April 2012, Every Spoil Is A Style

With Teeth: I’d Missed This Excellent Feature of Facebook’s “Listen” Function

I was using Facebook earlier and realised something I’m not sure has been widely mentioned before now. As well as adding a “Listen” button to Fan Pages, Facebook further extends this when you browse the page whilst listening to music via Spotify (or, presumably other streaming services).

For example, here is one of my band’s pages, browsed with no music playing via my Spotify desktop app:

As you can see, the info there is standard: the top post is the bookmarked one by the band, and on the right you simply see which of your Facebook friends also like the band.

Now let’s look at the same view when I am playing any music in Spotify:

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Music Industry

With Teeth: My Viral Marketing Presentation for Generator/Music Ally

On March 27th I attended a Generator/Music Ally “Music Futures” event, looking at viral marketing. Two presentations were made; the first by Ste and Drew from Powster, the second by me. Ste and Drew covered the bigger-budget end of virals by way of Powster’s own campaigns with the likes of Pendulum, Nero, Muse and more, and I thoroughly recommend viewing their showreel to see the kind of brilliant work they do.

For this reason then, my own presentation focussed more on the lower-cost or zero cost approaches to viral marketing (or, as I explain in the clip below, just good marketing – I hate the term ‘viral’) but also broadened out into general tips around approaching marketing music online. The aim was to provide practical tips that new, unsigned bands can take away and get something from. It seemed to go down well, as both Generator and Music Ally asked if I could make it available for both the attendees and the general public. So, here it is again – I hope you find it useful!

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Music Industry, Tech

With Teeth: Spotify Player, WordPress and the need for open source in music

Upon reading Spotify’s news of their embeddable player yesterday I must admit that I was initially really excited by the concept. After all, Spotify has aspirations to become “the OS of music” and on paper at least this move seems like a wise one. To some extent, it is.

Digging a little deeper though, I found my view changing. For one thing, the player itself isn’t particularly impressive – rather than exist as an entirely web-driven experience it instead is forced to launch your Spotify player. Immediately that introduces a number of obstacles to adoption. Firstly, you need to be in a country where Spotify has launched. Secondly, you need to have Spotify installed and an active user account in order to stream. Compare this to, for example, YouTube or Soundcloud and immediately the issue becomes clear: as long as this embeddable player cannot be openly used by all, anywhere on the web, it falls down.

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Music Industry, Tech

With Teeth: Should YouTube Be Your Primary Social Media Presence?

For at least 2 years now accepted wisdom has been that the second most important place a band should focus on (after their own website of course) is their Facebook Page. Like many I’ve focussed on social media campaigns there, and many would still consider it the best place for artist’s to connect with fans.

Of late though, things have been changing and shifts are occurring. Since Facebook introduced Timeline for Pages, there has been much talk of the devaluation of the Page for bands. After all, with no means to stipulate a default landing tab, fans-to-be cannot land on a page of music or video to enjoy. Instead, they land on the high visual impact of the main Wall page and, whilst you can pin a post to the top of that Page which might be a YouTube clip or a Soundcloud player, the reality is that means to have immediate connection via your music has been undermined. Its just too… wordy.

In the meantime, a a tortoise has been slowly creeping up on Facebook’s hare: YouTube. In the last year or more they have been slowing introducing a number of changes to their platform, and in combination these amount to a very compelling proposition for artists and their fans. Let’s take a look and run through the benefits and drawbacks:

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