Relationships Are The New Distribution

Social Media superhero Chris Brogan recently wrote a post on the basics – the 4 P’s of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion) and talked about how many people don’t spend enough time on their Product, and try to make up for it in Promotion. If that doesn’t work they try competing on Price. But rarely is much time spent thinking about Place.

This got me thinking about how music is marketed, and how absolutely right he is. A lot of indie musicians tend to spend the majority of their time on Product and Promotion, with Price usually being the standard $0.99 per track. The common mistake is in thinking that Place, which is your distribution, is taken care of once you’ve gotten your music up on iTunes or Bandcamp.

I think we need to start thinking of distribution as more than just where people download or buy your music from, and maybe shuffle a few P’s around in the process.

In the digital world that most of us are now living, your distribution is actually made up of the quality of your relationships. Every fan, blogger, DJ, promoter, or any other variety of human that you come into contact with is a potential distribution point for your music. The more they like you and your music, the likelier they are to talk about and spread it on a regular basis. So what can you do to get ahead? It’s actually kind of obvious…

Build Your Own Deal

Your distribution is only as strong as the relationships you build around your music, so focus on strategically identifying and building relationships with people who’s audiences you most want to expose to your tunes.

Engage with your fans and learn what kind of content you can create around your music that really resonates with them and helps them connect with you on a deeper level. The more engaged and entertained your fans are, the more passionate they are going to be about sharing your music with their friends.

Spend some time reading the blogs that are most enthusiastic about your music, and the blogs you most want to be featured on. Is there anything you can do to help them? Offer to write some guest posts or create some exclusive content for them. Do an interview with a band they cover, and offer it as an exclusive. Stop pitching blogs on covering your music and start looking for ways to help them provide cool content to their readers.

Form partnerships and collaborate on new projects with other bands, businesses, sports teams, charities, etc. Make contact and build relationships with people and organizations you’re interested in and figure out how you can help each other out.

Be Selective

Seth Godin made a great point in a recent post: Ubiquitous distribution is overrated.

You don’t need to be everywhere, and you can’t be. Focus on building up the distribution points that will get your music and other content to the right people, not the most people. Always be growing your fanbase, but keep it exclusive enough that your most loyal fans don’t feel alienated because you put more effort into marketing to new fans than keeping them engaged and happy.

As you tend to the distribution points you build and they grow stronger, you’ll see the spread of your music slowly increase. New distribution points will develop on their own, and you’ll need to make sure that you’re always listening and ready to engage with them when they do.

This is the sort of stuff that a lot of people tend to think of as Promotion. But if you start looking at it as developing a distribution network for your music, I think it makes a whole lot more sense in the long term. It can also serve to free up all the money you’ve been wasting on advertising and promotion, and instead use it to create amazing content

What Do You Think?

Does it make sense to view your relationships with fans, other bands, bloggers, and sponsors as distribution points? Do you think these relationships deserve more attention? What are the challenges a band faces in taking this type of approach to music marketing?

The Importance of Context in Music Discovery

This post was written as a guest post for Artists House Music. They’ve got an amazing site with tons of useful articles and information about the music industry, so check them out and follow them on Twitter.

Within the ongoing discussions regarding new music business models that are taking place across the blogosphere, there is a lot of talk about providing ‘context’ to fans, and using that to monetize your work rather than relying on the sales of your music alone. However context isn’t only important to provide to your current fans, it plays a crucial role in hooking new ones. So what exactly is context and how can we make sure we’re providing enough of it to gain the attention of potential fans?

Context : the surroundings, circumstances, environment, background or settings which determine, specify, or clarify the meaning of an event associated with the consumption of music.

Discovery Context

First of all, it’s important to recognize how important context is in hooking new fans. Sure, the music itself is the most important ingredient when it comes to potential fans discovering you, but if they haven’t been primed with contextual information, your music might not ‘click’ with them. We’ve all been introduced to a new band and dismissed them as uninteresting only to revisit their music again later equipped with new information and suddenly love them. It’s happened to me many times anyway.

Knowing that more fans are likely to be moved farther along in the absorption process if they hear your music in the right context, giving you a better chance of converting them into true fans, it makes sense to find effective ways of providing that context.

Step One – Identify Discovery Channels

The first thing you need to do is figure out how people are learning about your music. Use tools like Google Alerts, Google Analytics, and Twitter to find out where traffic is coming from and who is talking about you. Look at your YouTube insights to see who is linking to your videos. Use this information to poke around and determine the paths people take online to end up at your pages.

You might find that there is a large number of people finding you via a blog post somebody made at a website you’ve never heard of. Or maybe a video of yours is making the rounds on Facebook. You could be getting all kinds of traffic from a similar bands Wikipedia entry. There is no limit to the number of different paths people can take to discovering your music, so find out which channels are driving the most traffic.

Step Two – Plant Context Rich Content

Once you have a good handle on how people are finding you, start planting content along the paths that people are taking to find you that will give them a better understanding of who you are and what you’re all about. The type of content you should use to accomplish this depends on what is generating the interest in the first place. Here are a few ideas:

Video EPK
Interesting and relevant press items / interviews
Blogs
Personal message from the artist
Video of artist interacting with fans/other artists/his mother

Whatever content you decide to create and plant for this purpose, make sure your fans are able to take it with them and embed it in their own sites, blogs, message boards, etc. If you manage to make the right content, your fans will use it on your behalf to hook new fans for you. Make it easy for your fans to give their friends context and you’ll see a spike in new fans.

Here’s a simple rule to follow: Always Be Publishing. (Mitch Joel tweeted this the other day and it stuck with me, so I stole it.) Whether it’s new music, blog or twitter posts, pictures, or anything else – always be publishing. Furthermore, if the content you are publishing doesn’t accomplish at least one of the following goals, it’s not worth publishing:

Showcase your talents
Provide context
Engage fans
Build relationships

Step Three – Track Your Efforts

Pay attention to metrics such as traffic, streams, mailing list sign-ups, sales, comments, incoming links, blog chatter, etc. so that you have a solid grasp on how effective your current content and presentation is at converting strangers into interested listeners. When you make a change in order to increase conversions, watch carefully for changes in these metrics and make a decision on how to proceed based on your results.

You’ll learn a lot about your fans and what types of content engages them by simply paying attention. Many artists and music marketers expect that they simply need to do what everyone else is doing, and then wonder why they aren’t getting anywhere. Rather than creating generic content, listen to your fans and let them shape the type of content you produce to promote your music.

Conclusion

With the ridiculously huge and ever increasing number of choices competing for the attention of potential fans, it’s pretty obvious that artists and music marketers need to start doing more if they want to succeed. Your success in building and nurturing your tribe will be a direct reflection of your ability to provide valuable context to it’s potential and current fans. Context builds connection.

What are your thoughts? Use the comments to post examples of great contextual content that you’ve come across and let me know if this sparks any ideas.