Category Archives: Uncategorized

Digital Training Day in Derby

As some of you may be aware, we run a digital training day on behalf of AIM (Association of Independent Music) in London about once every three months.  Well, for those of you who live a bit too far north to make it to London, we will now be running a condensed version of this course in Derby, in association with AIM and CIN (Creative Industries Network).  So if you’re in the area you should definitely check it out.  Here’s a flyer with the details:

Twitter Profile Design

If you are an artist, or you represent an artist, you are probably using Twitter to communicate with fans.  If you’re not, give yourself a slap and then go and register.  Go on, we’ll wait…  Done it?  Ok.

While Twitter does not allow as much flexibility design-wise as, say, MySpace, you do have the option to upload your own background image.  You should be making the most of this by creating a background that mirrors the design of your website, MySpace profile, YouTube channel, etc, to ensure that you have a consistent design across all platforms through which people might discover your music.

So to get you started, here’s an article featuring some basic guidelines as well as plenty of inspiration in the form of examples of what other people have done with their Twitter backgrounds – http://bit.ly/dzCe4h

Also, here’s an article listing 10 great tools for creating Twitter backgrounds that you may find useful – http://bit.ly/a5fvqx

So now you have no excuse for sticking with that plain old standard Twitter background!

Digital Music Marketing Is Boring

Over the last few years digital campaigns for new albums and releases have had increased budgets, more time and a much bigger place in the overall marketing mix.

The work done by a digital department or independent company has come to be seen as crucial to driving sales and creating engagement. In fact the digital presence of an artist is now more sought-after than the actual quality of the music itself. A&R people will ask how many email addresses on the mailing list and if there has been a video that has ‘gone viral’. These are the stand-out indicators of the likely success of an album now.

Despite digital having this increased importance and there being a greater understanding of how to use it, campaigns are mostly dull and boring carbon-copies of the same idea.

If you walk into any marketing meeting at any mid to large record label you can guarantee to hear that the plan for ‘digital’ involves a free download, a remix competition and a stream of the album. The record will be pre-ordered with some sort of exclusive content and iTunes will have two bonus tracks that the artist didn’t deem good enough for the album itself.

It’s all perfectly well and good, but boy is it dull. With the opportunity to reach an unlimited audience, a starting point of great artwork, songs and lyrics to spark the creative juices and with pre-existing fans, why the heck is it like this?

Why do artists put up with having spent months in a studio tweaking every sound and laying down hours of different takes to get their musical expression correct and then have their marketing be a remix competition and giving away a free track.

I’m not saying that we have all the answers and can do this on every campaign, but it is up to us and the marketing departments at all labels to use digital creatively and not just go through the same motions on every record.

How To Change your Myspace URL

Changing a myspace url used to be impossible, but thanks to the addition of Myspace email, there is (as of writing) one opportunity to do so. This only works if your account was opened before August 2009.

If you’ve changed artist name, or want to bring your myspace url into line with your new website url etc than here is how you do it:

Login in to your Myspace account

When logged in click on ‘Mail’ on the top navigation

Once the mail page loads you should see a line of red text in the top right-hand corner which says, “set-up your own Myspace email address” (or similar text). Click this.

This will take you to the first page of setting up your new email account. You will be able to input what you want to be your email @myspace.com. By changing what comes before @myspace.com for your new email address this also changes your url to that text too.

So if I input my new myspace email as davidriley@myspace.com, assuming its available, my Myspace url would also become www.myspace.com/davidriley

This can only be done once so make sure you double check that you’ve written in the right text.

Simply go through the rest of the set-up of the email and your url will have been changed for good.

From there remember to update the links on your other websites etc to point to this new url.

Examples of artist websites built on WordPress

WordPress is one of the more common Content Management Systems that is used to build artist websites. It has become synonymous with blogging and is known for the ease of access and use.

Here is a quick list of some artist and label websites that are built using wordpress to give you an idea of what can be made:

Beck
www.beck.com

Dizzee Rascal
www.dizzeerascal.co.uk

Drift Records
www.driftrecords.co.uk

Gallows
www.gallows.co.uk

Gilles Peterson / Brownswood Recordings
www.gillespetersonworldwide.com

Hot Chip
hotchip.co.uk

Jaguar Love
takebacktheradworld.com

Maximo Park (artist)
www.maximopark.com

Patrick Wolf (artist)
www.patrickwolf.com

Party Dark (artist)
www.partydark.co.uk

Röyksopp
http://royksopp.com

Tinie Tempah (artist)
www.tinietempah.com

Please share other WordPress artist/label websites that you like or dislike in the comments below.

Stephen Fry on Twitter, music piracy and the web in 2010

Stephen Fry talks to .NET magazine about Twitter, offers his thoughts on music piracy and reveals what he thinks the web has in store for 2010.  As always with Mr Fry, an interesting watch: http://www.netmag.co.uk/fry/ (requires the Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin)

We Are Hiring!

Good Lizard Media are looking to expand.

We’ve spent six months setting ourselves up as a credible and creative digital marketing company, working on campaigns with Ninja Tune, Skint, R&S Records, Brille, Essential Music and many other fine artists and companies. There comes a point however when in order to continue to fulfill on a robust digital campaign – from the basics to the remarkable – we need to devote even more time and attention to campaigns. To that end we require another digital marketing manager to work alongside Pete and myself to manage, implement and plan campaigns.

The ideal candidate will have experience of managing digital music campaigns in a label or management environment as well as confidence in their own opinions and convictions with the knowledge and experience to back it up.

Candidates without the above but who are creative, have a willingness to not follow the rules and generally go against the grain will also be strongly considered.

Send us an email and tell us about yourself and attach a CV for all the other boring stuff.

Jobs@goodlizardmedia.com

Creating Video Content

Video content is a brilliant way for an artist to engage themselves with their audience. Enabling the artist to speak directly to their fans and to be more creative and insightful than is possible with just text…

This is a quick blog to take you through some of the different ways you can create and use video content:

Susan Boyle – Answers Fans’ Questions:

Here we see Susan Boyle answering questions that are sent in by her fans.

There have been 30 to 40 of these videos posted online over about a 4 to 5 week period. The footage has obviously all been shot in one go, with someone asking her each question in turn. The video has then been edited down into individual questions, lasting between 15 and 45 seconds. The person asking the question has been replaced with a static frame of the questions text itself.

This is a great example of making the most of the limited time that the artist has to create content. By planning the content and questions in advance the artist has been able to spend 45 minutes in front of camera and in turn created over a month’s worth of regularly update video content.

By asking the fans to send their own questions in, it looks like Susan cares about her fans and is willing to actually converse with them.

Manchester Orchestra – Video Podcast

This is a 7 minute video featuring a mixture of behind the scenes, artful footage and live video.

This video is not only up on the bands Youtube channel but is also available as a video podcast series from the iTunes music store for free. This video podcast series is updated roughly once a month.

The footage has been carefully and creatively edited. In comparison to the Susan Boyle footage above for example, this has taken much longer to bring together. Hence we see that these videos are only released about once a month.

Where the Susan Boyle footage is more about informing and updating fans, this video content is much more an extension of the bands own creative output. These videos form part of the Manchester Orchestra experience, both in the effort that has gone into the editing process, the featuring of good quality live video and the access to the artist behind the scenes.

Master Shortie – Quick update

Master Shortie goes into HMV and buys his new album. The footage is intended as a call-to-arms for his fans to go out and buy his new album.

This artist uses video regularly, partly we would assume because of the young demographic of his fanbase. In order to keep turning out content quickly there is very little editing involved in this video, with just three or four cuts in the whole video. The camera work is very rough and the audio quality isn’t particularly good either, but this actually works to the benefit of the content. It appears the video is being made by a friend of Master Shortie and is akin to the sort of video content young people take of each other when out and about. By having the video content like this, it is both quick to get up online and relates to the audience arguably better than well filmed high quality video would.

In order to get the required video footage done in a short time like this and with only a few cuts necessary, there needs to be some good planning beforehand. The artist needs to know what topics need to be covered and to be aware of any important information and dates that need to be included in their performance.

…

These three different methods of creating video content are all quite different, but this does not mean that an artist could not use all three. The most important questions when getting video content created are:

What is the artist comfortable doing?

What do you want to achieve with the content?

How soon does it need to be up online?

By answering these questions and planning the content you want to create, you can use any of the three examples of different content creation above or any other creative ways to film fantastic and engaging video content.

Creating a clickable picture

Pete and I ran the first AIM Digital Day recently, which is a day of training and instruction on digital marketing and retail for independent labels and artists in the UK.

One of the most often asked question during the day was ‘How exactly do we do that?’ especially in relation to embedding and html in general. So here’s a quick guide to embedding a picture as a clickable link into any site which allows you to input html.

The basic html is:

<a href=”X”><img src=”Y”></a>

Where X is the URL you want to link to, for example http://www.ticketmaster.com/brixtonacademy/myband.html or http://www.myspace.com/myband

This must include the http:// at the start of the URL as above.

And Y is the hosted image file that you want to use, for example:

http://www.photobucket.com/myband/flyer1.jpg

This gives you a piece of html that looks like this:

<a href=“http://www.ticketmaster.com/brixtonacademy/myband.html”><img src=“http://www.photobucket.com/myband/flyer1.jpg”></a>

This is very basically how to make a clickable image.

But if you want to go a little further you could enable your fans to put this onto their own Myspace profile or website etc, to really start virally pushing out the image and link.

By using another little piece of html code you can make, for example, a gig flyer that you have put onto your Myspace also display the html that fans need to embed it on their own page, right underneath the flyer.

This may look complicated but it is in fact fairly straight forward once you try it a few times:

<a href=“http://www.myspace.com/myband”><img src=“http://www.photobucket.com/myband/flyer1.jpg”></a><input type=”text” style=”width:290px;border:1px solid #fff;background-color:#000;color:#fff;margin-top:5px;” value=&quot;&lt; a href=&quot;http://www.myspace.com/myband.html&quot; &gt; &lt; img src=&quot;http://www.photobucket.com/myband/flyer1.jpg&quot; &gt;&lt ;/a&gt; &quot; />

This will produce you an eflyer plus a text box with a white background and black text containing the html that fans need to embed it onto their own page.

Here’s how it works:

This is your original eflyer:

<a href=“http://www.ticketmaster.com/brixtonacademy/myband.html”><img src=“http://www.photobucket.com/myband/flyer1.jpg”></a>

Then add in the following at the end of the flyer html code:

<input style=”width:290px;border:1px solid #fff;background-color:#000;color:#fff;margin-top:5px;” value= “X”/>

First change “290” as this sets the width of the box. This should be the same as the width of the flyer. To find out the width (in pixels) find the wherever the image is stored on your computer and either right-click (windows only) the file or hover your mouse over it to see the dimensions which will be something like 300 x 400, where 300 is the width and 400 the height.

You then replace 290 with 300 to set the width of the box. Then we need to replace the X at the end of the piece of code with the embed code for the flyer. This is what the fan will be able to copy and then embed onto their own site/social network.

We need to make sure that the code we put in underneath doesn’t just show as the flyer again, as if we were just to paste the same code in again for the eflyer it would just end up showing twice.

So take the eflyer embed code,

<a href=“http://www.myspace.com/myband”><img src=“http://www.photobucket.com/myband/flyer1.jpg”></a>

and replace all occurrences of the following characters:

<             replace with &lt;

>             replace with &gt;

“              replace with &quot;

&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.myspace.com/myband&quot; &lt; &gt;img src=&quot;http://www.photobucket.com/myband/flyer1.jpg&quot; &gt; &lt;/a&gt;

Then simply replace the X with this modified text

Then copy and paste the whole thing into wherever you like, Myspace or Website etc.

The Best Folk Blogs

There are many blogs online that compete for out attentions, some are incredibly popular and some are more niche. As my speciality is folk music I will guide you through, what I believe to be, the best folk blogs. I will also tell you how to work out which blogs hold the most power using online tools.

For the modern folkie there are many outlets online for blogging as many of the major blogs view this to be the taste of the moment. Major music websites also often feature news and reviews of folk acts too.

Here is a list of my Favourite (not necessarily the busiest);

Forfolkssake.com – This a fantastic site that is well connected within the UK folk scene and features regular reviews of albums and live shows. They also have interviews and feature a brilliant news section and are often the site that breaks the news.

TheLineOfBestFit.com – This site is incredibly popular and features reviews and informational content for popular alternative genres. This often includes Folk. They have constant updates and have over 3000 visitors a day.

Thefourohfive.com – This is a strong blog that includes many genres of music but also features the more hyped of the upcoming folk bands often signed to labels like Bella Union. This also gets a lot of hits. They do live reviews, albums, films and many news features.

To find the best blogs that are appropriate for your artist or label there a few good methods. One of the most effective it to search for similar artists using blog aggregators such as hypem.com or elbo.ws. These services allow you to browse blogs that have mentioned and feature similar artists.

Once have you list of blogs that interest you, put their website address into www.statbrain.com and it will tell you how many visitors they get a day. Many of the major blogs worldwide get upwards of 3000 hits a day, these are large outfits and can often be hard to get your music featured.

After you have chosen the suitable blog, find the email or contact page and send them an email explaining who you are and why you are contacting them. Many bloggers prefer to receive music digitally rather than physically, so it is best to ask before sending any records to them.

Written by Freddy Stringer, Digital Media Manager at Good Lizard Media.