Internet Marketing Blog

Moby's Movie Music Marketing

  Moby Rocks The Guitar 
  Originally uploaded by wacky doodler

Late last year, the musician Moby started a web site called Moby Gratis that offers some of his instrumental music for free to independent filmmakers to use in their nonprofit movies. If the movie gets purchased, then you'd need to pay a small licensing fee, the proceeds from which would go to pay for a charitable foundation devoted to this free film music site.

Moby Gratis is a source for his music to be used essentially under a Creative Commons copyright license. It provides wider exposure to some of Moby's music that would inherently have a limited audience because it is instrumental and it provides a free resource to independent filmmakers.

Pretty cool. Here's Moby talking about it and about his views on copyright law in general:

The End Of Nostalgia Marketing

  prince 
  Originally uploaded by A N G E L

If you've read my blog on a fairly regular basis, you know that I'm a music fan and, as a result, fascinated with music marketing. Music marketing is especially fascinating to me because, as Seth Godin points out in his Music Lessons post, since the music industry is falling apart, it provides a unique glimpse into the rise and innovation of online marketing and a demonstration of conversational marketing.

It began to dawn on me as I began following MP3 blogs that due to the phenomenal variety and volume of music that is now easily accessible through MySpace and MP3 blog aggregators like elbo.ws and Hype Machine, through music discovery services like last.fm and popular music blogs like stereogum, indiefeed and Aquarium Drunkard, the audience for bands and musicians is fragmenting radically. Music is no longer easily classified by genre.

This phenomenon has been discussed by New York Times columnist David Brooks and was recently a topic of conversation for Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning program.

For the music fan in me, this fragmentation is fantastic because it means I have a vast array of new (for me) music to which, until now, I would never have had access.

But the marketer in me sees the death of nostalgia marketing. For whatever reason, music has a unique ability to trigger emotions. I have memories of listening to the hit songs of 70s rock bands through the crackly AM band on my dad's transistor radio. Songs from the 80s spark general memories of my college years.

It is because of this phenomenon that you see the nostalgia marketing of music compilation CDs from a given era through late night infomercials replete with your "hosts" saying remember when all the time. I couldn't find an actual example on YouTube, but this is a clever spoof of those infomercials that gets the idea across:

Specific songs recall specific events and that phenomenon will remain. But because the channels through which we hear music are now practically infinite--terrestrial-, Internet-, and HD-radio stations, television, YouTube, music blogs and podcasts, our phones and video games--the concept of a broadly popular music star is fading away.

The same dynamic will likely hold true for movies and television programming.

With no broadly popular music star or movie or television show, the common touchstone, the shared experience of liking the similar thing that makes nostalgia marketing work, is eliminated. Is, then, nostalgia marketing viable? I think not. At least not on a broad scale.

An Ode To Digg (And Its Supporting Online Campaign)

Kina Grannis loves to Digg.

  Two Weeks For Kina 
  Originally uploaded by kasuya

She loves to Digg so much, in fact, that she's written a very clever and catchy song about her Digg love. Clearly, Kina's not alone.

But she's taken it another step by entering her song, Gotta Digg, in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl music video contest. The grand prize winner gets their music video aired during the Super Bowl and gets a recording contract with Interscope Records.

[UPDATE: Two kind readers have helpfully pointed out (see the comments below) that Grannis entered another song to the contest, not Gotta Digg.

I'm a bit disappointed because I really like Gotta Digg, but the fact that she composed that song for her online campaign only makes the campaign itself all the more brilliant!]

Kina's clearly got some marketing savvy in her corner because she's running a pretty sophisticated online campaign to solicit votes for her video.

In addition to asking for votes at her official web site (which is very professionally done, by the way), she has a separate web site for the contest itself: TwoWeeksForKina.com. It is this site that she promotes from her YouTube account and her MySpace page, where she has 2,820 friends and her Facebook page, where she has 850 friends.

She's hosting her contest campaign photos at her Flickr account , where, as of this writing, her 93 contest campaign photos have been viewed more than 900 times. Her only slip at Flickr is that she's wearing a Michael Vick jersey. Oops.

Naturally, her video has been submitted to Digg five times and, as of this writing, has been Dugg 10,734 times.

As of this writing, since Grannis uploaded her Gotta Digg music video to her YouTube account on December 23, the video has been viewed 124,234 times, boasts four out of five stars from 1,438 raters, has been marked as a favorite video by 729 YouTube users, and received 462 comments.

Those numbers are not surprising because the video is number 3 on YouTube's Top Rated Video this week, is the 11th Most Viewed music video this week, and the 42nd Most Responded to video today.

As of this writing, Google Blog Search lists 267 blog posts citing "gotta digg," most of them posted within the past 24 hours. That's pretty remarkable, considering the time period is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Technorati, meanwhile, lists only 18 posts within it's universe of registered blogs, but among those are highly influential blogs like TechCrunch,  Neatorama, and Buzz Machine. These posts are likely to inspire many more posts about the video down the long tail.

Kina Grannis is either one Internet savvy kid or she's got some very smart online marketers working on her behalf. Regardless, I would not be surprised at all to see her win the contest.

Oh, yeah; here's the video:

MTV's Online Music Video Marketing Strategy

I was browsing SPIKE (formerly known as iFILM) and came across the video for Billy Joel's song We Didn't Start The Fire. It's a pretty good song but a really good video and the quality is fairly good for a video sharing site:

Upon closer inspection, I noticed that it had been uploaded by mtvmusicvideos. So I click on the MTV Music profile and I get a page featuring the latest Jason Fox video, Aunt Jackie, which I can't embed.

I've ranted about content provider's refusal to allow embedding before, so I won't belabor the point except to say that MTV is trying to have it both ways. I also found a bunch of Eurythmics videos that are embeddable:

So it appears that MTV's online music video marketing strategy is to restrict current artists and recent releases while allowing embedding for past hits.

Isn't the point of music videos to promote new artists or new songs? Doesn't the refusal to allow fans to embed those music videos into their blogs and MySpace pages defeat that purpose?

Is Viacom worried that allowing embedding would discourage sales of music and/or music videos? It's a reasonable worry but not a very realistic one.

It seems to me that the opposite is more likely true; that allowing embedding would drive more sales.

And so it goes...

Music Marketing Through Blogs, or How I Tuned Out & Discovered New Bands

05.26.06 @ The Wiltern, Los Angeles CA
Originally uploaded by voxtrot

I was trolling Upcoming.org last night to see what shows were coming up and it occurred to me just how important MP3 blogs have become for marketing music and bands.

As a frustrated musician, I love music. As those of us who are passionate about our music can attest, there are few things better than discovering new musicians and bands. And though I don't get to as much as I'd like, I love to see bands live.

Back in the day when I played in bands and had a ton of time on my hands, I'd devour newly discovered  bands, listen to as much of their music as possible, memorize the lyrics to their songs, watch for their videos on MTV (yeah, that was back when MTV actually aired music videos).

There were three primary ways you'd learn about new bands back then: 1) friends, 2) radio, and 3) MTV. Nowadays, I find new music through MP3 blogs.

I've tuned out of music radio because I have no patience for the commercials. With the exception of stuff like talk radio-sports or otherwise--and live events, I just don't listen to radio. When I do listen to the radio for music, I listen to The Current, Minnesota Public Radio's ad-free modern music station. But even The Current has annoying pledge drives to give me a reason not to listen.

When I want music, I turn to my trusty iPod and that gets filled from the MP3 blogs to which I subscribe. Some of my favorites:

• Stereogum
• IndieFeed
• I Am Fuel, You Are Friends
• An Aquarium Drunkard
• The Yellow Stereo
• Large Hearted Boy
• The rest of my bookmarked MP3 blogs

So I learn about new bands not from traditional sources but from my favorite MP3 sites, MP3 search engines like Hype Machine and elbo.ws, and music sharing sites like last.fm. I think I'm becoming the rule, rather than the exception. Plus, I spread my love these bands among my friends and coworkers. They laugh because I have a "new favorite band" every week.

Back in the day, when I wanted to go see a band, I'd go to the Entertainment section of the Sunday Star Tribune, our local newspaper, or I'd get a copy of our free weekly alternative newspaper, The City Pages. Or I'd hear about upcoming concerts on the radio.

Now I go to Upcoming.org, or, occasionally, the web site of a nightclub that has live music like First Avenue or The Fine Line. I'd rather pay ten to twenty bucks for a far superior performance in a nightclub for a relatively unknown band than $200 to $350 for an inferior concert by an international superstar in a cavernous auditorium.

But for MP3 blogs, though, I would not have recognized three-fourths of the bands with upcoming gigs that were listed on Upcoming.org.

In addition to MySpace and YouTube, MP3 blogs have been a boon to music marketing, especially for the unsigned musicians and bands.

I may have only downloaded the one or two promotional MP3 songs that Voxtrot or Spoon released online for blog fodder, for example, but now I know who they are and am more likely to buy a CD or go to a concert. Were it not for the MP3 blogs, their names would not have jumped out at me on Upcoming.org.

From a music lover's point of view, too, MP3 blogs have made a vast amount of music far more widely available than ever before. I'm constantly amazed at the amount of great music out there.

And that is what we Internet marketers do in fact call, "A very good thing."

Read More: Music Marketing

Musical Genres & iPod - Harness The Wisdom Of Crowds

It is in the music industry's best interests to find a solution to the problem of classifying musical genres.

Jimi Hendrix - live
Sunday, June 1, 1969
Waikiki Shell, Hawaii 
Originally uploaded by Belltown

Inaccurate Musical Genres

When R.E.M. was climbing the charts, they were referred to as an Alternative band. Now they're just a rock band. U2 first emerged during the New Wave era and their sound fit in that category but now they're just a rock band. Progressive music used to refer to seventies bands like Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer, now you've got Progressive Rock and Metal, Progressive Trance and House, and even Progressive Bluegrass. Alternative has splintered into Alternative Punk and Metal, Alternative Country and Hip Hop and Synth.

The Problem Of Multiple Musical Genres

Then there's the problem of musicians/composers/bands whose music falls into multiple genres. Jimi Hendrix's music is Blues, Psychedelic Rock, and Heavy Metal.  Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were both Blues, Hard Rock, and Heavy Metal bands. The aforementioned Emerson, Lake & Palmer's progressive rock sound included elements of Jazz and Classical Music.

Meaningless Musical Genres

Finally, the current practice of labeling some genres of music with time-specific appellations such as neo and post; Post-Punk, for example. That type of labeling quickly becomes meaningless or unpractical when a following musical movement reacts to the current one. Does the following Punk movement, then, become the Post-Post-Punk genre? Clearly, that doesn't work.

The Benefit Of A Workable Musical Classification System

A better musical genre classification system would help sell more music because it would make specific types of music easier to discover. It seems to me that technologies such as portable MP3 players like the iPod, music download stores like iTunes, music sharing and discovery services like Last.fm that can all be tied together with tagging and RSS, can offer at least part of the solution.

Current Technological Limitations

I've been thinking of this topic because of my frustration with creating accurate playlists in iTunes. Let's say I want to create a playlist of my Blues songs but all my Jimi Hendrix songs are classified as within the Psychedelic Rock genre. Because of this, I will not have Hendrix's version of Red House, one of my favorite versions of one of my favorite blues tunes.

How about podcasts? Why can't I label my podcasts as not only podcasts but also new and video or Internet marketing? That way, I could have a playlist of only my news podcasts that are in video format or a playlist of only my Internet marketing podcasts. That would be extremely handy for those of us who subscribe to a lot of podcasts.

Part of the problem is the inflexibility of the current technology. Why can't I apply multiple genres to an MP3 file in either iTunes or to the metadata of the file itself?

A More Accurate Genre Classification System

The other, more difficult part of the problem is in the method by which we classify musical genres, which, I suspect, has more to do with musical media than anything else. Perhaps the mess that has become of categories of music is a result of the disintegration and dispersion of media. When traditional radio stations and mainstream musical media go online and you throw in online only musical publications, web radio, and MP3 blogs, you no longer have just a handful of sources from which to learn about musical genres.

So how do we arrive at a consensus on whose music belongs to what genre?

I don't know that it is the answer but it may very well be a big part of the answer: Why not harness the wisdom of crowds?

Apple's iPod/iTunes Tag Cloud

  iPod, do you? 
  Originally uploaded by Carlos Noboro

As the overwhelming online music market leader with it's iPod player and iTunes online music store, Apple is in a better position than anyone to revamp the genre classification system. I'd like to see smart developers world wide use the iTunes API to create some tag cloud functionality (for which Apple might need to expand the API).

Specifically, I'd like to see a public tag cloud(s) that display tags for the songs, albums, bands, and genres of the aggregate iTunes userbase that you could filter by year, user rating, play count over a given time period, and last played.

I'd also like to see my own iPod/iTunes tag cloud that I could chose whether or not to share.

With such a system, crowdsourcing will most likely arrive at, if not the most accurate, then the most popular genres applied to a given band and/or song.

It would be nice to have the option of applying the public tag cloud to my music library, if I want.

Music Relationship Engine

If you combined this tag cloud data to the iTunes relationship engine and put it out on the web, Apple could monetizing the tag cloud by offering iTune links to specific bands and musicians and albums and songs.

The user rating, play count and last played data could be the foundation of a popularity engine, which would also serve as a music discovery engine.

Such a system would vastly improve the functionality of the iPod while also helping drive sales.

Flash MP3 Player

Last Friday I discussed the changing expectations on the multimedia web and how people are increasingly expecting to be able to take control over online content.

With the explosion of online audio and, specifically, the MP3 files that populate music blogs and podcasts, there is really no excuse for not making those files playable directly from your web site or blog so that your visitors don't have to download the file to play it.

Fortunately, the popular social bookmarking service del.icio.us provides free for anyone who wants to use it, a nice little strip of JavaScript code they call Play Tagger that will enable a lightweight and elegant Flash MP3 player on your site any time you link directly to an MP3 file.

We include the script by default in the blogs we set up for clients and there's no reason you shouldn't use it as well if you ever link to an MP3 file. It is well worth the minimal time it requires to paste it into your site in order to vastly improve the usability of your site.

The links below demonstrate the del.icio.us Flash MP3 Player. Click on the blue arrow icon to play the file and you'll see it start working; you can pause and stop the player as well as tag the file into your del.icio.us account.

If you hover your cursor over one of the hyperlinks below, you'll see in the status bar at the bottom of your browser that they are direct links to MP3 files, so your visitors could actuall right-click on the link and download the file directly to your computer.

• Engadget Podcast 082 - 07.16.2006 - My favorite technology/gadgets podcast.
• Daily SearchCast Podcast - July 18, 2006 - Search podcast from Search Engine Watch.

Consumer Generated Music Videos

Every musician and band should be urging their fans to create their own videos for their songs and to show them off at YouTube. I am constantly being amazed at the depth of creativity that is being unleashed through such distribution platforms as blogging and video sharing sites. Somone calling himself Scotbot has created this mashup music video for the Alice Cooper song Generation Landslide by setting the tune to extremely well edited vintage commercials and military propaganda films.

Technorati tags: alice cooper | alice cooper video | generation landslide | video mashup | music video | youtube | military propaganda video | vintage television commercials