Ian Rogers (who I’ve met once, and is a really smart nice guy) recently posted his presentation on creating a digital marketing plan on the TopSpinMedia website. You can link to it here, and I definitely recommend you read every word. If for no other reason, it will inspire you with a ton of different ideas as to how you can better serve and grow your audience as a band in the year 2011.
Don’t misunderstand what he’s saying though, and simply run off to create a ton of different offerings, and throw all his suggestions into action at once. The part about there being a process and a strategic order to things is crucial. Always plan things with timing in mind.
And, as a very important aside… Ian Rogers can safely assume that you already make music that people love. That’s because it’s his job to market what you already make. As a musician, you can’t afford to make that same assumption. It sounds simple, but it’s really not. Make sure your music is incredible because if it isn’t, marketing it to the world is only going to make matters worse for you.
A friend sent me the link to this Mashable article today, talking about a new music/artist discovery tool called Hitlantis. I haven’t been able to get the actual Hitlantis site to function on my Macbook yet, so this post is purely in response to the Mashable article.
The idea behind Hitlantis is that it’s another site for bands to create their profiles on, and encourage people to become their fans on. Sounds pretty familiar so far. Only difference is the size of your fanbase is represented graphically on a map, and all the bands on the service are all placed onto the same ‘heat map’, so music fans can scour the heat map by genre and see what bands have bigger fanbases than others, simply by how big of a footprint they make on the map. Visually, it looks really interesting, and I definitely want to dig further into it. If the discovery aspect is fun for the end-user, then this could be a fantastic addition to the digital music landscape.
They’re apparently charging for upsells to artists though, including the ability to have a store (5 euros/month), and if you pay them 10-euro/month, you get record company pitching opportunities, and additional software features. Then they plan on taking a ten-point commission on any sales you make through their store. All this weirds me out a little bit, because it sounds like they could be making the bulk of their money off bands that are struggling to sell anything. It’s tough for an artist to make a living, and if these guys stuck with just the commission model I’d respect it more. They’d be making more of a committed statement to artist development, because they’d only be making money when their artists do.
I also somewhat disagree with launching yet another place that bands need to upload their music to, and create profiles on, and encourage people to become their fans on. But I don’t blame Hitlantis for that… I guess this is all Myspace’s fault, because as it declines, there’s no “one solution” to replace it yet. Could Hitlantis be that one-stop shop? Only time will tell.
Mobile app versions of Hitlantis are in the works too. Check out this video for a teaser.
