Over the last few years, MySpace has been loved and hated at the same time. Many users have loved that MySpace allowed their users to have full rein of the HTML coding on their pages and as such, could have custom layouts and change the design of their profile. That same functionality has created a huge traffic jam of slow page loads, over-stimulated flash and tired layouts. While it was very personal, most profiles became a jumbled mess. Beyond that, MySpace’s CRM (content management system) has become known to be somewhat of a nightmare. A while back, personal pages got a new look that streamlined profile pages into a cleaner, faster loading experience. Last week, Myspace rolled out something simpler for it’s music profiles.

Enter The NEW MySpace Music Profile

Think of this new MySpace as a more tightly controlled version of it’s old self. While you might think that is will stifle your creative powers in the land of MySpace, overall this may just be the saving grace of the social network. They absolutely put a lot of careful thought into creating a new platform that would be easy for an average person to create a good looking profile. At the same time, it also has an open framework for a great design firm to create a very dynamic fan experience.

It appears MySpace took a look at most of the popular profile layout customizations and created a clean, module based profile. While it does take away from some of the unique profiles of the past, this streamlined and uniform concept will help bring back some brand awareness for the social network, add some ease of use for the profile owner, and create a more focused interaction with the fan viewing it (think Facebook).

A great way to think of it is that MySpace switched from a PC to a Mac. While you may not be able to tinker with it as much, a lot of the idiotic issues with the system (ie PC) are a thing of the past because of the more tightly controlled, and dare I say beautiful build and design of the new system (ie Mac).

Here is a run down of some of the new features.

•  A cleaner and more simple look
•  Upload more songs, and feature up to 25 songs on your profile
•  Dozens of new themes, including some by Shepard Fairey’s Studio One
•  The Ability to create a custom marquee type header (which even allows you to embed a video)
•  Easier navigation
•  Your design theme carries over to your photos, videos, and other pages

So far the standard on the new profile layout has been set by Lady Antebellum (click on the image to see their page) They have created a clean but feature filled profile including a video in the new expandable “Marquee” section.

As far as the voice of the people goes, it seems that the chatter from blog comments across the web are a mixed bag. Those who have become accustomed to the simple look of Facebook seem to enjoy the new profile design while die hard MySpacers seem to loath the new look, hate that it is “a Facebook wannabe” and generally think it will be the death of the site. The professional design and marketing community generally see the new layout to be a great step in the right direction by MySpace.

The one item generally disliked by most comments on the web is the block ad in the upper right hand corner of the page. While it is a bit intrusive, for the most part this is no worse then Facebook’s ads and while it is ever present on the page, it is somewhat tasteful and better then the alternatives of a large header banner. As long as the ad department keeps itself under control and does not add more of these block ads on the page, it is a happy compromise to fund the site.

Is this a game changer or “too little too late”? We have not had a lot of kind words to say about Myspace in the past couple of years. We told our clients that while it may be a ghost town, don’t jump ship yet. That may have been good advice with this reincarnation. Only time will tell and we will reserve judgment until we have converted a few of our client’s profiles over to the new look and dig deep into the guts of what is offered in this new version.

What do YOU think about the new MySpace?

About

ArtistData is a social networking and event administration tool. At it’s core ArtistData essentially helps you:

-Post your shows to your social networks, a variety of concert databases, and alert local press

-Write Blogs and News updates and post them to your sites

-Update your status on most social networks

What they say about themselves:

“ArtistData tirelessly works to give musicians more time to be creative. We’re building solutions to automate the monotonous updating of artist websites, social network profiles, concert databases, Twitter, official news feeds, iCal, local press, fan newsletters, and even tour books. When an artist updates our site, we update all their sites. Our current users save hundreds of hours, giving them more time to do what they love: create music.”

My 2 cents

We recently started testing out the ArtistData system and have been pretty happy with it so far. I have to say that I think it is much more valuable for managers, labels, and marketing companies then for the individual artist. I found that the setup process is a bit involved and when you add in the additional tools (a ton of widgets and exporting functions- many useful, some not as much) you tend to glaze over for a bit. As an event posting tool this thing ROCKS! I love it. We regularly handle posting our clients events to social networks and being able to do it once is a big stress reliever. They have a simple event widget which can be used on your website which again makes for one less thing to update.

The biggest problem with ArtistData at the moment is that you can not status update to Facebook. For some reason you can post to a personal profile, but not fan pages. This makes the status update tool pretty much useless in my opinion. Another issue is that Myspace (don’t even get me started with this doe doe bird) has changed how apps can access there events which makes ArtistData unable to post your events on that social network. As I mentioned before it does have a bit of a learning curve and setup takes some time, but if you have a manager, label, or marketing company helping you with the setup or even have them doing all of your admin, this isn’t a big deal.

Price

Sonic Bids recently acquired ArtistData and they are offering it free until September 1st. After that apparently the pricing will be integrated into a Sonic Bids package. I will take another look at this product once that all happens and let you know my thoughts.

Find It Here

www.artistdata.com

About

Fan Bridge is an Email Marketing system designed for musicians. They provide tools for your fan relationships through email, mobile, and social networking lists. Still confused? Your fans enter there email info, Fan Bridge stores the email addresses and sends helps you send out updates and newsletters to those email addresses.

What They Say About Themselves

“FanBridge makes it really easy for musicians to build their fan list, manage their fans, and then communicate with their fans across multiple channels.”

Tools for Managing Fans:

- Free import help to get your list from any format into your FanBridge account

- Sort and target campaigns by custom groups or postal code and radius

- Automatic handling of bounces, subscribes, unsubscribes, and other email technicalities

- Store nearly 20 fields of data per fan (ie: name, location, MySpace/Twitter, and notes field)

- Hosted, secure platform accessible from any internet enabled computer

- Weekly account summary reports

Tools for Getting New Fans:

- Flash or html based fan signup forms (for your MySpace/Facebook/website)

- Downloadable fan signup form for use at the merch table at shows

- Free custom subdomain (http://yourname.FanBridge.com) with signup form

Tools for Effectively Communicating with Fans:

- Send plain text and html emails, or text messages to mobile phones

- Analytics tracking for your campaigns (track clicks, opens, bounces, forwards)

- Professional looking templates for great looking campaigns (or provide your own html)

- Relationships with ISPs to make sure your messages get to inboxes, not spam folders

- Custom branded web browser toolbars (keeping your site/buy/tour links in front of fans 24/7)

- Automatic Subject Optimizer to A/B test subject lines and make your campaigns more effective

- Scheduled sending (perfect for setting up emails before going on tour)“

My 2 cents

I was really impressed on the simplicity of getting up and running with Fan Bridge. Everything is simple and straight forward, each regular task is laid out in separate tabs on the screen and it is super easy to build sign-up forms and install them into your website or social network. They give you the ability to trade emails for media (as in ‘give us your email address and we will send you a free song’) which is really the future of music marketing. Building an email campaign is pretty straight forward as they have easy to use, bug-free templates that I would feel confident having one of our clients do on their own. They also give you the option to build your own HTML emails so your graphic designer can make you a slick template to wow your fans with. They also have a tool that lets you update your Myspace, Facebook Fan Page, and Twitter all at once which seems to work better then ArtistData. So far so good on trying it out with our clients, we are even considering moving our email marketing system over to this!

My only real gripes with this system is that if you want detailed analytics you have to upgrade to a paid account.  I am not a big fan of the sign up form layouts. I totally get that they need to be easy to build for the majority of users, but when we are building marketing systems for our clients, we think the forms are pretty boring.

Price

Free for the bare-bones version, pro plans start at $9 month

Find It Here

www.fanbridge.com

About

Simply put, Root Music makes your Facebook Fan Page sparkly. It takes an otherwise white and blue, hard to customize social network into a totally engaging, fun to look at barrel of monkeys. You can connect your Sound Cloud account to stream audio and link your ArtistData account to post your gigs right on the page.

What They Say About Themselves

“So here’s the deal. There are many musicians and bands out there that need a little help. Everything from finding a place to sleep while on tour, selling their own tickets, remembering when they should be touring and keeping in touch with their fans. It’s hard to get all this stuff done and keep it organized, and that’s why managers and labels will take a big cut: because they do a lot of hard work to keep the wheels running for the band.

We are now in an age where technology will take a task that would normally take two days and make it two clicks. And that’s what at the heart of what RootMusic is. RootMusic is a professional technologically advanced bag of tools that gives -you- the control to reach your goals.

Whether you are a local band in Harrisonburg, Virginia or a big time manager, RootMusic can help give guidance and support to your end goal. So now it’s not a matter of if you can, but a matter of if you want to. You’ve got the power now, so what would you like to do? That is our mission and we believe strongly in our statement.“

My 2 cents

Can you tell from the intro that I like this thing? What’s not to like? This Facebook app is really easy to setup and if you pay for the pro version, it allows you to make a lot of cool customizations including the ability to upload your own background. The application was written really solid, so it seems to be pretty bulletproof (no Myspace like template disasters). Root Music lets you customize pretty much every detail of the page down to the color of the text. Facebook seems to be holding pretty solid as the social network of choice and having a tool like this is going to be really important to gain more fans. I highly suggest getting the pro version and updating your background often to keep your fans excited to come look at your page and see what’s new.

The only thing I would change is the ability to embed a FanBridge (or other) email sign up form on the application. At the moment, they have to go to a separate tab to signup and I don’t think that is going to be too effective.

Price

Free or $1.99 a month for the pro version

Find It Here

www.rootmusic.com

Next Time…

In my next post on this topic I will take a look at tools to gain more fans on your social network called Headliner, tell you more about a cool way to accept credit cards for your merch at shows or on the go, and examine the pro’s and con’s of some direct-to-fan sales tools.

]]> http://www.eternitemedia.com/blog/streetpromotion/freeish-tools-to-run-your-brand-easier-part-1/feed/ 0 http://www.eternitemedia.com/blog/peoplelovecds/branding-for-musicians/ http://www.eternitemedia.com/blog/peoplelovecds/branding-for-musicians/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 19:32:38 +0000 admin http://www.eternitemedia.com/blog/?p=247 What is your brand and what is branding? In the case of what I will be talking about today, your brand is your band, act, music or business and all elements that go along with it such as  designs, costumes, websites, social networks, merchandise, albums, etc  that make you marketable as a product to the public. Branding is the process of unifying all of those elements in a way that will give your fans a consistent image of what and who you are. Your core brand is your bands logo and overall identity that lets your fans know who you are and should always stay the same. For example, the band KISS and their tours, albums and merch may have had branding themes but the basic KISS brand still shows through in their logo and costumes, which is recognizable. That is not to say that it would be inappropriate to change colors, or even tweak your logo a bit from release to release but especially while you are building your fan base it would be a good idea to keep the logo and any unique identity (like KISS and their costumes) the same. That said, your branding elements may and should change to fit the relevance of your project, and keep your fans interested in coming back to your sites and your shows.  Remember that we live in a time where we are bombarded by stimulation all day every day and that means your fans need to remember you and not get bored. Keep each album release fresh and with proper presentation. Match your gigs and tours to follow the theme of your latest release. Consistency throughout the life of your “product” is important so that your fans are conditioned to think of you when they see a trigger.

In this post I want to give you a quick outline of a good workflow in creating your brand. If you are managing your project yourself, this should give you a good guideline to stay sane while putting it all together. How we do our project management is just a starting point, so use it as a guideline and not hard rules.
Here’s the flow…

Conception

In the conception phase you should think about what the ultimate goal is. If it is an album or something creative based, it may be appropriate to get the bulk of the recording done so you get an idea of what the theme of the album is going to be. Basically, don’t paint the baby room pink before you know if your having a girl. If you are launching a tour, is it in support of an already released album? If it’s a general promotion or for an event like SXSW, what are we hoping for as the end result? It’s a good idea to sit down with your band, group or yourself and outline all of your concepts and goals. Write everything down, no ideas are wrong and by the end of the meeting funnel everything down into your overall concept.

Building Blocks To An Action Plan

At this point, it is time to get your action plan together. What outlets are you wanting to target like social networks and web, physical promo at events, etc). Work through all the items you will need to fulfill the concept section by section. Are you doing web promotion? If so, on what websites and what creative work will be needed (web banners, bios and press releases, etc)? What design work needs to be done on for physical promotion, and how are you going to do the promotion (street team or yourself)? For tour branding, will you need backdrops, banners, costumes? What is your layout for the merch table? For your products, what are you manufacturing (USB, CD, DVD, Merch) and what design and development needs to be done to complete them? Break down all of these into blocks and create a road map for completion in your action plan. This will help you to determine who you need to bring in to complete all the tasks and help you to stay on schedule throughout the process.

Find The Team

Once you have your action plan ready, then you can find the team to bring it to completion. You may need graphic designers, web monkeys, manufacturers, PR/marketing reps, street teams, and so on. A lot of times a band will do these these functions themselves. That is cool, but remember the importance of staying focused on what your good at and let the pros handle the rest. Picking your team is potentially the most important part of the whole process. If you are going to have anything manufactured it is really important that the people heading up your design work know how to follow the manufacturers specs for production (that sounds really basic, but 9 times out of 10 we kick back artwork because a designer did not follow directions). It would be a good idea to make sure that everyone meets before the project starts so they can discuss any needs and can spare the introductions when its time to get work done.

Set The Timeline

You have assembled the team so now you can put out the action plan to all parties and look at what the reality of production is going to be to accomplish the goal. Obviously you may have a deadline at the very beginning (a tour date, an event, etc) but if at all possible it will be much better to allow your team to give you their opinions on turnaround times for each item, look at what can be done simultaneously, add a little padding and set your date. Remember that for projects that require marketing like a CD release or tour,  it is best to have at least 60-90 days just to promote the finished product. That is not to say that you have to finish everything and then have an additional 60-90 days. You can prioritize the creative that will need to be finished to start marketing first and then task your team to finish up the creative work needed to manufacture and finish up the project.

Creative Production

Now it’s time to hit the ground running. Your team is on board, you have your deadline and now you need to begin the creative aspects of your project. Creative production involves designing of the digital and physical promotional material, writing of content, bios and press releases, and development of your social networks, blogs, website. This is also the time that you will be creating any mock-ups and designs for your album release and/or merchandise. Remember to prioritize your creative to fit the timeline you set so you are ready for marketing and manufacturing. This is also a good time for your recording mixing and mastering to be wrapping up.

Marketing/PR

Depending on your goals, you may have decided to offer a pre-sale on an album or need to start promoting your tour. With that in mind, you will want to start marketing as early as possible, and it never hurts to create your own hype during conception. Once your creative team has put together the elements you need to get started, your marketing team (or you) can take over in promoting your project. If you are doing a CD release, your PR person may need pre-release CD’s in which case you would need that physical production done at this point. You can use this time to handle your physical production, which we will talk about next. If you are doing pre-sales, you can use the marketing phase to gauge how much quantity you need to produce.

Physical production

While you are plugging away at the marketing, your design team should be finishing up everything the manufacturers will need to begin production. This also means that all your audio or video needs to be ready to go to manufacturing as well. This phase is pretty self explanatory, CD’s will start pressing, shirts start printing, and USB drives start loading. Once they are all ready you will need to stage all of your pre-sales to ship on launch day or be ready to walk out the door on tour day.

Launch/Release

The final stage is your launch day! You have worked your butt off up to this point and if all went as planned you are on time, under budget and you have a killer product.
Branding is an important part any band. Hopefully this post gives you a good starting point on how to tackle it on your next release or tour. In future posts we will explore the details of branding, including tools to help you run your brand, examples of good and bad branding, and taking your brand to the next level with fan interactive branding like iPhone apps and private social networks.

Symphonic Distribution is a digital content distributor and services provider aimed at providing the best in content delivery, customer service, marketing, education, distribution, licensing and more for music industry artists, managers, and record labels across the globe. Symphonic Distribution is ran by experienced music producers, label owners, and artists thriving in providing the highest level of service. Their mission is to provide you with the best services to improve brand performance. In addition to their comprehensive service list, they provide individual brands to better help a record label or artist grow. Symphonic is also accredited by the Better Business Bureau to further satisfy their clients and partners.  Below are some new highlights Symphonic has introduced recently that show just how much they have to offer.

SymSTREAM is the brand new iPhone / iPod Touch application created by Symphonic Distribution.  Being one of the only distributors in the world to have an iPhone / iPod Touch application, Symphonic Distribution has further diversified itself with new and evolving technologies aimed.  The tool also will serve as a new marketing initiative for artists and record labels distributed by Symphonic Distribution.  SymSTREAM allows you to preview some of the great music we receive each and every week!  If you are at the gym or simply want to listen to new, creative, and innovative music, download SymSTREAM for FREE at the APP Store today. More details in their BLOG

Rolling out in the first part of 2010, Symphonic is updating their client area with a new royalties portal. A second phase of the portal is coming soon that will add detailed stats and sales figures. This will give you a lot of insight on what is selling and what you need to market more in that quarter. This new content portal will bring a new level of self service and convenience to getting your tracks out to digital stores. You will be able to deliver releases to them and have full control as if YOU are the distributor!  This will also allow you more control at any time of your releases, eliminate errors, expedite release delivery, and just simplify the process in general. These updates will really make Symphonic your go-to site for digital distribution.

Being all about customer service, it should be obvious that they care about their clients. They strive to make every step you need to take as simple as possible, include free marketing plans and education with many different resources to make you shine! For example, they can distribute releases to promo pools worldwide, have many internal labels available to release your unsigned material and even have an Artist Connect- where they send unaffiliated artist’s demos to 600+ labels across the globe for potential licensing.

It’s a worthwhile trip to their website, so don’t hesitate to see what you can get into. Sign up for their newsletter to be in the know of their success and see how you can connect with other artists, labels or engineers. Check out their blog to see the Release, Label and Artist of the week.

http://symphonicdistribution.com/
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