Fan page, click ‘Go To Application’.
Click the ‘Allow’ button.
Go back to your profile wall.
Below your status entry box, click ‘Options’, then click ‘Settings’.
Click the link ‘applications settings page’.
On the list of apps, a drop down ‘Show’ menu select ‘Authorized’ to show all the apps authorized to access your profile data.
Click on ‘Edit Settings’ link next to ‘Custom Profile Box’.
In the pop-up window, make sure the ‘Profile’ tab is highlighted. *
Next to the “Box” item is the word ‘Add’. Click on this to add a box to your profile for this app.
Decide and modify the Privacy — I suggest setting this to “Everyone”.

You are done setting up the app.

* There have been reported cases where there is no ‘Profile’ tab on the popup at this point. Further reports indicate that this may be alleviated by editing the Box, and adding some content, then returning to this step of the process. More as it develops.

This problem, and its solution, are now more fully understood. The issue is that the Custom Profile Box application will not have a ‘Profile’ tab on the Edit Application Settings popup until such time that some data (any dummy data is sufficient) has been added. The solution is to place some data in the Custom Profile Box as per steps 1-5 of ‘Place the Fan Badge in the Custom Profile Box’ below. After that, return to this process. Note that any data is sufficient — it does not yet need to be the code for the Fan Badge, and it does not need to be entered in ‘Source’ mode (though it will need to be later, as described below).

This also applies to the sister application ‘HTML Profile Box’.

Generate a Fan Badge

We have so far installed the ‘Custom Profile Box’ into our profile. Next we need to generate a Fan Badge for our page. Later we will place this Fan Badge in our Custom Profile Box and move the Custom Profile Box to our profile sidebar. Oddly, to make a Page Badge, you need to travel through your (personal) Profile’s Profile Badge link. The code for the Fan Badge will be copied and pasted into the Custom Profile Box’s editor. Accordingly, it may be easiest if you open another browser tab for this next bit.

Go to your personal page’s Info tab.
Near bottom left is a link entitled ‘Create Profile Badge’. Click it to go to the Profile Badge page.
On the Profile Badge screen there is a column where you can choose what type of badge you want. Choose ‘Fan Badges’. This will take you to the Fan Badges Widget screen.
On the Fan Badges Widget screen, find the dropdown entitled ‘Select a Page’. From that dropdown, select the page for which you wish to create a badge. Note that you must first be a fan of that page.
From the 2nd field on the Fan Badges Widget screen, copy the HTML code for your Fan Badge.

Place the Fan Badge in the Custom Profile Box

At this point, we have installed the Custom Profile Box application, and created a Fan Badge for our destination page. The code for the Fan Badge is in out buffer. We next need to paste this into the Custom Profile Box. Later, we will move the Custome Profile Box to our profile’s sidebar. Go back to your earlier browser tab.

Click on the ‘Applications’ status bar menu and select the app from the pop up window.
An editor will load, and takes 30 secs or so on busy connection.
On the editors toolbar, click the button named ‘Source’. This allows you to enter raw FBML code.
In the editor window paste the (FBML) code for the Fan Badge, which should be in your buffer from the earlier objective.
To save your creation to the app box, click on the ‘Update’ button. If all is well your box should appear in the boxes section of your profile.
Click on your profile, and select the boxes tab. See your app box and your creation in it.
You can drag your box to any desired location on the page by left clicking the box and dragging around.

Move it to the profile sidebar

OK, we have added the Custom Profile Box application, generated a Fan Badge for our destination page, and placed the fan badge in the Custom Profile Box. The last step is to move our Custom Profile Box from our profile’s Boxes tab to the sidebar.

Go to your profile
Select the Boxes tab
Locate the Custom Profile Box on the Boxes tab
There is a pencil at the upper right corner of the Custom Profile Box. Click it.
Select ‘Move to Wall tab’.
Go to your wall. You should see the Custom Profile Box, with your Fan Badge linking to your artist page, in the sidebar. You can change the location of this sidebar element by left-clicking and dragging it where you want it. There is however, the restriction that it cannot appear higher in the sidebar than the standard facebook sidebar elements.

Collect more fans!

That’s it. Now all visitors to your personal profile will be met with a graphically branded link to your artist page. By making it easier for people to find your page, you should collect new legions of fans.

Got a facebook topic you would like to see covered? Let me know in the comments section!

Second Life provides musicians with new moneymaking opportunities

There is a burgeoning new online market for musicians of all types. Recording artists, performers, singer/songwriters, turntablists, playlist DJs, karaoke aficionados, and more can find paying audiences in Second Life. This article provides a top level view of Second Life from a musician’s perspective. It quantifies the market opportunity, and touches on some of the considerations in reaching this worldwide music market.

Second Life

So what is Second Life? It is an online 3D virtual world, or Metaverse, where people meet and interact with each other through digital ‘avatars’ in a virtual landscape. Visually, this Metaverse bears a passing resemblance to Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft. However, this resemblance carries no further than the ‘look’ of such MMORPGs. Second Life is an alternative universe where avatars (people) are free to carry out whatever activities they wish. In my mind, the three qualities of such a metaverse that distinguish it from an MMORPG are:

There is no previously defined goal or objective by which one may ‘win’. Instead, avatars live the life of their choosing.
Everything inworld is created by the residents. With enough talent and time, you can recreate every thing you would encounter in the metaverse — be it a house, a landform, an article of clothing, a manner of moving, or any other ‘thing’, tangible or intangible, that can be discerned.
Second Life has a freely functioning real economy, with a unit of currency that is freely exchanged to and from US dollars.

Size of the economy

So how big is this potential marketplace? Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, reports that over $1 Billion in resident-to-resident transactions have been made since the inception of the metaverse. In 2010, the projected figure is in excess of $500 Million per year, and growing quickly. As quoted from San Fransisco Business Times:

In 2008, Second Life users spent more than $360 million on virtual goods ranging from land to designer shoes to lavish homes. The Second Life economy almost doubled in size – 94 percent up – between the second quarter of 2009 and the same period in 2008. User-to-user transactions now amount to nearly $50 million per month.

To put this figure in perspective, in 2009, all sales of digital downloads of music combined totaled about $1.9 Billion — barely a little over three times the size of Second Life’s economy. Indeed, Second Life’s economy is larger than the GDP of some real countries.

Music and other economic activity

Of course, not all this money reflects musical purchases. There are many other activities and goods vying for the avatar consumer’s dollar. Again from the aforementioned source:

In total, users around the world have spent roughly 115,000 years in Second Life socializing, attending live concerts, creating, selling and shopping for virtual goods, learning languages, attending business meetings etc. User hours grew 33 percent year-over-year to an all-time high of 126 million in the second quarter of this year….

However, music does represent a significant part of the overall inworld economy. At any moment of the night or day, there are multiple performances occurring across the grid. Rock, country, Hip Hop, or Americana … solos, duos, bands … some completely live, some with backing tracks, some doing mimed ‘role play’ … about any form of music you can imagine can find a worldwide audience on Second Life.

At any given moment, there are dozens of thousands of people logged in as their avatars to the Second Life virtual world, or ‘grid’. And for many of these people, attending musical events is their primary reason for being inworld. They visit virtual venues, hosting musicians on their stages, at virtual concerts. There they can sit and listen, or dance and interact with the other avatars onsite. While partying there, they may converse with the others in text chat about any given topic. As a musician, you are also able to see the local chat, thereby providing you with a direct communication channel between you and your fans. This provides a higher level of interactivity than typically possible in real life.

Dancing to live music

Employment in Second Life music

There are several broad categories of musicians performing within Second Life. Linden Labs makes an official distinction between Live performance and other forms of music:

A live performance in Second Life is presented by a person who is represented in-world by an avatar, and is creating the performance in real-time, streaming the audio (or audio and video) portions into Second Life as they are being created.

Playing back a previously recorded performance, whether audio, video or Second Life machinima, is generally not considered to be a live performance if there are no live elements performed while the audience is watching the show.

We do not intend to imply here that either Live or non-live music is superior to another. This is just being pointed out in order to understand how to present your performance consistent with inworld norms. If you are presenting a playlist DJ type performance, it would be a breach of protocol to list this as a Live Music event — however, it would indeed be appropriate to list it under the Nightlife/Entertainment event category.

And the variety of opportunities is quite staggering. I have seen the following types of acts, all paid for their performances:

Playlist DJs performing various styles of music for the dancing enjoyment of the venue’s patrons
Scratch or BeatMatch DJs creating unique layered performances using prerecorded tracks and synthesizers for real-time creation
Singer/songwriter types with a guitar or keyboard and vocals
People singing over Karaoke backing tracks of hit songs
Solo musicians performing with backing tracks of their own creation
Duos, trios, and full groups completely live
‘Tribute’ acts, where the ‘musicians’ construct and animate elaborate imitations of chart-topping groups — to the original recordings by those groups
‘Role Play’ or ‘listening’ sessions where original artists mime performances to their own recordings

Much as in real life, some performances are the main focus of the venue, and others are an adjunct to some other commercial or social venture — such as a mall opening, or a mingler. There are also inworld opportunities to sell digital downloads of your music — either limited to playing inworld or as universal mp3s.

Is it for you?

After reading the above, you may be eager to delve into Second Life as another marketplace for your musical endeavors. As you can see, the opportunities are nearly endless. Further, it costs nothing to try your hand at it — plus, it’s just a whole lot of fun. No matter what sort of musician you may be, there is another market waiting for you in Second Life.

This is but one article in a series on opportunities for musicians in Second Life. Further articles will cover resources, technical issues, groups and organizations, revenue streams, publicity outlets, and more. Next up, however, will be a brief overview of the software required to pipe your music inworld. I hope you join us in this journey to a strange and wonderful new world. In the meantime, you may wish to do some early exploring on your own — it is free to get started! Just click the link below:

new Google music offering — indie musicians face new challenges and opportunities

Google has just announced a major enhancement to its handling of music searches. This change brings new conveniences for average Google users, and new opportunities for musicians. Herein, we’ll let an official Google video speak to the consumer side of things, then discuss what changes are under the hood, and what they mean for music marketing.

So here’s the video, aimed at your average consumer:

Basically, users searching on keywords involving artists, album titles, song titles, or lyrics are presented with a simple means of listening to those tunes for which they are searching. Also presented at the top of the search results is a wealth of similar content that can be played and/or viewed. It is the playing of the material where things get interesting for musicians.

They playing of the songs is actually handled by Google’s partners — currently iLike and Lala. Clicking on the play icon at the top of the search results opens a popup song player, with the song of interest playing, and other songs by the same artist loaded. There is a link at the upper right of the song player to the retail outlet, where one can easily purchase the song in question.

Note that, while others have reported that the partner used to play any tune is random, my limited testing showed a decided bias to Lala. Out of perhaps twenty searches for an artist name, all but one came up on Lala. The last — Mahogany Rush — came up on an iLike player, but had no link to a retail purchase.

It should be mentioned that below the default links in the top search result are links to the artist on other sites — including iLike, Rhapsody, iMeem, Pandora, and possibly others. Note that MySpace bought iLike earlier this year. From my limited testing, however, it seems clear that Lala is a favored retailer.

As an online music retailer, Lala has a rather unusual business model. Users can stream every song on the service once for free. After that, customers can buy the right to stream it for $0.10 or buy the MP3 for $0.89. Users can also upload their own music library to Lala and then stream those songs freely over the Internet.

It is also interesting to note that Lala has recently partnered with Facebook, with an officially connected Lala Facebook application.

Google has also partnered with the major music labels: EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. I assume this was required in order to smooth over the legal ramifications of being able to preview content in search results.

We all know what a giant Google has become. From it’s humble beginnings, it has risen in a few short years to dominate the Internet. Like iconic brands such as Xerox, the company name has become both a household noun and verb. Even given the central role of search in our daily lives, it has been reported that approximately 6% of all Google searches are music related. This points out how important Google is to all commercial musicians. Now with this major user-facing enhancement, the use of Google by consumers to identify and acquire new music seems certain to multiply.

So what does this mean to indie musicians? It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. From a personal perspective, I am in the middle of evaluating partner organizations to act as interfaces to online music retailers. As of today, I know that I need to re-evaluate my options, with a particular notice to which such organizations partner with Lala.

In a similar vein, I need to learn more about the relationship between Google and MySpace — as MySpace has just announced an ‘artist dashboard’. This is an analytics tool which over time may aspire to much the same functionality as ReverbNation.

In this wild musical world defined by the demise of the traditional recording labels, independent musicians live in a sea of change. One thing is certain — while this constant change requires continual attention, it also brings a steady stream of opportunities for independent musicians to bring their music to new legions of fans.

so what’s all this Second Life stuff, anyways….

Second Life is an immersive 3-dimensional digital world, where one acts out a character (“avatar”), in an online environment with other people. This environment provides numerous opportunities for musicians to present their music to new audiences, and make some money in the process.

…or ‘why does he keep talking’ about performances, when all the photos are of just a bunch of cartoons?’

OK, back up the bus. Looks like I need to step out of character to frame the discussion again.

First, in real life, I work with computers. All day, every day. In fact, I can confidently say that, if it were not for my work, several small internal details of your computer would operate differently than they currently do. Yes, the computer you are using to view this blog – be it a PC, Mac, Sunfire, IBM mainframe, or whatever. Not that it wouldn’t work, just that it would work differently.

Why do I tell you this? Merely to frame the point that, after working with computers, I have no desire to play with computers. Computers are the bane of my existence. Accordingly, I have always stayed far away from computer games. Sure, I had an intense but short lived addiction to the original 8-bit Zelda and Link Nintendo games, but that’s it. I have tried things like Lesire Suit Larry, Doom, Myst, WoW, etc. Bored to tears in five minutes flat.

With that out of the way, Second Life is an immersive 3-dimensional digital world, where one acts out a character (“avatar”), in an online environment with other people. In this, it bears a superficial resemblance to MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games – I think I got that right). However, there are several key differences that make it so much more –

1) There is no universally defined goal to SL. Once inworld, what does one do? What do you want to do? I am inworld in order to perform my music for others. Others are inworld to build things, to program things, to go clubbing, meet others, have cyber sex, whatever. There are even those in SL that are inworld to engage in standard MMORPG activities (kill or be killed – though this is limited to certain identified areas). Like real life (RL), the goals are as individual as the people who have them.

2) Almost everything inworld is created by the residents themselves. Ordinary people like you and me. Landforms, critters, dances, cars, buildings, wings, clothes, lighting sources, sounds, games, etc. There is almost nothing you will run across inworld that you could not create yourself from scratch (given enough time and study).

3) SL has a real functioning economy. There is an inworld currency (the Linden Dollar, or L$) that is freely convertible from and to US Dollars. True, the L$ is a fiat currency, created out of nothing by Linden Labs (the RL originator of SL). However, this currency creation follows strict rules on how much currency can be created, and at what time it will be created. In this regard, the L$ is actually a more stable currency than the US$, which is created out of nothing by the FED according only to their whim. This currency system enables many real people to support themselves in RL strictly from providing goods and services in SL for L$, and converting these L$ for US$.

So after gigging in RL for longer than I care to mention, to people in my geographic vicinity, for little money, I now bring my music to SL. Hopefully, I can entertain a handful of people, and make enough RL money at it to cover guitar strings and a microphone or two.

Oh – one other aspect. A couple of blog posts back, I spoke of Kazzabee Runningbear helping me with my first stream inworld. Just so happens that the human who is the alter ego of Kazzabee was in Australia at the time. So picture this – in RL, I am sitting in my house somewhere in the USA, performing my music for someone who is literally half a world away. In real-time. If not for SL, I would not have had an opportunity for Kazz to hear me. First performance. Half a world away. How cool is that?

intro to ReverbNation — social aggregator for musicians and bands

ReverbNation provides tools for musicians to market their music. It prompts the user through logical marketing activities in order to build brand equity in the band or performer’s name. Further, it pushes out info to other social media sites, allowing the user to update the info in one place, and have other sites instantly and automatically updated.

intro for me, anyway.

There are just so many social media outlets available that a person could spend their entire life updating them all and getting nowhere fast.

One possible tool for musicians to cut down on the duplication is ReverbNation (RN). This tool provides a handy control panel that tracks and even guides all aspects of marketing for a musician or band. At least it seems to guide the marketing activities — I do not have a background in marketing, and RN seems to prompt me as to what I should do as a next step, based upon what I already have in place.

As such a marketing control panel, RN is useful in and of itself. However, it also contains hooks to MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. As a consequence, one can enter (e.g.) a new scheduled show on RN, and have their (e.g.) MySpace page instantly updated with the new info. Or so it appears to me at this moment.

I’m still stumbling about in the interface, but I think I am getting a handle on the tools available therein. So far, I have just been expanding one of my bands’ presence there. This would be the Lee Thomas Band. Here is the Lee Thomas Band RN Profile.

As an example of the tools available, I’ll talk about the mailing lists. RN provides a mailing list utility, which maintains a database of contacts for the band. This is linked to an editor and mass mailer, for distribution of newsletters and such. This is similar to the functionality one would find at Aweber or Constant Contact.

Also provided are one-step HTML generators, that create Widgets for posting on any arbitrary site. I used this to embed a signup for the LTB RN mailing list on each page of the Lee Thomas Band website.

Once I figure out how to modify this blog’s layout, I should be able to embed that widget (and others) right here. Further, there is a Widget Widget, which allows anyone to generate and embed a Lee Thomas Band mailing list widget in any site of their own. This is intended for the use of fans in viral marketing campaigns.

More to come…