1. You should send a press release to all music related websites
2. You should show the videos to your  friends and ask them to reshare it with their friends
3. You should make a riffle regarding the video

Before I start with my thoughts. In this blog article I will explain some fundamental concepts of online marketing. This is not only interesting for musicians but for any brand! The concepts of branding will be questioned hard.

The aked question is very fundamental for online (music) marketing

The oberservation of this musician is quite right and holds true for many musicians but also for other products. Actually it is a nice application of the Pareto Principle (8.9% of bands make up 91.1% of plays on Last.fm). And the problem exists not only on the web. Once you start a new thing with a lot of enthusiasm you will most certainly get to realize that no one really cares despite the fact that your product / music is good and your receive some nice feedback. I looked at some of the social media response for this particular artist and found out that he really is in the lucky position to receive a lot of great feedback and see that quite a lot people cared. Still it is  hard for him to increase his reach and inform people about this very product id est introducing the music to them.

Problem of overcoming the boarders of one’s own social circle

The entire problem breaks down to overcoming one’s own social circle. If you understand that the entire world is a network (it is really hard to fully understand all the implications of this) you understand that the big problem in (online) marketing is the following:
You have your ego network – or let’s call it social circle of people – that you can reach with an idea. You will realize within your  social circle some ties are better and some are worse. Some ties are so great that they might even help you out (for example because they are your record label or promoter or booker or die hard fans). But in the end they can be all combined as one person in the network that has a (somewhat bigger) social circle. And the social circle will look like the following pictures which I took from Marc Smith Blogpost about social networks in the news (A tutor of mine at Webscie summer school 2011)

In this series of pictures you can actually see how weak your social circle is (and again for a music band the circle might be bigger at all but the entire picture will look similar:

Even though you can reach anyone in our worldwide friendship network with only 6 people in between your social circle will only reach a view ten thousand people! So the question is: “how to get the other 7 billion?”
To make this even more clear: As a b(r)and you might “know” an amazing number of let us say 3500 fans (mabe you reach even more) and become a “rather” central node in the social graph of people and brands. But let uns see why this is not of any help!

1. you know 3500 fans
2. Those fans already have 410’000 (almost half a million) people in their ego networks which probably makes the use of Facebook so tempting. 
3. Your fans friends altogether know 51 mio people. 
4. Finally these people that you already know over three hops will know the entire rest of the world e.g. the other 7 bn people 

Do you really think your music / product / message / idea is so great that your friends will tell their friends who will tell their friends who will tell the others? That is really all it takes! 4 hops. Sorry to disappoint you. This is almost impossible to achieve!

The classic answer before the viral web was born: Advertising

Well the problem existed a long time before the web was born. People already have figured out the solution: You ask someone who has a huge reach to tell his audience about your new idea! Less sophisticated we can summerize this idea in one word: “advertising” you go to any media pay them some money and they will talk about you. This worked amazingly well in earlier days. There wasn’t that much media and if you had your product in some media you could be certain that you had at least a brand awareness. But there is a limitation of advertising…

A Problem of advertising and some advantages and disadvantages of online advertising

Of course once you run advertising campaigns your will receive some attention. No matter how good or bad your product is. That was the principle during the Dot com Bubble  where many start ups spent way too much advertising dollars and money to built reach instead of focusing on a great product. This is the reason why every ad campaign should carefully measure several things (fortunately in online marketing this is easier than anything else!):

• Conversionrate – as the percentage of people that convert to (fans, custormers, emailadresses,… basically whatever goal you have for the campaign)
• Bounce rate – as the amount of people that clicked your ad but left your page / product right away
• The price you pay per click (or per 1 thousand impressions)
• The value to you for a new fan (customer).

Once you know these numbers you can easily calculate weather an ad campaign is usefull for you or not! And you can calculate those numbers easily. The first three are given or measured during the ad campaign. If you don’t know how to do this. Contact me. The last one has its own paragraph.

What is the value of one new fan?

For the value of a new fan you could do the following. Count the number of fans you have (e.g. size of news letter / facebook fans …) and then look at your last year revenue (sum up: merch + concerts + sold music) devide this number by the number of fans and you see how much revenue one fan produces in one year. I know it is only a rough estimation but I wonder how many bands have calculated this number! Look at other products and markets.Everyone who is in the business of direct marketing maintains a customer data base which is a solid asset to the business. Groupon for example gives away 6 Euro for every new Customer someone finds. (This means that Groupon thinks a new Contact is worth at least 6 Euro.) 
As a musician you should know this number. Assume a new Fan is worth 6 Euro to you this would mean that knowing 5 thousand fans is worth as much as the production of an entire record. Could this be true? Actually I will try to start some calculations together with my Collegues from In Legend soon and try to calculate how much we should spend to gain a new fan!

Problem of aggressive marketing vs spreading of new information

On the web the problem is that people have so much choice that advertisting only helps to some degree. With Google adwords for example you only pay for clicks. So you definately obtain the attention. On the other side people drift away very quickly and their span of attention is very small. Another drawback is that many things on the web are free. Even though advertisting for music on the web is so much cheaper than offline advertising it is not standard to make use of advertisting on the web. Recordlabels and promoters so far refuse to invest money for it. That is sad because there is a lot of potential in online advertising (especially once you measure your conversion and bounce rates as well as the click through rates.)
Luckily those rates can be measured before you run an ad campaign. Investing money to increase reach should therefore never be done to a complete new product. A complete new product should be tested first. You meassure the feedback. Once you realize that people are happy you are save paying money to increasing your reach. For example in in legends case the youtube pandemonium video received much better feedback than vortex video and so far the soul apart video seems to receive the best feedback overall. By user ratings / average daily views as well as user comments. So you better go out an make advertising with your best performing content. Will you care that this is not your newest piece of work or even the first video? Hell no! Advertising is always targeted to people that don’t know you. You can even show them a 10 year old video and they might not realize its age! Once they like you they can still discover your newer stuff. 
Attention the above suggestion drastically changes if you are a mature b(r)and. In that case of course your star products are already well known and you should use promotional power and your brand recognition to get out the new product. This leads to the next paragraph.

Do all these calculations depend on the maturity of the band?

The answer is clearly yes! A band that is mature will still need promotion and advertising but also a lot of messages spread from almost alone. Some other things are easier achieved (mag title stories and so on…) But the obvious message is the following. The cost of advertising and your conversion rate will most probably stay constant and remain independent of the bands maturity. Metallica has to pay the same price for youtube ads as In Legend has to. But the fan is worth more if a band is not mature yet. A fan from the first record might go to many tours and buy a lot of products and also help spreading the word in a viral manner. For a mature band chances are pretty high that people who see the ad already know the brand but already decided not to like the band. So even though a young band has not much money and can not be sure that the product is already sufficiently good (which will lead to a drop in conversionrate i.e. more expensive ads or higher acquisition cost per new fan) ads make much more sense if the band is totally unknown. Be couragous invest some money and bootstrap your product! You are also courageous by going on the stage. So please also enter the web stage and built your reach! I know it’s less fun than rocking the audience in a life concert but the effect should be pretty much the same.

Other non advertising impact factors to overcome the boarders of one’s social circle

Since advertising is very expensive and probably not sustainable one can wonder if there are other ways to overcome the boarders of your social circle. I would say there are. The best way to do so in my pure empirical experience is transparicy, openess, the trust in other people and the interactive communication with them. Take me as an example. When I went to china I had basically no one to talk to about my interests. Now I started blogging sharing my ideas and – some people already called me crazy – parts of my intellectual propertie. Guess what! By doing so I was able to find more and more people with similar interests from all around the globe that I would never have met in my own social circle giving my valuable feedback to my ideas. My Reading club on distributed graph data bases is just a recent example of this added value from transparency.
So as a band here are some things you could and should do besides advertising your star products (and yes it is not the mainstream and might take some courage to do so!):

1. Interact with your fans. Treat them with respect. Not just by telling them but by really showing them. Don’t be so “kind” to share only news about you. That’s not interacting that’s publishing! Join the discussion on current topics (in music, news, …) or respond to what your fans say! Find out if it is relevant and stay in a conversation. I know it is hard since fans can become annoying and as a person it is already hard where a band has much more fame and more people and ideas to take care of. 
2. And please don’t be fake interactive by asking questions like “Heya Legends..
   A new week has begun, what is your sound for depressing mondays and what gets your through the week???” Asking questions especially if they don’t really carry a meaning is not interactive. That is just embarissing. That’s the reason why this kind of questions don’t take your marketing anywhere.
3. Integrate your fans! That is the by far most promesing strategy. As a band with already 3’500 fans there is so much diversity, creativity and so on that you will be able to achieve extra ordinary things. I am sure fans of you will have access to recording studios will have access to cheap videos maybe there are webdesigner and photographers. If you interact with your fans in a very smart way you don’t even have to ask them if there is a REPLACE BY WHATEVER YOU NEED. You will just know who is it. This leads me to 4th
4. Use the upcoming social network google+. First of all it is very obvious that it will kill Facebook on the long term (probably even on the short term) but more important it supports you to follow your fans since you can put them into circles. So all photographs go in one circle. All reviews go in another circle, all bloggers in the next circle, all technicians, all bookers, all concert organizers and so on. Streetteamer go in one circle. Follow those people they like your music and could be valuable for you.   
5. Speaking of streetteam: I once talked to a record label coworker. She told me in her experience the single best promotion tool for a band is a streetteam. Unfortunately I have seen many streetteams also did not receive the respect they deserved from band mambers. A band’s streetteam has an incredible impact. I once wondered how a poster of my favourite band came to be placed on a train station of a minor German city. It was much later that I realized that this must have been streetteam members… On the web by being interactive you can build your own global streetteam with almost no cost – besides time! Treat your streetteam. Have a streetteam meeting at least once a year and have all bandmembers come and have a great party with them. You can also make virtual meetings.
6. last but not least: Do all the things your promoter suggested at the very top of my post. Those are the core homework choires. 

For the last lines. Have fun making music and enjoy the most recent video of my band

Filip: Even though I wasn’t agreeing with your Facebook skepticism in the beginning, I realized that I was overestimating Facebook in its promotion role. I’ve been creating extremely successful, targeted (extremely low budget though – just 5 or 10 euros at a time) campaigns for my band on Facebook.

Results?

Even though I managed to inflate the number of fans (with 12 fans/1 euro average), the interaction stayed the same. These campaigns aren’t entirely useless, though – having this number of fans or more looks nice in a smaller Croatian market and can help in booking bigger shows (thus getting to more fans)..but still dissappointing. I won’t campaign until we release a website/album/have something to sell.

Rene: I like your observation. The first was that gaining these paid likes does not really increase interactions and increase your reach. As I am saying to the In Legend guys all the time: “Money invested in facebook or even effort in facebook reach is not the best way to increase one’s reach” I am very glad that you came to the same conclusion and shared your insights!
Secondly I partially agree with the effect of large fan numbers while booking gigs. It certainly looks good to business partners like bookers, labels, distributers,… if your social media numbers burst. But again I would say the price is too high. With 1 Euro / 12 fans you would need to invest 1000 Euro for 12’000 fans an 12’000 isn’t even skyhigh (well I don’t know about croation standards). But as we know only a very small fraction of these 12’000 fans would actually become real fans and start interacting with you. All this for getting a gig! I guess this money could much better be invested in a high quality video which especially for a young band is a very good investment. With the video in combination with smart music downloads you will be able to increase your reach. Maybe not to 12’000 fans but still to a solid number of real fans that actually come to your concert because they really care! In this way your social media fancount (especially facebook) will also grow.

Filip: Question1 – sharing music!
About the thesis of providing music only on the band site – I think it’s hard for someone to become our fan if there is no music on Facebook. Choosing one song for preview and directing a fan to .com might work, but they are attracting entirely different audiences – think poppy indie rock vs. oriental, modern metal ballad. Is it okay to let this promo run free and spread like wildfire until the album release? Or should I provide 2/3 of songs for free, and ask for a mail adress for the 3rd one? This might be a good model.

Rene: I agree with what you say. At the time of writing the blog post you are referring too I wasn’t aware of the existing facebook music apps. The important thing is getting a sustainable contact to the person interested in your music. This is achieved ultimately by his email adress. But your question is very important. Of course you have to give people a bait. This could be

1. snippets
2. entire song(s) on streeming
3. a music video (In legend offers downloads under every music video)
4. a free download (without registration)

and I really don’t know where to set the boarder.
In the beginning times of In Legend we had 3 songs for streaming on myspace and 4 songs on the ep for download in exchange of an email adress. That turned out to be a good solution. People who liked the first songs where curious to download them together with one additional song. So I guess a 2/3 split would work as well. I will just warn you. Asking people for their mail address scares 4 of 5 people away. But hey at least you get the adresses of your fans that are really willing to give something for the music!
Now about the place where to make the connection. If you achive getting the fans mail adress via a smart Facebook music player or via download on your homepage I don’t care. Once people like your music (and chances are higher once you can talk to them frequently) they will also turn into facebook fans. So I recommend switching from rootmusic which you are using right now on your facebook profile to bandRX or Songpier since both services allow you to give access to your music in return of mail adresses. Songpier is a very new service but they also offer a cool mobile app (right now also without collecting mail adresses)
Here is a video about bandRX

Filip: Question2 – What do you think of Bandcamp?
I personally think it’s a great platform for selling music and there is an option of collecting mail adresses. The downside is that there is no valuable content that can be published, like blogs. It would be perfect if it was just a music-streaming, checkout widget on my site.

Rene: One of my Favourite (but retired) bands Jester’s Funeral have just published all their songs to bandcamp and have linked to their homepage and from the homepage to bandcamp. It is not quite the widged you are asking for but I guess this stays an option especially if you don’t bring the technical know how of programming a homepage that enables you to offer your music as a download in exchange of mail adresses.
There is only one thing that bothers me about bandcamp. They only let 200 fans per month download your music for free (email exchange) and offer a pay as much as you want option. From the money raised they keep 15% as a service charge. If you want more free downloads you have to buy them or have people pay for your music.
To some extend they offer a fair deal. It is a good service for a reasonable price. I as a programmer would just do it on my own have the full controll of my data and keep the 15% but I am pretty convinced that bandcamp should be a pretty good option for many musicians
I hope I could answer your questions to your satisfaction! Sorry that there isn’t always the clear black our white, right or wrong. Things are complex on the web but by reading your mail I am very convinced that you are asking the right questions which means that at least in online marketing you are far ahead of 95% of all musicians!