During Q&A I also gave a litte background on the actuall question but I want to be a bit more detailed in my blog:

• So yes I wish the “open web” to be a human right.
• And I also think it is really important to protect the copyrights of artists, musicians and other people creating stuff. Working together with In Legend I really know how hard it is for a musician to survive and it is really important that he gets paid for what he does and shares.
• BUT: the discussion is always an “eather – or” discussion and goes in the wrong direction! Bastian Emig from In Legend is very open minded about new ways to use the web working for the musician. Already in the plenary session Tim pointed out that he did not invent the Web to harm the record industry. But it is rather the record industry that refuses to think about new business models and just wishes everything to stay in the old ways which used to work quite well for them. 
• I made the experience that a band still needs to have a record label. You don’t get booked without the label. You don’t get articles in big print mags. The label gives you trust within the industrie and without that you are not seen by many people. And so on…
• But just in my experience I see that the record label does big harm to a musician. As a member of this musicband I want to share our music on the web. Since there is piracy – which I cant change – I just have to think about a way how I could profit from it. Obviously by sharing the music myself I can increase my reach. This could significantly increase my chances for direct marketing (making the record label kind of obsolate) and this is what the labels seem to be afraid of. The web offers several huge opportunities for musicians to become recognized and an established act. But Labels own the licences and block musicians in doing smart and wise moves on the web.
• I realize this problem exists due to the fact that labels have a monopoly on the product and too much power but pretending to protect the interests of the artists. Thereby hiding the fact that they are just fighting for their very own interests which do not neccessarily correlate  whitch those from artists.

Here my question / point

It is not about copyright vs free / open internet. It is much more about a new model of copyright that can coexist with a free internet. In This new model licence owners (e.g. the labels) wouldn’t build those exclusive monopolies giving them such a high power. I asked what can be done to establish a new way of thinking about copyright. Since it really does not make sense that itunes gets 50% royalties for a digital distribution that is almost free of cost which I could easily run myself!
First of all – to my surprise – this won me a big applause from the audience which happened very rarely during the conference.

The full panel and discussion can be found at: http://www2012.wwwconference.org/media/videos/keynote-neelie-kroes/
Gille – to whom the question was originally directed – who is very friendly to the record industry answered some stuff I don’t even remember but he was basically stumbling around.
But then two really great answers came along:
Neelie:
“We are working on this and we see that the biggest issue is the record industrie. They pretend to protect the artists and they are not! We need legislation but maybe we need new forms of legislation. Models that worked well in the past may not serve our needs in todays world. I agree with you that you are pointing to the most cruicial point in this discussion.”
Me being totally satisfied with her answer sat down but Tim Berners Lee wanted to say something:
“You know it! Think of a world that you want. Just imagine it!

• What would be the distribution? 
• what would be the user interface? 
• What would be the processes? 
• What third parties would be involved.

Go out and build it! Talk to the people here. Install an apache server and just go geek and make it happen!”

what a great statement!

It is always nice to have ideas and see solutions to problems. And yes you can always wine around and do nothing. But as a matter of the fact right now the web is still open an free! The technology is there. It really is just a matter of going out an building it. This is what I always said: This is why big traditional media companies didn’t built the youtube, google, facebooks, twitters, flickr,… applications in this world. 
This statement gave me a lot of confidence to stronger believe in my ideas and even one day later I am really feeling that this statement will change my future life. It is really interesting that a man – who I value a lot – tells me something I always felt, hardly did and hits right a way to one of my weekest points! 
After the sesion I got my copy of Tim Berners Lee’s book signed and he asked me to send him an email once my site is up. It is really amazing to receive this kind of feedback by such a great person.
That was one of the most inspiring moments in my life! So anyone who wants to join me going geek on the next generation music web app is very welcome to contact me or leave a comment! There really is a lot of stuff in my mind and I have already dreamt a lot and seen what is possible…

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!

• 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!

Rammstein SEO vs In Legend SEO

First have an impression why this is actually important! watch in fullscreen

50 % of queries for our band name

Almost 50% of all search requests that lead to our page is search for our band name i.e. “in legend” the landing page of course would be www.inlegend.de. Quite interesting is that it doesn’t rank #1 due to the fact that legend is a highly amigious keyword. Anyway the absolut number of clicks that come from this query indicates how popular the band is.
All the other search requests distribute in the longtail but yesterday I took the time and grouped them by hand:

22% of all queries for illegal downloads

Antoher 22% of all search requests are searches for illegal downloads. In most cases the landing page is optimzed to the keyword
ballads n bullets mp3 download by in legend
On that page (and also in this article!) we spread link power to the following higher specialized long tail illegal download pages:
Rapidshare, torrents, filesharing, warez, emule, bit torrent, streaming, megaupload, sendspace, direct download link, p2p, edonkey, napster, megashare, ftp
If people search for this they will in any case find some chances to listen all our songs in an online stream. We also offer them verious ways to share email adress or become facebook fans. c.f. http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/how-to-take-care-of-your-fans-%E2%80%93-the-perfect-band-website-part-2/
So if you want to help a musician to fight illegal downloads you might want to share this post

17% of all queries for In Legend lyrics

Next 17% of all searches go for lyrics of our songs. Instead of going to some lyric portal the fan is taken to the website of our band where we also offer merchandise, albums and have the chance to start a communication with the fan.
note that each song has its own page optimzied to the corresponding keyword.
01. Heaven Inside [4:23]
02. Pandemonium [3:50]
03. Elekbö [4:44]
04. At Her Side [3:29]
05. Vortex [3:40]
06. Life Is Up To You [3:22]
07. The Healer (Inclusive Remedy) [5:56]
08. Yue [5:01]
09. Soul Apart [3:06]
10. Stardust (feat. Inga Scharf of Van Canto) [3:59]
11. A Hanging Matter [4:40]
12. Prestinate [4:01]
13. Heya [4:31]
14. Universe [3:24]

10% for the Longtail

this alreads sums up to 90% of our search traffic!
The rest would be some longtail keywords. Almost all of them lead to our message board.
I am pretty satisfied with this result. Though I am still amazed that every one out of five queries is about illegal downloads. Especially if you consider that a lot of searchers might not even click to the official band website even though it ranks high! Which means that the black number should be much higher. It is nice to see that my theory according to which most bands throw away potential by not optimizing their page for lyrics and downloads holds true!

What do you need for an youtube video

• a song
• a camera team (and an idea for the video)
• someone to cut the video

Well these things where already mandetory in an offline world so I won’t discuss them any further.

What is important while uploading the video?

First of all it is important to understand how your video will spread through the Internet

1. On webzines if you contact them an tell them about your video
2. It will pass on from person to person once they find, watch and like it
3. It appears as a similar video besides other videos
4. Via search functions (be it google search or the video search of youtube)

The first two points are mainly your responsability. Once your video is great and you contact a lot of magzines and give them a press release the video might appear on a lot of websites. If your song and video are really great people might spread the word. But be warned everyone is talking about becoming viral. If all the music videos out there became viral everyone would be constantly watching music videos. So don’t forget that becoming viral hardly ever happens.
The 3rd and 4th point are your responsability. To some degree youself can decide where your video is supposed to appear. Search and recommendation engines are responsible to battle with these two points. But machines can undersand text documents like websites much better in comparison to rich media content like your video. That is why the algorithms on these machines probably pay a lot of attention to the tags you use while tagging the video, the title you put in and the description text. Of course they will probably also look at the websites on which the video is embedded and analyse what users this video watched an which other videos these users watched.
Anyway: your video should have the following title: “Bandname – Songname on Recordname” because this is what people are most likely to search for.

A short discussion on cover songs and guest musicians

Doing coversongs is by the way a great method to gain publicity. Look at the Van Canto videos. They have covered many bands and have those names in their title. If you search for “wishmaster” in youtube you easily find the van canto cover of wishmaster! Imagine how often people search for music by a famous musician in comparison to your music!
I did the work for you and just looked it up for Wishmaster and Van Canto:
On last.fm 317.207 people listen to the record wishmaster by Nightwish. On the other hand only 49.164 people listen to Van Canto! So you can do the math and decide what kind of songs you want to upload for promo reasons.
here you go with a title for a song with a guest musician: “your band’s name – songname feat. musician’s name from his band’s name”

illegal content on your videos

Most songs are on youtube in some form. Be happy about the fact that people like your music! A lot of artists wish they had so much attention. My article Why open source is the way to go holds perfectly as my contribution on copy rights in music anyway – also compare my article on sharing music. So what can you do to profit from the fact that most songs are on youtube anyway?
Upload them yourself. Use good tags, nice pictures, and provide the lyrics. Promote them! Put them on your search engine optimizied pages and ask people to connect with you and buy the album or donate for your music.
THINK ABOUT IT!
If you are Lady Gaga and your videos are being watched million times and some one else put them on youtube you don’t have as much benefit as they are watched on YOUR youtube channel. Where people could become subscribers or where you are able to embed AND change messages for your tour / album within the videos.!
So do you really want to be angry if someone else puts your videos on youtube. A very nice example is Blind Guardian. About one year ago they uploaded all their videos to their youtube channel. But the videos where already out there and other videos already made rank1 in search for videos. Again algorithms are just not that smart and the user doesn’t care as long as he sees the video!

new forms of marketing

This is the best part of the message. have a look at this great video (thogh it has nothing to do with music!) and realize that you have to act differently on the internet.

Understand?
Well here is a list of things you can do to be interesting and attract people on youtube if you are a musician:

1. Fans love interviews: make a video interviews. Have your fans ask you questions and answer them in a video
2. medleys (album introduction)
3. have a prelistening session of your album. You can tune into every song and discuss the song. What do you need print  media or similar for? You can reach your audiance in a much more interesting way
4. live videos: Ask your fans to tape your show. You will easily get a 20 + cam mix of a song. This will create much more feeling and will be much cheaper than any professional music video
5. Record short stories,
6. Interact with the world. Remember what old spice – even though not a band – did? If not have a look at my upcoming blog article on old spice.
7. Make competitions: Ask your fans to create funny videos using your songs. Don’t be afraid that the quallity might be bad. (if the quality is bad it won’t spread on the web)

Be creative be fun and especially forget about the old business models! On the internet you want to be open!

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.