Archive for September, 2009

A Guest Post by Bas Grasmayer

To the readers of the Make It In Music blog, I would like to present my paper looking into some of the best practices of the online promotion of new music releases.

The paper identifies trends at play in the online practices of music promotion, looks at five different case studies and draws some observations and conclusions based on these case studies.

With the great, and some times not so great, examples set by Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, DangerMouse & Sparklehorse, Mos Def and Groove Armada, the paper aims to show very simply what works well when promoting music on the web and what does not.

Are you familiar with the phrase ‘freemium’ yet? Where you give something away for free, only to give yourself more opportunities to sell your premium content (fan packs, high quality versions, bundled packages, etc.).

Something else the paper discusses is that when you give something away, you should really give it away. So no DRM (copy protection), no sub-par quality versions (anything below 128 or 192 kbps), or other things which might actually disappoint people expecting to be delighted.

Without further ado, I present to you my paper about the online promotion of new musical content, click the link to download: Online Promotion of New Musical Content by Bas Grasmayer

This article was written by Bas Grasmayer, an International Communication Management student at INHOLLAND University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He’s currently writing his thesis about successfully using the web for monetizing music and wrote this paper as a side-project.

As part of his studies, he’s completed an internship with the Bulgarian National Radio in Sofia with excellent results, studied new media and PR at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, Turkey for a semester and has combined two of his biggest loves, new media and music, into one research objective for his thesis, which will be finished and made public somewhere within the next few months.

Bas regularly tweets about innovation in the music industry on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spartz

Bas’ contact info can be found on his blog: http://www.basbasbas.com/

You can also find him on LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Facebook. Be sure to check out his Google Reader shared items for many more interesting articles about the music industry and web 2.0!

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We love Nimbit.

It’s been around a while offering all sorts of amazing ‘direct-to-fan’ marketing tools (email list capture, analytics, social media tools etc) and ‘direct-to-fan’ selling tools (widgets that allow you to sell all types of stuff from all sorts of places). In fact, we’ve been recommending it to our clients for a very long time and many have chosen to use it for it’s ‘all-in-one’ ease of use.

And now, they’ve moved the game on and managed to bring their functionality to facebook.

It’s important to realise what a powerful tool Nimbit is before you can really see what their new extra tools for facebook can mean for you as a do-it-yourself artist.

Nimbit allows you to manage your direct-to-fan activity pretty much all from within Nimbit’s site. Meaning, for the most part, that you can deal with all your Social Networking pages and your own blog all from one place.

And what can you do with it?

You can:

• build your fan mailing list, find out more information about your fans, mail them in loads of cool ways
• sell pretty much anything direct to fans – digital tracks, merchandise, CD’s, tickets
• sell that stuff from loads of different places where you can drop their widget – MySpace, your blog etc
• control your Social Network presence from one place and build your ‘music brand’

But that’s not all – they’ll also get your digital tracks for sale on all the major sites, such as iTunes and Amazon.

So, why is this update to what Nimbit can do on facebook a big deal? – because it has all their functionality in one easy to switch on App! It’s so simple – literally switch it on and you are selling to your fans on facebook.

What does it cost?

Well, maybe nothing!

In order to have the MyStore application running on your facebook page, you have to have a Nimbit account – but it can be the basic free Nimbit account. There are limitations on what you can use it to do, but you get most of the facebook App functionality for free.

In truth, if you get it, you’ll probably end up falling in love with how easy Nimbit can make your music marketing and to get all the functions you’ll have to upgrade to one of their two membership levels – either $9.95 or $19.95 per month.

But, it’s well worth it.

Click here to go to Nimbit and have a look at the MyStore App.

Or, watch the video about MyStore below.

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