You are a musician or you work for a modern record label. You realized that after myspace is kind of dead that you can reach your fans and new audience on Facebook. Congratulation! Of course you can quickly go to facebook, create a fanpage for your band, install some widgets, and have your customized Fanpage as you did on myspace before. Once you write status updates on a regularly basis (several times / week) as Blind Guardian did you will realize that your fans will pretty quickly follow you to Facebook. But lets be honest: It is a pain in the ass to push your fans to another social network and get in touch with them. Before getting all excited lets do a …

Quick review of the downfalls for online music marketing with Facebook.

Additionally you face the risk that Facebook might be as dead as myspace in the future or that Facebook will simply change its policies for commercial fanpages. They could ask you to pay a fee for fan interaction. Remember the introduction of Edgerank is already the first step. After its introduction only a small percentage of your fans will actually receive your status updates and even a smaller percentage of their friends will receive the interactions with your post. On Facebook everyone has the hope that due to wall updates / comments and likes that his message will spread very far. Be aware that this is an illusion! The awareness of facebook users is so high due to the fact that there is hardly any spam on Facebook. Edgerank is filtering it (and your news!). You don’t believe it? What about this experience? On March 11 In Legend a band with 1450 Fans posted a status update about the release date of the new album. This highly relevant status received 93 likes and 24 comments creating 117 interactions with fans. These interactions should theoreticly forward the status update to alle the friends of 117 people. If that was true In Legends Status update would have a theoretical reach of over 10’000 impressions. Indeed there have only been about 5’500 impressions of this update to facebook useres. Ten days ealier In Legend posted a status update with only one user interaction following which got displayed to 4000 users. To sum up: One fan interaction seems to bring 15 new Impression… So please don’t over estimate the power of Facebook. We have seen that music hardly becomes viral on the Internet. There is just to much out. In Legend for example have destroyed a f***ing piano and the youtube video – though quite successful – was far away from becoming viral.

Becoming viral might be easier since Facebook but still very hard! Keeping these problems / downsides in mind I now want to introduce a method that a musician can probably easily use on Facebook in order to create a viral marketing effect.

Concept for a viral Streaming Application

Instead of putting some promotional songs or snippets online you create a facebook app that will be able to stream those songs. The advantage is clear. Fans have to accept and install the application. This gives you the possibility to add your fans’ emailadress to your newsletter. Facebook is so kind sharing users private data with you, once the user installs your app. This gives you a lower risk in working together with this social network and makes you independent of it.
The application will stream your music but it will only stream one song until a certain amount of people have installed the app. Afterwards one more song will be available for public stream. Now you can always double the amount of people that have to install the App to get another promotional song for streaming. The good thing about this is that once your fans like your music they will not only show it to others but ask them to install the app that more songs will be available. You get your (sometimes) lazy fans finally to do the best promo you can ever receive: “Word of mouth” and wasn’t word of mouth the kind of promo you are aiming for? This will probably work even best if you use music and songs that have not been released yet!

Summeray

Creating a viral merketing effect is harder than you think. And in hardly any case it “just” happens. Consider if this is really cheap and if you can be smarter than the others that just use facebook or whatever platform. Be aware of the technology available and consider consulting by friends or experts. Don’t just follow everyone because this will most certainly not result in “Word of mouth”
Oh and if you now think that programming and maintaining such an app is a lot of trouble and might cost a lot of money I’ll tell you the good news. This app is almost ready programmed and I will share it as an open source project. So why don’t you sign up for my newsletter or follow me on twitter so you will definitely know about the final release as soon as possible?