Music Promo Blog: 2004/04

Do you have some music marketing and promotion business news that you think musicians should know about? If so, submit your music promotion news.

Prince's Royal Treatment

In the first week of it's release, Prince's latest CD, Musicology sold 191,000 copies. But 17K were not sold at retail or online. They were free gifts with every ticket sold at a concert in South Carolina.

The brilliant aspect of this is that since they were incorporated into the ticket price, the CDs were not just freebies. They were point-of-purchase sales at SoundScan. Thus, they were tracked on the charts. Give ye any ideas?

--posted by Marc Gunn at Thursday, April 29, 2004
Free republishing rights are available to all articles written by Marc Gunn. You can find a complete list of such music marketing articles here. You must contact individual authors to get their permission to republish their articles.

eBay auction madness offers a great lesson viral music marketing

I got an email yesterday about about a wedding dress for sale on eBay by a disgruntled newly divorced man. The comment my friend made was, "Read what he wrote." I laughed my ass off!

Yesterday afternoon, the site had 500,000 hits and the dress was selling for $800. End of the day, it had hit 2,000,000 hits and the dress was selling for a few million. Okay, it's now back down to a very reasonable $25,000... WHAT?!

It's a stinkin' wedding dress, but as any collector would note, it's not the dress, it's the entertainment value. This eBay Auction even made the Today Show this morning.

So what does this have to do with music marketing?

This is what they call viral marketing. Something with a lot of entertainment value gets passed around like a virus. I found a couple similar sites that I added to an article, .com eBay Auction Gone Mad!

The point of this is that if you're really anxious to build a fan base in the digital era, you need to go viral. Meaning:

Release a Free MP3 single from your latest album.
Give it away.
Encourage your fans to share it with their friends.
Post it on Kazaa and Morpheous.
Upload it to every MP3 website out there.
Post it to bulletin boards.
Offer incentives for people to spread the virus.

Do it right, and you might be the next viral bandit on eBay.

PS. Find out more about Viral Music Promotion from a couple articles I published four years ago on the topic.

PSS. Seth Godin published an incredible free ebook called, Unleash the Ideavirus. Go download it and learn more about viral marketing.

PSSS. Don't forget to tell your friends about this Mad Viral Marketing success story on eBay.

--posted by Marc Gunn at Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Free republishing rights are available to all articles written by Marc Gunn. You can find a complete list of such music marketing articles here. You must contact individual authors to get their permission to republish their articles.

How to Be Your Booking Agent Update

I was notified by a reader that Jeri Goldstein's incredible book "How to Be Your Own Booking Agent (and Save 1000s of dollars)" was no longer available at Amazon.

I was a bit horrified. Jeri's book is my absolute first suggestion for ANY band trying to get started in the music business. It's packed with the greatest information on booking gigs. Jeri Goldstein is THE Authority on the topic.

Fortunately, I dropped by Jeri Goldstein's website and found that it wasn't gone forever. It just changed names. It's now titled, "How to Be Your Own Booking Agent: The Musician's & Performing Artist's Guide to Successful Touring," and it's back on sale. Buy it at Amazon.com. If you don't have this book, you need to go get it today.

Hopefully, thanks to a this weeks music marketing tip, musicians shouldn't have too much trouble figuring out that the title has changed.

--posted by Marc Gunn at Saturday, April 24, 2004
Free republishing rights are available to all articles written by Marc Gunn. You can find a complete list of such music marketing articles here. You must contact individual authors to get their permission to republish their articles.

I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy... of Google

Man, the folks at Google just totally kick ass! I love seeing brilliant marketing and thusfar, Google is the sh*t!

Yesterday, I heard that they are preparing to start their own free mail server like Yahoo and Hotmail. The big difference is the Google genius. No pop-ads. No banner ads. Plus, 1000 MB of FREE storage!

And the genius of it?

Ye know how at the bottom of Yahoo and Hotmail emails you'll see a wee message that says something like "Hotmail http://www.hotmail.com/" or whatever. Well, they'll do the same, only they'll add content relevant text ads which I assume will be a part of the their Google AdWords program.

Imagine. You're chatting with a friend about Celtic music and you see the following ad:

Download free Celtic mp3s
Brobdingnagian Bards are The Original Celtic Renaissance music group with over five million MP3s served. www.thebards.net

Or something like that. You don't even have to add it in. They take care of it all for ye.

I haven't signed us up for AdWords yet, but I'm gonna. That and I gotta get some Google stock when it goes public. What brilliant biz people!

--posted by Marc Gunn at Friday, April 02, 2004
Free republishing rights are available to all articles written by Marc Gunn. You can find a complete list of such music marketing articles here. You must contact individual authors to get their permission to republish their articles.