Category Archives: Uncategorized
Top 5 Social Network Marketing Tips
Keep wording of biographies, news and other text to no more than 2 or 3 paragraphs and provide links to ‘read more’. These links should go back to your official website or blog.
Separate your band ‘news’ from fan engagement, i.e choose one space on a site to regularly display tour dates, new releases, merch etc and another separate space for blogging, street teaming and more personal engagements.
Use widgets to increase engagement, but use them very sparingly. It is far better to create a widget yourself rather than using another company’s. To do this there is a really simple and currently free tool called www.sproutbuilder.com where you can design your own widget. Other widgets include www.gydget.com and www.reverbnation.com.
Twitter (www.twitter.com) is fast becoming a significant tool for fan engagement. As a general rule use 80% of tweets to talk about the day to day life of the artists and engagement (replying, re-tweeting etc), leaving 20% for artist news (tours, merch, audio etc)
At all possible opportunities try to turn a discovery (users listening to music on Myspace, ilike, last.fm, watching videos on Youtube,etc), into further contactable fans by adding email sign-up forms, widgets, free downloads etc.
Digital PR – Blogs, Sites, PR Companies and DIY
Online PR is the process of getting your artist and their music onto websites other than your own, in order to get the attention of new fans.
Having discussed the work involved in getting an artist written about by blogs, online PR is essentially the next level up. The work of online PR is to get placement on sites where the readership is a lot higher, thus putting an artist in front of a wider audience. Music/entertainment websites generally have a higher turnover and range of content than a ‘blog’, and usually involves more than one writer and a number of freelancers too.
For music there are roughly three different categories of sites to focus upon:
Niche sites:
These are music websites that specifically deal with a certain style of music. Content is added to the site based upon what that community are interested in. They only feature artists which fit within their musical remit and will often have their own forums or discussion areas. These are the easiest areas for smaller artists to gain attention, as long as they fit within the specific musical genre or remit.
www.breakbeat.co.uk – Drum and Bass.
www.residentadvisor.net – Electronic Music
www.punktastic.com – Punk and Emo
General music sites:
Music sites whom cover a broad range of music. Some general music sites have a slight leaning towards certain styles of music, but mostly deal with a range of music and a vast amount of content.
Portals:
Portals are websites that bring together a lot of different types of content into one site (news, entertainment, business, celebrity, lifestyle, music etc and are typically owned and run by large internet companies. They have a large number of visitors and music is one part of their overall offering, often with regional versions (i.e UK, US, etc). Portals tend to have editors for each type of content on the site.
Music can also be found as part of other sites offerings such as:
www.ivillage.co.uk – (female orientated)
www.fhm.com – (male orientated)
www.perezhilton.com – (Gossip site)
Types of Content
Single/Track Reviews
Live Reviews
Album Reviews
Written Interviews
Audio/Video Interviews
Competitions
These are the standard types of content that all sites are looking to use on their site. It essentially makes up the basic offering of music content. However, responding to customer demand, the increasing number of blogs/websites and the easy availability of music, sites are moving more and more towards unique and bespoke content.
Unique and bespoke
Track By Track talkthroughs (Video, Audio and Written) – The artist will talk through every track on their latest release giving insight and information about the influences, writing and recording.
Live video footage - Video taken from a live performance edited into individual tracks.
Photo Galleries – A set of anywhere between 5 and 30 photos based around a theme, i.e. ‘artist through the ages’, live event, behind the scenes etc.
In The Studio – Blog posts, video updates and photos from the recording of a new release.
Artist Opinion Pieces – The artist themselves writing on music or another topic not to do with their own artistic output.
Top 10’s – An Artist favourite tracks, artists, festivals etc
Behind The Scenes – Video of the band walking on stage.
Tour blog – Daily blogging and pictures/video from the road.
These are just a few content ideas that sites are currently using.
How to approach Online PR
There are numerous companies who can do your online pr for you at a cost. These companies have regular contact with the biggest sites and a large database of contacts for smaller sites and even blogs. If there is budget available then hiring a good online PR company can be a good move, but it’s worth asking yourself a few honest questions before hiring.
Do blogs already write regularly about the artist?
Does the artist have a large fanbase and the ability to contact them?
Does the artist have time to do interviews and produce content (video/photos/written word), for the time period you are hiring for?
Are you able to get for free/pay for journalists’ tickets to your live shows?
If the answers to these questions are yes, then its advisable to hire a pr company, if they are mostly no’s then its worth looking at addressing these questions before moving forward.
Doing it yourself
This is all about research. Contacting the right sites about your music, is key to doing online pr yourself.
Collate a list of the sites that are most pertinent to your music. Start by writing down the sites that you regularly visit which have music content on them, and then ask your friends and fans to let you know where they visit.
Once you have a list, go through each site and look at the type of content that they have. For example if they don’t review albums then there’s no point sending an album etc.
You then need to contact that site, and this is the most important part to get right, as there is no second chance to make a first impression.
On most music sites they will have a general info@ email address or a contact form in order to make contact with the people who run the site. It is worth spending the time writing individual emails to each of the sites that you want to get in touch with, as most of the 100’s of emails that sites receive a day are email blasts sent impersonally to large lists of address’.
Keep in mind that this email needs to be as short and succinct as possible, here is a rough list of what to include:
About the artist.
Upcoming releases
Upcoming tourdates
Link to listen (myspace etc)
Any content you have to offer (free download, video, photos etc)
Invite to a live event
Try and talk about the website that you are writing too, to show that you have a knowledge of their work and how the artist fits with that. For example you could say “Artist X is a big influence and we saw that interview you did with them on the site etc” or “ a lot of our fans have said they visit your site” etc.
Inviting people down to a live show is important too as online PR is a longterm game as much as it is a short term exercise to promote a release. Meeting editors and writers and getting to know them, may not help you in the short term but in the long term these relationships can be invaluable.
If you don’t hear back from a site then leave it a few months and go back again, with another personal email etc. This will take time to build and may be frustrating, but if you keep bugging someone they are much more likely to never open another of your emails.
However if you do manage to get a review or interview etc, then keep the writer and the editor up-to-date with the artists progress and send them music, gig tickets etc even when you have nothing to promote.
Whether you use an online pr person or do it yourself, bear in mind that what you are doing is raising short-term awareness of the artist among people looking for general music info. What you need to do is harness this spike of interest into contactable longterm fans.
You should make sure that you ask for the bands website url to be included at the end of any content and if you can add an incentive in like a free download or video footage etc to get people to visit your site. Many people will have their interest piqued by music website but will go elsewhere to find out about you, by searching google or visiting myspace. Make sure that if you are doing online pr that your website and social networks are up-to-date and ready to engage with new fans.
Building Blog Buzz
Blogs are very difficult to PR to but can provide significant impetus to the initial stages of a PR campaign.
How to find out what blogs are saying about your artist or similar artists:
There are two big music blog ‘aggregators’, that collate 1,000s of blogs together and show which are the most popular and also rank the most blogged about bands and most blogged about mp3s. These are Hype Machine (www.hypem.com) and Elbows (www.elbo.ws). It’s worth regularly checking them out to see what bands and blogs are popular.
To find out who is blogging about your artist, try doing a Google ‘blog search’ by going to blogsearch.google.com. Also use your regular checking of Hype Machine and Elbows to see what blogs are writing about very similar artist to yourself and approach them. If no one is yet blogging about your band try searching for similar artists and begin to approach these sites.
If people are blogging about your band already or if they do so after you contact them, place a link on your website and social networks directing your fans to read it. Bloggers are often very keen to increase the traffic coming to their sites and may be more likely to write about you again if they see increased visitors as a result.
Contacting Blogs
Blogs are near impossible to PR to with a blanket email approach. A better manner of approach is to send personal emails to each individual blogger, referencing artists that they’ve blogged about before and giving them a free mp3 to give away or inviting them to a gig. The relationships that are built with bloggers are important and in most cases need to be built slowly and gently. Bloggers write because thye enjoy music and want to have their own voice based upon their own taste…
If you have the time yourself becoming a ‘blogger’ will give you a great insight from the ‘other side of the fence’, write about the music you like and think about why you write about certain artist, analyse your communication and use this to better approach other bloggers about your own music.
Tracking blogs
Once you have started working on getting blogs to write about you, keep track of it by setting up a Google Alert for your artist name. To do this go to www.google.com/alerts put your artist name in speech marks (i.e. “Rolling Stones”) as the search term, change the ‘type’ field from ‘comprehensive’ to ‘blog’ and input your email address. Once a day from now on you will receive an email from Google with links to any blogs that mention you.
A guide to email communication for artists
Popular programs and web services for bulk sending out emails
With many companies offering bulk email sending services, it’s often difficult to see what would be best to use for your fans. Prices vary with the size of your email list and the level of tracking and reporting you require so it’s worth spending time choosing the write option for you.
The basic level of keeping in contact with fans by email is sending out a message from your band email account with the email address’ in the BCC field. The highest level of email communication treats each fan individually and tailors messages based on previous interest.
A rough list of bulk email providers:
Constant Contact – www.constantcontact.com
A paid-for browser based email collection and sending tool
Your Mailing List Provider – www.yourmailinglistprovider.com
Free up to 1,000 email addresses, funded by adverts. After 1,000 email address’ this become a paid for service.
Fanbridge – www.fanbridge.com
A paid-for browser based email collection and sending tool
Subscribed – www.subscribed.co.uk
A paid-for browser based email collection and sending tool
iContact – www.iContact.com
A paid-for browser based email collection and sending tool
MailChimp – www.Mailchimp.com
A paid-for browser based email collection and sending tool
PHP List – www.phplist.com
Free Open Source server software, which needs a bit of technical know-how to set-up but once installed on your web hosting, emails and data can be stored and sent through a web browser for free
PHPLIST is free to download and use, meaning that there are no costs per email, your databases can be as big and numerate as required and there is no advertising. All that is required is web hosting featuring MySQl/PHP (most web hosts should have this but this is worth checking, also check you are not prohibited from using mailing list software) and a little time to upload and properly install the program. As with most Open Source software this has been rigorously peer tested and there is a great deal of user generated documentation and support.
When choosing your bulk email product, there are a number of key factors to consider. Before committing to using any service, first make use of any free trial options to send a test message to at least a hotmail, gmail (google mail), yahoo and Microsoft Outlook based email account. After trialing a few different products, ask yourself a few questions about how you plan to use email:
How many emails do you intend to send per month to your database?
How much do you expect it to grow in the next 12 months?
How much time will you realistically have to send out emails?
How much time will you have to evaluate statistics and take care of your list?
The answers to these questions will help you understand how you plan to use email communication and in turn aide in deciding your product. If you don’t have time, for example, to spend much time evaluating your email but want to send out 2 or 3 times a month, you want to focus on a product that enables you to easily create and save templates and is as cheap as possible to send large numbers of email.
What data to collect
As a general rule of thumb at all of your sign-up points you want to be collecting the same details, this means that you can keep one clean and clear record of all your data.
To keep things manageable I would suggest just asking for name, email address and city, with mobile number as optional. Other fields you could include are:
Full address, Postcode, Age, AIM handle, myspace address, country…
The reason for the data suggested is that; email address is fundamental, name will usually help with any email address’s you can’t read from handwriting at a gig, the city will help you target your emails and the mobile number may well be useful as mobile communication becomes easier and more popular..
Where to Collect it
Sign-up sheet at a show:
The classic data collection tool, still as valid now as it has ever been. Make sure to provide plenty of space to write the email address and head the paper with the date, venue and city of the gig you are collecting from. Keep a sheet on the merch table or if this isn’t possible keep a copy with you after you play the show in or around the venue. If you are playing a big show it may be worth having a couple of friends to politely ask whether people would like to enjoy the mailing list, each person if possible should have two or three clipboards to deal more quickly with demand.
The quicker and easier the process is, the more likely it is that potential fans will sign-up.
Sign-up form on official website and Social Networks:
Collecting data from your social networks pages is a vital task that many artists do not place importance upon. Given the overwhelming amount of spam and ‘friend’ content that your average myspace/bebo/etc account is filled with, it may be difficult for you to effectively get a message across. Social network allegiance changes fairly rapidly and you may irretrievably lose contact with a fan when they stop being an active ‘friend’. Also it is an unfortunately regular occurrence for myspace, Bebo and even facebook music pages to be taken down or disappear entirely over night, taking with it all your contact with those fans.
This is not to say that email address’ are not subject to the above problems, but they do act as a sensible back-up. With governments bringing in tighter permission-marketing rules, spam email will decrease and the effectiveness of emailing your fans directly will continue to be useful.
Most email management programs will give you a ready made piece of html code to embed a sign-up form into a website. If you encounter problems with entering this html code into a social network/promotional site it is best to provide a large link to the page on your official site where the full sign-up form is. Trying to manipulate html to fit it onto a page and to counter any code bans on 3rd party sites (like social networks) may cause the information to be stored incorrectly or to not even save at all.
When a fan decides to enter the information to a sign-up form it is important that this can be done as quickly and simply as possible. It is conversely very important to have a clear and functioning unsubscribe link. Despite not wanting your fans to leave your emailing list, it is far better to do so than to plague people with unwanted emails. You stand a much higher chance of unsubscribers returning if you make the unsubscribe process as transparent and easy as possible.
Enticing sign-up
Signing up to an artists mailing list isn’t high on most peoples list of things to do, whether at a gig or on the internet. The prospect of receiving what are usually just bulk marketing messages from an artist does not entice someone to join a bands list. The act of joining therefore should be incentivised, there has to be something in it for the person signing up.
The most popular choices for incentivisation are free media, a competition or the prospect of what the email messages will contain in the future:
Free Media – Offering to send all those who join the mailing list a free mp3, video or background jpg is a very simple way of gaining many more sign-ups. What you are giving out is exclusive content but the real selling point is that it will be conveniently sent straight to the fan.
To make this incentive work to its fullest the free content must be sent quickly and simply to the fan, ideally in no more than 24 hrs from time of sign-up. If you want your new contact to have confidence in your band and to continue to look forward to your emails they must trust that you can fulfill promises. This initial test of your ability to do just that is crucial.
This could be done manually by attaching the content to an email and sending directly to all new subscribers as BCC. So once a day check your new sign-ups, copy all the email address’ into the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field, attach the media and send out.
There of course ways to automate this process which can be explored through your mailing list software or custom PHP/mysql coding. For example you could put a link to download a track on the confirmation of sign-up page which most bulk email providers allow you to edit.
A Competition – A quick and easy way to incetivise sign-up. All new sign-ups within a certain time frame will be entered into a prize-draw to win a competition. Competition prizes will usually be signed CDs/Vinyl/Merch, gig tickets or meet and greets.
It is good housekeeping on a competition like this to provide an end date and to inform all entrants as to who the winner was, i.e. “The winner of the signed 7” was Jenny from the UK.”. At every stage of the process building trust is important and letting everyone know that a winner was drawn is important in confirming that.
The Prospect Of What’s To Come – At the very least mailing list sign-ups should come with a description of what sort of things one can accept from signing-up. Try to be as specific as possible, “News and stuff” is not a good enough description.
Including text or video next to the sign-up form explaining why why you want the data and what you want to do with it, acts to encourage people to input their data. Show that this isn’t like signing up to a multinational company, this information is taken in an attempt to keep the fan better informed and by informing them of your intentions they are more likely to trust you with their data.
What To Send Out and When
The best rule of thumb for mailing lists is to make sure you balance your taking and your giving. When you contact a fan with tour dates, updates, new product etc you are asking for something from your fans. At the least you are asking for their time and involvement and at most you want them to part with their own money.
It is not the basis of a good relationship to constantly demand something without giving in return. While it is true that your fans may be interested in being kept up to date, will that make them want to open your email before all others?
Always bear in mind that you are not the only artist emailing each person, there could be 100’s of others all vying for the same pair of eyes to open and view their email. You have to consider what sets yours apart and why someone would want to read it.
The main criteria for good email communication –
Layout, Prose, Title, Reward, Frequency and Trust.
Layout
Delivering content that is easy to read and highlights key info is the goal of laying out any bulk email. To achieve this regularly it is good practice to develop an email template that you can use every time.
Test your content before sending it by test-sending it to and reading it in hotmail, gmail, yahoo and Outlook accounts.
Using complex html and images will inevitably cause problems. There are two solutions to this, the first is to use plain text and the second is to carefully design and rigorously test your design. With your email it is important to project your bands ‘image’ but remember that the chief goal is to deliver information and retain trust in the quality of your correspondence.
At the bottom of the email should be clear unsubscribe links as discussed previously. There should also be a link to sign-up to the email, as your fans may forward on your newsletter to friends or colleagues. Providing an easy way for them to jump on the mailing list increases the likelihood of them doing so.
Find out what works best for your audience, but for a starter here are a few suggestions:
Bullet point the main sets of information contained in the email at the start, in the order in which the content will appear in the email. This just allows for a fan to skip to the parts of the newsletter they are most interested in or that they don’t already know from elsewhere.
Include links (where possible) to buy the tickets/product you describe, the links should open in a new window and should deep link to the exact ticket or t-shirt size etc that it pertains to.
Place the most important information as close to the top of the email as possible.
Sign-off your email from the band as you would do in a letter i.e
“Hope to see you soon,
David, Matt, Ben and Joe”
This just makes the email seem a little less cold and impersonal.
Adding at the end a few links back to your main social networks like Bebo, Myspace and Facebook, as well as your official site, allow a fan to choose to continue finding out more if they wish to do so.
Prose
Take your time writing your newsletters as spelling mistakes and ambiguous sentences will severely reduce the joy of reading the email.
There is great scope for writing your personal thoughts, long winded diatribes and silly little phrases on your blog. The email-out though is primarily a fact-delivery system so make sure that along with a personable prose style, that you keep the ‘facts’ clear.
It’s worth bearing in mind that when your fans receive this email it will be read by its recipient, more often than not, sat at their computer on their own. Take into account that despite being a message to a large amount of people the email only ever reaches one person at a time and thus you should try and speak as if that one person is in front of you.
Take some time to sign up to other artists email list and look at how they present information and what the positive and negative aspects are of each.
Title
The title of your email is a crucial part of your email correspondence. Try to consider the title as a one line reply to a fan asking you “what’s new with the band?”, in this situation what would you say?
Remember that an email account may be filled with 100’s of new emails, from other artists, friends, work-related stuff, payment reminders, social network news, retail adverts etc. As the owner scans through their email your message should aim to achieve one of two things; Give them a summary of all the important info, whet their interest enough to open the email.
For each band and artist the way in which you achieve this depends on your target market, but it is nonetheless one of the most crucial aspects of this promotional tool. Once you have the fan opening your emails you should be able to maintain their interest in opening further email by the other facets of the promotional email.
Reward
To create a productive relationship with your readership there has to be an incentive for continuing to read, in the same way there is for signing up, as discussed above. A good rule of thumb here is to aim incentivise every third email…
Of course not every email should be about giving the fan a gift but remember that your email only reaches the fan upon their good-will, so keeping that should be a top priority.
What is an incentive?
An incentive should have value either in itself or due to its exclusivity. Here is a short list of some of the things you can do as incentives as either a part of a newsletter or an email on its own.
The exclusive first stream of a video or track
A link to download a video or track
The exclusive first announcement of gigs/tourdates, record releases etc
A competition only announced on the newsletter
Exclusive photo sets, 6-12 pictures not used elsewhere.
A newsletter only blog
There is no great cost involved in any of these, but it provides both a reward for the reader and, perhaps, as importantly, a token of recognition from the artist to the fan for their continued support.
Frequency
Email Newsletters need to be regular and only as frequent as your band is productive. There is no hard and fast rule to when and how often to send out your email messages, however there are a few pitfalls to avoid.
It is really bad fan management to just use your email list when it comes time for selling product. If you go quiet on sending out emails for 6 months then send a couple of emails, saying “ we are on tour” and then “we have an album out”, you are sending out spam. This is not a process of give and take anymore and the fan will feel they are being used rather than being informed.
Keeping up a consistent dialogue is a balance between keeping the content interesting and keeping it consistently delivered. Using an online calendar such as Google Calendar can help in keeping content regularly delivered, setting reminders for yourself that new content is due.
If you can get a main update every month, then you are on target for keeping your fan base happy. Depending on how well your data is segregated, you could also send smaller but useful emails out to your database as well. For example you could send out an email to all your London fans about a gig you are playing in Brixton, with a multimap link to help them find the venue, myspace links for all the other bands playing and maybe a few words about what songs will be in the set. Maybe even suggest a pub where you are going to have a few drinks during the day.
Trying to breakdown the formality of band ‘email newsletters’ is key. Some major label bands have a few faceless employees sending out information based emails intended to sell gig tickets and push product. It is very easy to compete with these emails by keeping your emails regular and interspersed with more personal and targeted messages.
Trust
Trust is the single most important basis for the artist/fan relationship. By implementing the steps above you can build trust in your email communication which will repay itself when you need to use the medium to ask for money. By investing time in your layout and content, by giving something back to the fan and in being a consistent presence you will rightfully earn trust.
Top 5 tips – a recap
Include unsubscribe links in every email as well as a link to sign up to the list. The very bottom of the email should also have your contact details.
Include links to your social network pages (i.e. facebook, myspace, last.fm, twitter etc) in every email.
Keep emails simple, large jpegs and any complicated html should be left out. Text should be key.
Test emails before sending out. Set-up accounts with Hotmail, Yahoo and Google mail and send a test email to all accounts. To fully test, open the email in each account using as many internet browsers as possible, including Firefox, Internet Explorer Opera and Safari on both PC and Mac. Once you have an email format that works, stick to it.
3 to 1 rule. For every one email you send out asking for something from the fanbase (buying tickets, merch, music or vote for us etc) you should try and send 2 or 3 emails that ‘give’ the fans something, e.g. a free mp3, a new blog post, a video link etc. This increases the likelihood of fans regularly opening emails from you and develops a better overall relationship.
Using Free – Part One – Analytics and Data
As much as music consumption is moving towards free, the rest of the web is also moving this way too and there are a number of great opportunities for artists to harness this for their own growth.
This is part 1 of an ongoing guide to what’s out there for free use for artists.
Analytics
Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics – A free service from Google that allows you to analyse the traffic that you receive to an artist website or microsite. This is an easy to use tool, that beyond the obvious stats provides for a really detailed breakdown of how your website is performing, where traffic is coming from and comparisons to past data etc.
Youtube Insight – This tool allows you to see the amount of views, demographic, geographic and community data for each video that you have uploaded to your channel. Being able to access this data gives you a clearer idea of what type of video content is working for you and what people you are reaching through it. Access this by logging into youtube and click ‘insights’ next to any of your videos.
Bandmetrics – http://www.bandmetrics.com/ – This site is currently in private beta. It allows an artist to see data about them from sites like last.fm, myspace, twitter and many more. Useful for spotting trends and understanding how people are finding out about you.
Google Insights – http://www.google.com/insights/search/ – Google Insights for search allows you to see details and graphs of search traffic for keywords. This is another useful source of data which lets you see data for how people are searching for your artist and from which countries and towns etc. You can compare different search terms and see related search terms.
Quickly monitor buzz with Google and Twitter
Not sure who is talking about your music, feel like your not abreast of the blog buzz or the latest reviews?
Here are a couple of quick tips for using google to help you monitor what’s being written about your band:
Google Alerts – This emails you as-it-happens, daily or weekly with all the new articles that have appeared on the internet with your specified words in.
Head here: http://www.google.com/alerts
Put your band/track/album name in the ‘search terms’ field, keep the ‘type’ as comprehensive to start with, choose how often you’d like to be updated and fill in your email address.
You will then start receiving emails to your chosen account updating you with all that’s happening online…
Twitter Search – Twitters search function allows you to see all the tweets which contain your chosen search terms. So you could search your own band name, or the name of a festival you are playing etc. Usefully twitter enables you to take an rss feed of that search. Go to www.search.twitter.com, make whatever search you wish and then click on the “Feed for This Query” button and add it to the feed reader of choice (I use Google Reader reader.google.com)
Digital Asset Management
Five years ago, digital was an afterthought for most record labels. Unless they were big enough to get a direct deal with the retailers (e.g. iTunes) most went with a digital distributor/aggregator. As nobody really knew what a distributor did, the decision of who to go with was usually based on personal relationships and recommendations more than anything else. Very few people knew what was going on and placed a lot of faith in distributors to handle everything for them. What many people may have not realised is that the distributors were, for the most part, making it up as they went a long. That’s not to say that the distributors were taking people for a ride – they were doing the best they could to help out labels in a truly confusing time.
Now, 5 years on, the dust has started to settle. Talk to anyone in the independent music industry and most will be able to tell you who are the most reliable digital distributors. Personal relationships still play a big part, as they should, but with the knowledge now available and many important lessons learned, you are less likely to end up getting burned.
Having said that, it is time for record labels, and anyone else who owns recorded music, to take responsibility for their own digital assets. However solid your current setup may seem, these are still uncertain times. If your distributor disappeared tomorrow, how long would it take you to get everything back up and running? Don’t get caught with your drawers down!
As far as digital retail goes, there are three important types of asset that you must take care of:
Audio
Album artwork (packshots)
Metadata
Audio
FORMAT
Audio should be stored in an uncompressed format (no mp3s here please!). That means .WAV files. WAV files can be converted to any compressed format (mp3, wma, aac, etc) so you are ready for anything that could be thrown at you. It’s the digital equivelant of that dusty shelf in the corner of the office containing all your CD masters.
NAMING CONVENTIONS AND FILE STRUCTURE
The audio files must be named in a meaningful way that can be understood by anyone. Everyone has their own slightly different way of doing this, but you should essentially name each track with three elements:
barcode(UPC/EAN)
disc number
track number
Like this:
5103462467956_01_001.wav
5103462467956_01_002.wav
5103462467956_01_003.wav
…
5103462467956_02_001.wav
5103462467956_02_002.wav
5103462467956_02_003.wav
etc
The underscores can be replaced with hyphens if you wish, but you get the general idea.
Store these files in seperate, barcode-named folders. For example, the audio files in the example above would be stored in a folder named ’5103462467956′.
STORAGE
Everyone has their own way of storing things, whether it’s on a server, on the local hard drive of someone’s computer or on external hard drives. However you do it, you must make sure that the storage location is secure, safe from accidental corruption and easily accessible. Setting up a server is beyond the scope of this article so, if that’s completely alien to you, I would recommend getting hold of an external hard drive with plenty of space (you can pick up a 1TB drive for next to nothing these days).
BACKUP
Storing your audio in a safe place is all well and good. But accidents DO happen. Don’t think they won’t happen to you. It is essential that you create regular backups of everything on that hard drive. Again, the ins and outs of backing up are beyond the scope of this article. We’ll write that one soon but, in the meantime, there is plenty of useful information on the net about how to do this at little or no cost. Here’s a great article to get you started:
Geek to Live: Automatically back up your hard drive
You’ll need something to backup to, so you can add another external hard drive to your shopping list. Trust me, it’s worth it!
Album Artwork (Packshots)
As with audio, it’s important to store your artwork in a universally recognised format as well as in high quality to ensure you can handle any eventuality.
FORMAT
Whatever application you or your designer is using, you will have the ability to save image files in .JPG format. This is the format that all digital retailers currently accept so it’s a safe bet.
You should save the images to the following specifications:
Dimensions: 1400 x 1400 pixels
Resolution: 300 dpi (dots per inch)
Most decent image editing applications (e.g. Photoshop) will let you choose the level of ‘quality’ you wish to use. You should always choose the highest quality.
While not essential, it’s also a good idea to store a lower quality version of the artwork. This can come in handy if you just need to send someone the image and quality is not important. There’s no point in attaching a large 2MB file to an email if it’s not necessary. A good specification for these lower quality files would be:
Dimensions: 600 x 600 pixels
Resolution: 72 dpi
NAMING CONVENTION
Quite simply, name the artwork files with the product barcode. For example:
5103462467956.jpg
Store the files in one folder named, for example, ‘album-artwork’. If you are storing lower quality images as well, create a seperate folder for those and give it a meaningful name. For example, you could have two folders named as follows:
album-artwork-300dpi (for your hight quality images)
album-artwork-72dpi (for your lower quality images)
STORAGE
Again, like audio, you must store your artwork files in a secure location. I would recommend that you store the artwork folders in the same place as the audio.
BACKUP
Yep, you guessed it. We need to back these up too. If you have your artwork stored in the same place as your audio, the backup process will be exactly the same.
Metadata
When thinking about the storage of your metadata, there are several important things to consider:
- What kind of data to store
- How to store the data
- Where to store the data
- The ability to supply the data to anyone who needs it in the format they require
WHAT KIND OF DATA TO STORE
Every distributor and retailer has its own data specification. It’s not possible to store your data in a way that fits perfectly with all of them. What you can do, however, is store your data in way that makes it as easy as possible to export it in a way that works for them. The key to this is having every conceivable bit of data stored and having it stored in a way that it can be manipulated to suit the requirements of others. So, without further ado, here is a list of what you should be storing:
Product Level Data
Label Name
Barcode (UPC/EAN)
Catalogue ID
Disc Count
Track Count
Product Title
Display Artist Name
Primary Genre
Secondary Genre
Format
Parental Advisory
Physical Release Date
Digital Release Date
Original Release Date
Available Territories
C Line
P Line
Main Artist(s)
Featured Artist(s)
Track Level Data
Disc Number
Track Number
ISRC
Track Title
Version Info
Display Artist Name
Individual Sale Rights
Preview/Ringtone Start Time
Main Artist(s)
Featured Artist(s)
HOW TO STORE THE DATA
There are two recommended ways of storing your metadata – in a spreadsheet or in a database. Setting up and managing a database is a big topic and not something we will delve into right now. If you have no experience with database management, you’ll probably want to go for the spreadsheet option. Alternatively, until we get around to having a more in depth look at database management on these pages, there are plenty of online resources to help you get started.
With that said, let’s take a look at the spreadsheet option. If you have some kind of spreadsheet application, you’re all set. If not, you can either purchase something like Microsoft Office, which will include Microsoft’s spreadsheet application, Excel, or you can go for a free alternative. OpenOffice is very popular and can certainly handle the kind of tasks we’ll be looking at here.
Firstly, as we are so generous, we have created a sample metadata spreadsheet for you (saved in Microsoft’s .xls format). Before reading on, grab it from here. You are free to take this, adapt it to suit your needs and pass it on to your friends. Please don’t try to sell it to anyone, that’s just not cricket.
Got the spreadsheet? Ok, let’s continue. I won’t reiterate what is already included in the spreadsheet, but I’ll give you some pointers on how to navigate your way around it.
The first worksheet (Metadata) is where you will enter all of your data. It contains a column for each and every item on the list above.
The second worksheet (Glossary) tells you what should be entered in each of those columns.
The third and fourth worksheets (Reference – Genres, Reference – ISO Country Codes) are there to make your life a little easier when defining genres and available territories.
The final worksheet (EXAMPLE) simply shows you an example of how you should fill out the Metadata worksheet.
Once you have your spreadsheet setup and populated with all your data, it’s important to keep the data up to date with any changes/updates to the catalogue. Data that is out of date or inaccurate is no good to anyone.
WHERE TO STORE THE DATA
Where do you think? That’s right, store it on that hard drive that you are backing up regularly. Compiling a spreadsheet full of your data is not a 5 minute job so, of all the things that could be lost, you don’t want it to be this!
THE ABILITY TO SUPPLY THE DATA TO ANYONE WHO NEEDS IT IN THE FORMAT THEY REQUIRE
As mentioned previously, it’s impossible to store your data in a way that meets everbody’s requirements without a little tweaking first. Storing your data in the way that has been explained will put you in the best position possible. Supplying your data to somebody may mean spending an hour or two renaming columns or combining fields, but none of that is too difficult with a bit of spreadsheet trickery (I’ll save that tutorial for another day!).
Storing your data in a database will allow much more flixebility but, again, let’s not try to do too much at once.
So there you have it. We’ve looked at how to store your audio, artwork and metadata in a way that will ensure ease of access, security and adaptability. If you can implement everything we’ve looked at here, you will already be well ahead of most companies out there and you will be well positioned to deal with whatever this crazy business can throw at you next!
The Good Lizard Media Mission Statement
“Hi fans, sorry we’ve not been updating this recently! We will definitely be posting a lot more in the future. You can expect updates, news and videos from us, every week.” Updated 6 months ago.
Trust between artist and fan is, for us, the cornerstone around which Good Lizard Media is built. As our first blog post on our brand new website, I wanted to lead with all the great things we want to do with the company and with this here blog. As I thought about it, I was reminded of the numerous times you see a close variation on the quote and date at the top. How many websites, MySpace profiles, blogs and twitter profiles have you seen like this?
The answer, I fear, may be many.
Communication is key to profitable (in all senses of the word) artists and requires planning, thought and commitement. An audience needs to trust that you will deliver when you say you will.
So here, as our first blog, I declare that we will be blogging (either myself or Pete) at least once a week with information, guides and news that we think you might find interesting or useful. The spelling and grammar on my updates will be questionable if Pete doesn’t check it first and Pete’s will be massively techy if I don’t check his, but that’s are only caveat.
We know what we want to write. We have plenty of great info stored in out heads that’s bursting to get out and there is space and technology that allows us to be creative.
Simples.
I hope you come back soon.
David
