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

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.

The Facts From an FTC Point of view

• Google is the leading search engine on the net.
• Companies and the FTC seem to believe that there is a bias. Google seem to display their own products in the search results more frequently than similar content from competitors (e.g. Maps vs. Yelp or Youtube vs. Vimeo).
• The combination is considered to an abuse of Google’s market share in search.

Google’s Reaction

You can read the official answer to these accusations on the Google blog. They don’t start a discussion about it but basically state their noble goals and achievements:

• Google supports open standards and open source
• Google does not try to lock the users in. Instead, contrary to most companies on the web, they have the data liberation front to give users the chance to escape from Google products and take their data with them.
• Competition on the web is hard and the alternatives are only one click away
• They believe in “user first” and create search in a way that satisfies the user
• Using Google is a choice. If they don’t put their users first, they will lose them.

You can find more detailed information on Google’s perspective here.

My Opinion.

1. First of all, Google products like Youtube belong to the most relevant products on the web. I am pretty sure an algorithm without any bias would rank resources from Youtube first and videos from other websites second.
2. Additionally, since search for rich media content like videos is much harder than text retrievel, it makes sense to use all the information you have for solving issues regarding information retrieval. So it is obvious that finding the relevant videos from Youtube is much easier for Google than finding the most relevant videos from other websites.
3. Google is a service offering a direction to their customers. These directions come fast and in outstanding quality. That is why Google became a world wide market leader in search. If their search results were biased and they would put their own products to the user, they would take a huge risk. If the user didn’t like the search result, they would quickly lose him as a customer.
4. Assume the accusation is true. It is still Google’s good right to do that. Web search is a very hard problem. Google is a normal enterprise. There is no law that web search has to be the most objective search that is possible. Especially since there is no universal truth or ranking to compare with anyway.

The internet is one of the hardest markets to compete in. If you change your product for the worse, the alternative is indeed only one click away. Therefor, antitrust investigations on the internet make almost no sense. By creating an extraordinary product, focusing on users needs and having high ideals, Google was able not only to remain successful over a decade, but also to continue growing. This would be impossible with a dishonest product on the web. So dear FTC, before chasing Google with antitrust investigations, I suggest to chase some other companies.
Yahoo: Look at their portal. Yahoo was the leading search engine before Google was launched. After a while, they started pushing a lot of additional products on their users. Many of them are still out there and produce good revenue streams for Yahoo. (Editorial News, Mail, …)
Facebook: They mislead everyone who has a fan page by not communicating clearly that having a thousand fans does not really offer the opportunity to communicate with all of them or their friends. Also, look a the Open Graph API. This API is everything but open. This name is one of the most misleading marketing devices I have seen in my life.
Microsoft: Internet explorer is still one of the most widely used browsers in the world. Talk to any technically savvy person and you will realize that this is not about a good product but rather because Microsoft abused their reach. By the way, in Google Chrome’s search box, you can choose right away which search engine should be your default. They don’t force you to use Google.
Facebook / Microsoft + Bing: If you find a person by searching for them on Bing and that person happens to be on Facebook, Bing offers you the option to send them a message directly without opening Facebook. Look at this video and decide for yourself. Remember Microsoft invested 240 $ to buy 1.6% of Facebook shares.

Apple: The popularity of the iPod allowed them to create the iPhone, a product locking in people. You cannot use certain standard products and software on it because Apple doesn’t want to pay the licence fee. You get locked in iTunes. There is almost no way to export your music out of iTunes to other systems or devices.
Ebay / Paypal: Well yes, Paypal solved problems. But was it neccesary to market it this aggressively on ebay?
Disclaimer: For all the companies and products I mentioned – except Facebook – I still think it is their right to do what I stated here. To quote a famous man: “It’s ok. Let the market decide. It is called competition.” (Eric Schmidt)
offtopic: I talked about how Google is not locking in users. Ther is a funny video from the onion network about this topic which I want to share with you:

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!

1. I am reading Eli Parisers book about the filterbubble. I don’t want to review it until I am done which happens hopefully somewhen soon. But it has a connection to the other thing I am doing
2. I am promoting my Band’s first album ballads n bullets that just came out

I was able to convince my band that money invested in Google Adwords and Facebook is probably a better deal than spending money in print campaigns. Online is much more efficiant to reach our target group and introduce them to our music. So far so good! But sometimes you discover the worst or boldest things while doing something.

Some Background

As we all know facebook is filtering your social newsstream. Recently we did an update and send a reminder to all our fans on facebook (2000) and reminded them about the upcoming release. We got 2500 Impressions and received 100 clicks resulting in 6 sales. Not so cool!
Right now – just by my experience of watching impressions in facebook and several websites und seeing how much traffic comes from facebook to our homepage I am about to belief that Facebook counts ten impressions to your status update if one user visits his facebook news stream 10 times and was therby ten times able to see your news update.
Apperantly it seems that I am not mistaking with my guess. Have a look at Tim Wilson’s post on how Impressions are counted on Facebook:
http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2010/01/27/facebook-measurement-impressions-from-status-updates/
Let us think again what it means to have 2500 Impressions of a status update. Could it be possible that these 2500 impressions have been generated only by a couple of users – let us say less than 200?

See how bold facebook is!

While booking ads facebook is offering me a deal that made me sit down and look twice! I am now able to buy visibility of my own status updates in the social news stream. If I pay for each click my status update receives Facebook will not only show the update to all of our fans. But they will also show the highly filtered interactions of them to their friends!
To make buying advertising even more attractive Facebook is telling me that our friend of a friend network has about 206’000 users that could be reached with the status updates of my band. Up till today my status updates only reached a visibility of 5500 impressions. The 206’000 that facebook offers me is only 40 times as much. Assuming that every user produces only one impression and we know that a user produces many more impressions.
A factor of 40 or higher is an amazingly huge number. Probably the number every marketing person has in mind when he decides that everyone has to be on facebook now!
Isn’t that insane! Facebooks user experience suggests us to be there because we get think that we get this incredible high reach. but the reality is that we get nothing but our premium customers if we don’t pay facebook. Facebook should pay me that I produce such a great content on facebook!

What should I say? It is a curse!

Everyone jumps on the facebook train with the totally wrong expectations. No not everyone and all of their friends see your advertising and status updates!
Of course if something really sepcial happens facebook really makes you viral but most the time you have no advanage by using facebook in comparison to other marketing methods. Especially the only one that is winning always is facebook. I have hardly seen any brand in the world that was printed and promoted on so many flyer / poster / and mags and even tv commercials. Amazingly facebook did not even pay one Cent to appear on all these media. Everyone pushes their own facebook channel – hoping to become viral – instead of pushing their own brand and thinking about how to really bring out the brand and do marketing or thinking about how to make a great product.

Everyone seems to expect miracles from Facebook

Hello everybody! Think about it! The world wide GNP won’t grow just because everyone is now using facebook! It is only facebook that is growing!
By the way I was warning everyone about the fact that you should focus on your website and not on facebook in one of my articles about the perfect band website. It is just to risky to relay on facebook. First it was great. now it is big and policies are changed over and over again!

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?

What is the idea?

Recently I was searching for a book a friend recommended to me. I wasn’t sure weather I wanted to buy or not. So I did what anyone would probably do. I left the store keeping in mind that I could later decide weather I want to spend the money. Today – about one week later – I was searching for something completely different browsing on a website and realized the advertising of the exact same book by a store I visited before. Interestingly the web shop was a German one and the ad was displayed on an English speaking American website. That was kind of scary. So what happened here? I was looking at the source code and figured out that Criteo (not Google!) is running the Ad server behind it. A quick scan on their homepage lead to the following video:

I think the idea is very clear. The problem with this issue as usual is privacy so let’s dig into it.

privacy concerns of Criteo

As we saw on the video the whole system works – as we could have guessed – by setting a cookie.

“A cookie, also known as a web cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie, is a piece of text stored on a user’s computer by their web browser. A cookie can be used for authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing text data. A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs containing bits of information, which may be encrypted for information privacy and data security purposes. The cookie is sent as a field in the header of the HTTP response by a web server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. As text, cookies are not executable. Because they are not executed, they cannot replicate themselves and are not viruses. However, due to the browser mechanism to set and read cookies, they can be used as spyware (see zombie cookie and evercookie for more details). Anti-spyware products may warn users about some cookies because cookies can be used to track computer activity—a privacy concern, later causing possible malware.”
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

So the whole discussion can be reduced to the cookie discussion. Well any website uses cookies to enhance the websites usability. This does not mean that I think there is no problem. but please be realistic. If you browse a web shop the shop – at least if it is a professional one – will save information about your browsing behavior. Even though you can be recognized by the cookie the whole process is still very anonymous. Once you delete the cookie (and Criteo gives you the explicit possibility on their website) retargeted ad’s cannot reach you because you won’t be recognized. The only thing Criteo will probably still save about you is your browsing behavior on that very shop you visited in the first place. This data is not linked to your name or anything that could identify you.
The privacy of this service is much higher or better than Facebook. So if you are using Facebook without fear you shouldn’t be afraid of Criteo’s retargeting advertising system.

How will this change the online ad market?

Google could easily install a similar ad system. There are probably several good reasons not to do it.

• Adsense is running very good and Google has the competitive advantage of being market leader.
• Customers have to be on your web shop first before you can retarget the product.
• Due to the more efficient advertising conversion rates will probably rise. If the cost for the advertisement stays constant the publisher (Google and their publishers network) would loose on its profit margin.

The last one is exactly where I see a competitive threat to the Googleconomy. The advertising is more efficient. If I was an advertiser. i would most certainly give it a try. The problem with this system is that it is hard to use with new products.
The whole discussion leads to the question why doesn’t Amazon install a similar system? They have a huge knowledge about customers interest and a wide network of publishers in their partner program. It would be easy to deliver highly targeted ads and improve the user experience and conversion rates of their affiliate program. I guess Amazon is concerned about privacy. Also Amazon is the market leader. So obviously they are not doing to many mistakes.
What is your oppinion about this startup and their product?

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?

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!