TalkMusicBiz, Music Promotions & Using Social Media Site YouTube

I know my readers yearn for tips on getting there music heard, so I went to one of my favorite social media sites and video-sharing sites, YouTube, and subscribed to TalkMusicBiz because they always upload videos geared towards the music business and give proven to be successful ideas on how to market your business or just some new twists on music promotions.  In this new video that I’m going to talk about today, the speaker George discusses social media skills along with music marketing and other “geo-tagged methods” one can adapt to on YouTube. I wanted to share these tips he used for a band with you, my readers, because they will beneficial and advantageous to you and your music exposure. 

It was nice that he brought up keyword threading and how important that is for promoting music on social media networks and indeed, your choice of keywords are of the upmost importance in any social media campaign and for social media optimization, but that I will save for another blog post. He began to talk about this local Hawaiian band called Kapala that he only did a slideshow for because at the time they could not afford a video. They were a brand new band and he promoted their song on YouTube by using demo description type keywords that were Hawaiian related. For example, in the subject title for the slideshow, he included the title of their song, their name, and Hawaiian music, all in the same title. And then in the description box, he put Hawaiian music, their location and zip code, and clubs they had played at, both recently and awhile back.

(youtube.com)

George even created tags with Hawaiian keywords and that helped boost their views up to 1,200 on the first two days of the upload! He made a good point in that the title of your YouTube video should have included in it the style of your music and perhaps the sub culture group within that style because that will help people find you. I agree that you should always take time and put information in the description box because I do notice that people forget to fill that out and it is a decisive move that can help get your video placed well in a search engine query. Another tip he suggested was to put your performance list and what town you are from in your description box. All of these YouTube promotional tips can bring in large audiences that may otherwise skip over your video while searching for music without these extra keywords or added descriptions.

Adding your url with the whole protocol, and the http, is always smart to have completed for any online promotion when using social media. You must also have an active url so people can actually see and hear your music or videos when they click on the link! Thank you George and TalkMusicBiz for these great music promotions tips and I will be giving more disserts about this channel and their tips very soon for you guys so join my mailing list so you don’t ever miss out!

Source: http://youtu.be/xLkh-JCYqNE

Are Digital Downloads Making the Cut or Are They Steadily Dropping the Ball?

I just started a new Digital Marketing course at Full Sail University and I wanted to write a blog post this week based on some fresh ideas on songwriting and the digital evolution. I can tell this will only be the beginning of my quest of connecting the industry and the digital  download world because the two will only continue to coincide with one another as time goes on. As I am always searching online for both new and experienced bloggers in the industry, I stumbled upon music strategist Jay Frank’s blog titled “FutureHit.DNA”, and I thought the name of the blog was super catchy to the eyes of a songwriter. Browsing though his row of informative posts, I found one that seemed to really have some solid truth to it and I wanted to share my thoughts on his opinion about the future and power of digital downloads.

The post is titled “Digital Downloads Still Key For Future Hits” and he starts off asking the question if one has ever moved 12. 5 million units of anything, and my first reaction was no, but I sure would love to! I was a little mystified myself when he started to talk about how global tech and business research companies such as Forrester Research felt about what that 12. 5 million units in digital downloads may mean for the music business. Music insiders probably strongly feel that because the increase only represented a 1 % increase from 2009 to 2010 compared to the 13 and 28 % increases they saw from the year before, that that automatically means the digital downloads format is failing the music business and is dropping dead. I do not believe that to be true because all I hear from other music lovers is whose album they just recently downloaded from iTunes or Rhapsody or their favorite artists’ websites.

I agree with Jay Frank that digital downloads is actually growing, and that it will be big business for the future songwriter. As he mentioned, digital downloads have grown 10 % and added almost 44 million downloads to last year’s total downloads and that is an industry that is not faltering by any means. I was amazed when he said that digital downloads have had three times more growth this year than it did all of last year! Songwriters and artists are readily catching onto the digital landscape more and more each day and are starting to think more about how to utilize the digital concept for increased sales purposes.

The author went on talking about “ the wider breadth of songs being sold in decent numbers” and the rise of on-demand video streaming for example, and I have to agree again. There are so many artists and songs out now in digital format, everyone can now get a comfortable piece of the digital market pie, not just the top 5 selling artists. Well, they are always going to have a more ample share but at least a less known or popular artist can strive to reach those same formerly only traditional means of selling millions of units through the indie digital route. Consumers download from so many sites and purchase downloads from both known and unknown artists and will download whatever they can from songs to videos to podcasts. 

(futurehit.dna.com)

 I have also noticed how platinum selling artists have lately begun to stick with promoting just singles and not albums and in many ways, that is a very smart move, because people aren’t seeking to buy entire albums anymore and give a thousand reasons why they don’t any longer, from bad contemporary music being produced to the economy. Artists are making money from leaking singles even before the album is complete and heavily promote them for more massive results. Selling huge numbers of units based solely on singles seems to be the path the digital music world is taking and is based on the current mindset of the new digital consumer.

I encourage you all to visit Jay Frank’s blog when you get a chance.

References:

Here is a link to Jay Frank’s blog on the Internet: http://blog.futurehitdna.com/