have a look at the app here:

Features and Problems

• works on facebook and on any other webpage
• enables setting more and more songs free for streaming while more people install the app (in order to spread the word)
• users need to connect (with facebook or via email adress) in order to listen
• some lightweight statistics
• encrypted flash player (not open source yet) that makes it hard to download the music (Though I myself have some moral problems with this kind of feature. But well it is how the industry works…)
• Slideshow of pictures to improve listening experience
• optimized usability for high conversion rates

The app runs on PHP, MySQL, JavaScript (MooTools) and you will need your own webspace in order to host it

A kind warning

The App was developed with a lot of time pressure and we had some nasty bugs that needed to be fixed. That is why the source code is messed up with some really fast and dirty quick fixes. Afterwards I never really had the time to clean up the source and make a good documentation. As my PhD progresses this situation will not change in the foreseeable future. Since my prediction says that Facebook will be overrun by Google+ within this year it is more than time to share the app!
The good part: most of the stuff can be reused once Google+ opens its API and the app can be transformed to a great social network.

Source code on google code

http://code.google.com/p/in-legend-facebook-music-streaming-app/source/checkout

Motivation: Compare theoretical reach and cost of youtube ads vs print media

• The current situation in youtube is the following. Right now you pay 1 Cent per person watching your video / listening to your piece of music after he by himself has choosen to click on it by seeing an interesting title and description.
• In print media on the other side you pay 500 Euro for a quater page of advertising. At least that is the number that I know from Metal Hammer which is read by 40’000 people. This means you pay 1.25 Cent per Impression! 

You think this sonds like a similar price to you? WRONG! That is much more expensive! Let me tell you why:
Not only 1.25 Cent is more than 1 Cent. But recall that an impression in a magazine full of advertising is not seen by many people. Also we know that even the people who see it don’t take an action and buy your CD or search for you on the web. On youtube again every Click means that a person spends at least 4 minutes with your music and you have the chance to score some points. Think of your self! Do you become fan of a band just because of a silly ad in a magazine or after watching a cool video and listening to a great song?
I have to admidt thogh that there is the positive fact that ads in magazines give rise to stories in mags which have a huge conversionrate and a reach that probably goes far beyond the audience of the mag. Well on the other hand sharing a Youtube video with you friends also has a huge reach that goes beyond the  audience you payed for.
So we conlude Youtube Promoted videos is the much more superior, efficiant and much cheaper way to reach new fans!

what is going on on youtube and what do you have to watch out for?

Let me first explain the difference between Conversion rate and Clickthrough Rate (which is called viewthrough rate = VTR in the context of youtube):
View through rate:  In the dashboard of your youtube ad campaign google tells you about your VTR and says the higher the VTR the better. Well that is technically true but there is one little thing missing. A high VTR is helpfull for Google/Youtube. You don’t have to care. VTR means how many times does Google have to show your video as a promoted video untill someone sees it and you have to pay. so if your VTR is 1% it means that after 100 display ads you have one person watching the video and you have payed youtube once. Let’s assume the rate is 2%. Well then with the same amount of impressions youtube has earned the double amount of money. You should not care about this rate. As long as you get the viewers you payed for everything is cool
Conversion Rate: A metric that should be of your interest though is the Conversion rate. Unfortunately this is hard to track and google does not really help you on this. It tells you how many of the people your reached turn into fans / recommend the video / sign up to your newsletter / buy an album to make it short take any action. You are interested in a high conversion rate since it gets you the maximum out of the viewers you payed for.
This rate is probably increased by choosing good keywords and being really honest in the ad text about what to expect. Despite what youtube is saying you’d rather have a lower VTR and increase your Conversionrate!
Ads within the video. As soon as you have your video in a promoted campain you can controll the ads that are displayed within your video. This enables you to display something in the video with a link to an external website which is impossible otherwise! The funny thing is if the campaign is paused due to the fact that your google adsense account is runnin out of cash those display ads are still visible. I will write an entire article about this nice little trick!

My personal Experience

I have the feeling that on my first test on youtube I did not get a high conversion rate. Only 0.8% clicked on the download this video for free link! (but most of them actually registered to the site an downloaded it)
I was lazy and made a campaign with 150 different keywords (which I choose as popular metal related words from metalcon (mostly band names)). all ad’s had the same ad with the same title and text. For example I bought the keyword: “hard rock” well our music is not really hard rock. Since we also used this word in the ad text I guess a lot of people have been disapointed and did not convert.
Since youtube seems to favor ads with a high VTR (this happens if add text and the keyword you pitch for) are similar (because users think the video is of interest to them) we recieved 40% of our views on hard rock which is as I said not even a good keyword at all.
Next time I will group keywords together in smaller groups and make ads particularly for these groups in this way I push VTR which is good for youtube but I also find fans on keywords that will convert better and I can drop off the campaigns for keywords like hardrock…
Overall I have to say that I bougth 1000 clicks per day for 10 Euro a day for a German audiance. Which was nice overall. I spend 80 Euro for 8 thousand views which gave our video a nice little push. 

Summary of my Experiences

• I think Youtube ads are very cost efficiant and are a great tool for musicians. It is a product where advertising really makes sense / not like a tv commercial for diappers or some other FMCG…) It is especially good for small musicians that need to introduce their music to many people.
• Right now ads on youtube are totally undervalued (which will most certainly change over time). I cannot imagine that in 5 years from now youtube ads will still be that cheap.
• However youtube has the problem that high quality advertising material is rare. so maybe the price might stay low for a pretty long time.
• Youtube ads can probably be even more efficiant if good keywords are selected!
• If it was my decission for a band as small as in legend I would buy advertising on youtube for thousand till two thousand euros.
• I would not need to depend on any label or promo company or any other person to reach a very large audience at a rather cheap price! I would have real people who spend time getting to know my music!

in other words we again see a situation in which the web can help people to solve a problem. A new comer can reach out to hundres of thousands of people at very low cost and independent of other people!
So tell me what is your experience with youtube ads?
 

• the dvd enables us to advertise our products (concerts, merchandise, records, online activities…)
• the lyrics of the songs can be displayed
• the dvd will help us to keep the user with OUR videos and not keep on surfing to some other related content
• Pleased by our good experiences with the free Pandemonium Download In Legend agreed to make the videos available for free download on their website which will contribute to In Legends viral marketing!

I am really excited to see how the idea with the Youtube DVD will develop. How the videos will spread and if the users like and understand the menu! It’ll be also interesting to see if other bands will adopt to the idea. If people are interested I will post some instructions how to create such a Youtube DVD. If you guys have any suggestions comments and thoughts I’ll be happy to hear about them!

Answer all Questions in your Fan mail on a regularly basis (maybe weekly) on your website!

Answering fanmail one by one is really taking a lot of power. You could rather answer them publicly on your website. So if someone sends you an mail and puts some questions inside you will extract the question and post it in some section of your homepage. you order the questions and answers by date to show that you are actually answering questions regularly and thereby show that you are happy about more questions. you write something like

2011 August 30 – Bob asks: Hey band, I was always wondering could you do a show in ….
Musician from Band: Dear Bob thanks for your question. We would love to do a show in …

If there are more and more questions you can later on think about grouping them by topic and make it easier for your fans to navigate through them!
And by the way you can also extract questions from social media. Whenever you answer a question you should sent a quick reply to the person that asked the question notifying him or her that you answered it at the following link…

There are several reasons for this process:

1. For your fans it is really great and interesting content and they will visit your homepage more frequently. Especially because you also have several updates.
2. You don’t have to answer same questions several times. Which saves you time!
3. It shows that you actually answer to questions (especially if you post the date of the question!)
4. it is better than answering on facebook! because you controll the content and people are on your homepage (where one can also find your shop!)
5. it is content around your band name that will make your page also relevant for longtail queries for search queries. Which will in turn bring more natural traffic to your page.
6. Since you answer the question as a response it it still a pretty personal way to communicate.
7. you can later on refere to what you wrote!

I have seen an author of a book doing something similar 3 years ago and it worked perfect. She just answered 5 or 6 questions a month. I am excited to see what my bandmates from In Legend think about this idea!
By the way I am doing nothing else here in this blog. Earlier days if I had an idea I sent an mail to In Legend and later we discussed the idea and eather followed it or threw it away. That is time consuming. By blogging my ideas they are available for the future. If in Legend can’t follow the idea hopefully other people and bands find it useful! This is is a philosophy! The internet has shown in many great examples that open source and openess in general works amazingly fine!
The whole topic is by the way part of Customer relation management! I have never learned that in theory. So if you have some great resources on CRM (especially in music) I’ll be happy to get your reading recommendations.

Quick answer: “where to upload your music”:

• You upload all of your music to the internet.
• It is your best asset and marketing tool. Nothing will help more to attract fans
• But you don’t upload it everywhere. You only upload it on your website.

There might be exceptions to the rule but the fact of the matter ist that your music is the best content you have. Why woud you want to put it to some other site and increase that sites value?
In fact everything I describe here works even better if you give your music away as a download

Explainations

If there is one thing your fan is most certainly interested from you it is probably your music. On the other side you are – or at least should be – interested in talking to your fans. Myspace became so popular because it was the first more or less legal spaces where fans could listen to music. Great for the founders but what about the musicians? There have been complaints that myspace wasn’t paying royalties for the music…
Look at the following graphic by http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/ and understand the flow of money and value chain in music industry.

Even though you don’ tmake money directly when streaming from your site. You give away user data something much more valueable if your music is being streamed on other sites (no matter if they pay you royalties like last.fm and spotify or not just like our good old friend Facebook!)
You don’t belief how valueable user data are? Remember Google one of the most valuable companies in the world has business models around user data and making 30 billion $ per year of it.
Of course having music on other sites might lead some of the customers from those sites to get to know your music but let us have a look at the numbers and understand the potentials of streaming the music yourself and making profit of the data.

Having music on your page results in huge benefit and sales opportunities

From the image we saw 1.5 Mio. listens on last.fm are equivelent to selling and distributing your music just by yourself to 143 people. Let us see how many sales 1.5 Mio. streams on your homepage should produce once you start a conversion with the people streaming your music.
Let us assume the player on your homepage allows a user to stream 2 or 3 songs right away but asks him to register before he streams more music. Since you also needed to be registered with last.fm let us assume that the 1.5 Mio streams really came from people who registered on your site! Also assume that next to the player are several shopping opportunities for merchandise and cds.

50’000 Fans produce 1.5 Mio streams

According to Lady Gagas Last.fm profile 2.389.882 fans produced 122.908.193 streams. This means 51 streams per fan. With the In Legend facebook app I recorded about 10 Streams per registered fan. Let us take the average of 30 streams per registered fan. Under this assumption 1.5 Mio streams are produced by 50’000 registered fans!

50’000 fans streaming music in your page can result in sales of 28’400 $

To understand this let us talk about conversion rates in online marketing. For selling Ballads n Bullets I have experienced conversionrates around 4% which is not to high for online marketing but still reasonable.
4% of 50’000 fans = 2’000 cd’s your fans should buy. If you earn $8 per CD because you distribute it yourself this makes you earn 16’000 $ which is about 14 times more than your royalties at last.fm
If you ditribute via amazon you will get additionally comissions for the other purchases of users. In this amount of purchases you should earn 7,5 % comission on amazon. From my experience about only 1/3 of your amazon sales come from your music. So you can add another 7.5% of 32’000 $ which is 2’400 $
Let us assume the conversionrate on merchandise is half the one from your cd. On merch you should also have earnings of 10$ ==> 10’000 $ of merchandise earnings
Result: 16’000$ (CD) + 2’400$ (Amazon Comission) + 10’000$ (merchandise) = 28’400 $ earnings!
Do you see how much potential you give to other sites if they have your music or videos! I did not include selling tour tickets or increased benefits in search engine optimization and other options for Customer Relation Management!

Conclusion

To me facebook seems to be highly overrated and overvalued. Our sales would have been much less If we did not have a great customer relation management / Newsletter and homepage. Maybe I should call this thing the facebook bubble! What is your experience?

History of Facebook and StudiVZ

So in Germany we there was this Facebook clone – let’s call it StudiVZ – starting in late 2005. Due to the fact that hardly anyone knew of Facebook and StudiVZ started some great word of mouth marketing (and stole the entire design from Facebook) it spread very quickly and became THE social network in Germany. In 2007 / 2008 no one would have imagined how the most popular German Website could ever fall back. StudiVZ (being aquired by a traditional media company) tried to make advertising dollars. While Facebook started to gain real social network know how. Not surprisingly Facebook passed by StudiVZ within a couple of months while 2010.

The Experiment: How good is the user search on social networks?

A must have feature of every social networking site is the user search. So I wanted to test how good does the user search on both sites work. (already knowing that Facebook would easily win this battle) I thought of a person with a very common name that is not a friend of mine on ether of these social networking sites.
After a little bit of thinking I came to Sebastian Jung. On Facebook as well as on StudiVZ he is registered with his real Name. (along with about 140 other Sebastian Jungs in Germany) Sebstian was in my grade in high school together with 130 other students. I hardly know him.

Search for Sebastian Jung on StudiVZ:

Typing his name in StudiVZ brings up his profile to the 4th position. Lucky me that he has recently updated his StudiVZ profile which is to my knowledge the variable the user search results are sorted by. If he hadn’t done this he would have disappeared somewhere between those 140 other Sebstian Jung’s that have a StudiVZ profile with the same name.

Search for Sebstian Jung on Facebook:

Typing his name into Facebook search immidiately shows his profile on the first position. In my case this is particular interesting but let us first explore why Facebook does so well.

How does Facebook user search rank the results?

Of course the exact algorithm is secrete but the idea is easy. As everyone knows we can measure the distance between to people in a social network by the shortest path of people between those two people. Uff. Shortest path?!? What does this mean?
For Sebastian Jung and me this shortest path would be of length 1 since I have some friend from my old school that is a friend of Sebastian Jung. Which in turn means there is one person between Sebastian Jung an me.
For our German Chancellor and me the distance would probably be 3 (wild guess) but I think you get the point. So what facebook does is to sort all the Sebastian Jungs on the result Page according to their distance from me. Pretty smart isn’t it? But Facebook is probably even using a little bit more information. Let us assume I have 4 common friends with this Sebastian Jung and maybe 1 common friend with another Sebastian Jung. The distance in both cases would be 1. But the one I have more common friends with is still probably more relevant to me and will most probably be shown first.

Oh and why is this particular interesting for my case?

You can call me paranoid or something but I am still afraid that facebook knows to much about me if I tell them more about my friendships. That’s why I decided to have 0 friends on Facebook. Obviously Facebook is not only using actual friendships that exist but also the 120 friendshiprequests I have received so far and other knowledge (maybe people have uploaded my email address together with their address book) Anyway this experiment show that my fear obviously has a reason but it also shows that I clearly failed to protect my most sensitive data from Facebook.

Conclusion:

1. Still I am very convinced that Facebook’s success is due to the fact that these little things just silently work perfect in the background producing great user satisfaction.
2. As I always say. You cannot steal an idea on the Internet. If you don’t understand the Idea you might have a short success but then you’ll fail because your product will just not be as good as your competitors product
3. If you want to be successful on the Internet don’t focus on selling ads and making money in the first place. Look what the big players have been doing! Focus on user satisfaction. If your users are happy I am pretty sure the money and reward will come to you!
4. Even though the pages look a like and StudiVZ is still copying features from Facebook they oviously don’t understand the essence of these features and what exactly makes them great. Otherwise after 5 years of operations they would be able to have a good running user search which should be the kernel of any social networking service.
5. Much to learn and improve for my own social network Metalcon that has a crappy search function over all (-:
6. 6. I still haven’t digged deeper into the EdgeRank Algorithm

I am happy to read about your comments and thoughts as well as your experiments to user search with Facebook and other social networks. What other (technical (!)) reasons do you think make Facebook the superior social network in comparison to sites like myspace, orkut, studiVZ, bebo,… ?

Tie your fans to your website:

There is nothing worse than an artist putting a news on his website and thinking that now every fan of him in the world has received the information. If your website has just a news section and some other static content (like discography, some pictures and maybe even a mp3 snipped) your fans will not be informed just because you put some message in your news system! They just don’t visit your website!
Of course your band’s name might be Metallica or Rammstein or your name might even be Lady Gaga (in this case, thanks for reading, I like your music!) In this unlikely case your reputation is so high that putting a news on your page is sufficient for other people to quickly talk about it and reach media and getting spread. But let’s be honest even if you play the main stage of Wacken Festival your the reach of some news on your website will probably not be on all webzines within a couple of minutes or hours.
So you have to make your website more interesting to tie your fans to it. Good luck this is easy to do! Just make your page interactive. Some suggestions:

• Have guest book.
• Give your fans the possibility to post comments on every single subpage of your site.
• Run a message board
• Have some contests
• allow your fans to upload photos on your site
• allow your fans to upload videos on your site
• you can not only embade your youtube videos on your page but also include all the comments and ratings via youtube api.

Notice that interacting users also create user generated content on your website which increases the amount of content on your website and there by is great for your search engine optimization. For more info on band page seo please read part 1 of this series.
So you have implemented all that stuff? Great! But you can do even better. You will realize that some fans will be tied to your website discovering new information very quickly. But the information will still miss a lot of your fans. So it is better to establish a connection with every fan. On the Internet this connection can be established in several ways:

• collect the email address of your fans
• try to make the fan become your fan on Facebook
• run and operate a Twitter channel (with more content than 5 tweets per year)
• add your fans on MySpace and other minor social networks
• send newsletters to web magazines and make interviews with them

Even though all of these methods are important and I recommend you to do all of them. There is one single method that is definitely the best.

Have them sign to your newsletter and collect their email address.

Yes I know Facebook is much cooler but remember not long ago MySapce was cool. Today you are sitting on your notebook reading my blog having 100’000 inactive myspace friends in your basement and don’t know what to do with them… Imagine you would have had only 50’000 email addresses! You could still inform your fans about new cool stuff.
The best thing about it: You tried to tie people to your site but some people still don’t come back frequently. Informing them of an update per mail, thereby pulling them back to your site gives you a new chance to tie them to your site!
Ok so now you want to collect email addresses and you don’t know why. Well there are several possibilities:

• newsletter registration form on every subpage!
• Ask for an email address once your fan is interacting on your site
• make riffles
• make a contest
• or if you have read my article “Share your Music! but do it the right way!” you might even consider to exchange some of your music for a valid email address
• run a web shop and let your fans purchase merchandise and music from your site and not from amazon (you earn more in this way anyway)
• Even allowing users to login with open authentication methods like Facebook it is usually possible to download and save the email address.

Let me clarify my statement. I do not encourage you to not use Facebook or other tools to interact with your fans. But in the center of your activities should always be your website and your newsletter. This is stable! Facebook could change its policies or even become unpopular. You don’t want to rely on someone else or even make advertising for Facebook with your own brand and music! So once your website is done correctly you can expand your activities to other places such as Facebook, MySpace and so on.
And one last word: Don’t give the email address to anyone else. Don’t sent Spam and don’t sent emails to fans that wish not to receive information. Always give them the option to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Summary:

Your Website exists to inform your fans about your music, upcoming concerts, releases and other stuff related to your band. If you just have some static pages you can also stop having a webpage and stay with myspace. Alestorm is great example on how to not do it. For the first two releases they only had a myspace profile and now when you google alestorm you end up on the kind of dead myspace page.
Even though you are a band and popular and people actually are interested in you you still need to have an excellent website. User interaction is one way to make your website more interesting another way is to establish a communication line with your fans to inform them about changes!
So how do you take care of your fans? Tell me via comment if you think I am missing some important points!

4 different approaches:

We have seen all kinds of different reactions. The most frequent reaction is anger and the close attempt to sue everyone who violates against ones copy right. I will call this reaction the Metallica approach.
There is also what I call the promo approach which would include to give away one or two songs or make mp3’snippets or streams available.
Another attempt is to gain some promotion and make the music one composed and produced available through download. Last.fm advices bands to give away mp3’s on last.fm as free download for promotional reasons. In some cases I have even seen something like giving away the music via download on myspace! Since I don’t know of any famous band going for this way of free download I will call it the last.fm approach.
The last approach which I will call the Radiohead / In Legend approach is my favorite. The complete music is made available to the fans on the artists homepage. It is free of charge but the band will gain something different.
So let us discuss each approach.

The Metallica approach:

This approach might work for a band of this size. But as stated in the introduction. Even Metallica will not change the people. Just going out ignoring and hating the Internet takes away a lot of great marketing opportunities. As stated for a band with Metallica’s reputation this might work. Every information that Metallica releases will quickly spread on the Internet by magazines and fan communities. Metallica doesn’t need much promotion or customer relation management.

The Promotion approach:

Showing snippets to the fans or making songs available for a music stream is certainly a good way to attract fans and tell them about an upcoming album release. There is certainly nothing wrong with this approach. But it misses a great shot. The band never knows who is listening to the song. The band will never have the chance to talk to these people again. This is similar with views on youtube videos. Of course it is nice if a band has some youtube videos with more than a million views. But one thing is for certain. Once the video has been watched the fan is first of all gone and the band doesn’t know who it was. The only thing that remains is hope that the person liked it and might buy something in future. This leads directly to the Last.fm approach.

The Last.fm approach:

This approach is rather dumb. Last.fm really tells the artist that he would gain some advantage if he made his music available to download on last.fm. Yes of course making music available for download will attract people. In this case it will attract people to the Last.fm website. The band had the unique chance to start a conversation with the person that is being interested in his music. And what happens instead? Due to its great content (which would for example be your music) Last.fm is improving its reputation. Of course having a lot of listener’s on last.fm can be good promo for a band but I think there are much more effective ways and the band is not helping itself but rather last.fm.

The Radiohead / In Legend approach:

In this case the music is made available at no charge on the bands own homepage. After downloading the music the fan is asked weather he wants to donate some money. In scientific papers one can find that Radiohead made a fortune from the donations after people downloaded the music and afterwards the Radiohead album ranked #1 in the charts in UK, France and US. So it turned out to go pretty well for Radiohead.
After I consulted In Legend, they took this approach even further. The first in Legend release was not only made available for download on the In Legend Homepage. It was also mandatory for the fan to register to be able to download the music. This is a very smart move. Instead of the Last.fm approach the band now has a direct connection to everyone that is interested in the music. It is no surprise that a newcomer like In Legend was able to build a strong fan community on its own message board with more than 10’000 posts in 6 month. In Legend could simply inform its fans that the message board existed. Within a short time In Legend fans created their own merchandise as well as poster and flayer to distribute them in bars and music venues.
Furthermore there are hardly any torrents for In Legends music on the Internet and if you search for In Legends music on Google you will find In Legend’s very own homepage ranking number one.
Next article in this category I will write about search engine optimization for a band’s homepage. But I want to quote and explain a statement from Google about search engine optimization to justify my believe in the Radiohead / In Legend approach:

The best method for great search engine optimization is still to produce and publish great content on your website!

This means that Google decides how websites rank by the popularity of the website on the web. So if your content is great people will like it and talk about it on the web. This will in turn increase ones search engine rankings. Search engine rankings are closely related to popularity and reputation on the web. The same is true for music. If you are a famous musician your music should definitely count as great content. If you publish your music on your homepage, not only will your search engine rankings rise but with it your publicity. And if you where smart enough to follow the In Legend approach your fans will love you and you can talk to them forever inform them at low cost about upcoming tours, albums or merchandise.
If you are a band, label or band manager I encourage you to share your music with the fans. You can only win and those who love and collect CD’s will still buy them. Anyway most money is earned with concerts and merchandise nowadays and for success in those fields you will need fans, fans and more fans. So if you like the idea and need help in setting up your homepage or want to understand more precisely what to do feel free to contact me or leave a comment.