digital artist management: final news/update bonus round

Few rumblings on the tech side. Apparently some big progress has been made on the myspace promotion front. It does mean me spending money on new software platforms that sound a bit too good to be true but we’ll see how it goes.



– but really – myspace will still only ever be a shadow of it’s former self. The life is gone so you really need to know what you’re doing to get the best out of it. Lucky myspace has retained it’s brand as a music destination.

So for those starting out – you gotta start somewhere and myspace is as good a place as any.



But right now I’m looking at my competitors in a really web 2.0 kinda way and thinking, god why don’t I just outsource all of my day to day spam kind of stuff so I can focus more on the bigger picture – y’know, the hard question right now - of BREAKING AN ACT.

What’s breaking? You heard the man! 1000 true fans!

DO the math like Trent Reznor did last week! 2,500 x 300 = doing pretty okay!


OKAY.

now that I’ve done my little update and familiarised myself with the frontline of music 2.0 promotion (see: bonus level power up 3)



I’ve been brushing up on my search engine skills with a few new tools and I got back into some serious research concerning the direction I’m going with that has created a little bit of interest in my blog – your website being more important than your album, because the attention you can create on your website will be easier to make money off – “monetize” than copies of your digital content.

See, I got my break in music promotion from hanging out online with some bad people. I got all my software and all the tricks I’ve learnt since from very bad spammers, the types that yknow use myspace tricks to try and get you to join dating sites.

I was just hanging around them to learn stuff I could use to promote bands. I didn’t really follow to deeply into exactly how they made their money but I knew it was about adsense pay per click and more importantly affiliate marketing – your ad brings a buyer to a landing or sale page, and you get paid a generous commission.

But learning how easy it’d all been made . . . and is continually being made more so . . . The possibilities are getting me excited. What you can do with the attention economy . . .



It goes way beyond problogging and simply having google ads on your website and blog!



By next year once I’ve really got into understanding how to operate ad supported platforms I’m going to be talking about more than 2c a hit.

I’m talking about turning 1000 true fans into $1000 on a regular basis.

Do you think a true fan would sign up for some crappy free ringtone or dating site – FREE – if they knew once a thousand people had signed up and you’d collected over $US1000 in affiliate pay outs, you were going to give a new song away free?

Ad supported revenue just offers so many possibilities for creating revenue in a whole new way than any artists or manager could imagine.

And that’s the horse I’m backing, that’s where I’m throwing in my lot, that’s the way I’m playing my hand.

I make CD’s, that’s my main income. I ain’t gonna stop making them. I’m going to be talking to clients one on one about licensing. We’ll be looking at merchandising

I probably still won’t touch gigs unless I’m needed for promotion

But ad supported revenue – working with someone like me with knowledge of the digital environment – by 2009 will be the best way for musicians to attempt to earn a full time living from doing what they love.

But how will new acts get the momentum, get the fanbase and traffic to a point where they can make money off it if they cant pay someone like me to work with them for up to a year before seeing returns???



Well now that my promotion power up series of reports is OVER and my car is ready to pick up from the garage . . . we can get onto that!