The Indie Artist X Project – Awareness
About the Project
The goal of the Indie Artist X Project is to develop a basic, actionable music marketing plan designed around simple strategy, prioritization of tactics, tools and a reasonable budget that can be implemented by any indie artist that has the inclination to follow it. A group of like minded people interested in helping foster the success of independent musicians have banned together to create this community based music marketing plan. It’s our hope that any hard working, talented musician can utilize this plan to grow their fan base and help lay the foundation for a sustainable career in music. We will be working with one anonymous artist to design and implement this music marketing plan then track and report the actual results over a four month period. All the details of the plan are available in a publicly shared document called the Indie Artist X Music Marketing Plan.
There are several guidelines in place to ensure this project reflects the true nature of an independent musician. The budget is limited to $20 per month per channel (for a total of $120 per month). The artist must do everything himself. The sponsors and community are allowed to provide advice, insight and guidance but all the work must be done by the artist himself. Most importantly, the identity of Indie Artist X must remain anonymous so any publicity surrounding project does not give him an unfair advantage. Everything achieved over the course of this case study must be the result of the artist’s efforts, just as it would for any independent musician.
The Participants
We have broken out the independent musician marketing plan into six channels, each with a lead sponsor that will work as a middle man between the community and Indie Artist X. Since every aspect of a musician’s career is intertwined, these sponsors will be working closely together:
- Fan Development: Andrew Goodrich of Artists House Music
- Commerce: Bruce Houghton of Hypebot
- Awareness: Cameron Mizell of MusicianWages.com
- Website: David Rose of KnowTheMusicBiz.com
- Influencers: Heather McDonald of About.com Music Careers
- Live Shows: Martin Atkins via Revolution Number 3
You can learn more about each channel at the sponsor’s respective website or via the shared Indie Artist X Music Marketing document.
This project would be nothing without Indie Artist X. We chose an artist that is not unlike any other hard working, independent and resourceful musician trying to make music a full time job. He is not signed to a label and does not have a booking agent or manager. He works a full time job and is married. He was chosen for these reasons, and because he has the work ethic to follow through on the advice of the sponsors. By the end of this case study, we will have substantial, real world evidence of what marketing strategies really do work for the D.I.Y. musician.
Awareness
Here at MusicianWages.com, we will help develop a strategy to spread awareness for Artist X’s brand. We will use social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook to funnel traffic to the artist’s website. We will also focus on keyword heavy tags for blog posts, YouTube videos, and other online content. We will experiment with different approaches to build a mailing list. We will run some type of contest to engage fans, which in return will help create buzz and improve Fan Development. Most importantly, we will develop an organized and efficient strategy that produces the most effective results using as little time as possible. After all, we need to preserve as much time as possible for offline development of the actual music!
I have read a lot of great advice on how to use Twitter to promote your brand and have found it useful myself. One of the most common complaints about using Twitter is that it just requires too much time to keep up with everything. I don’t believe the point is to keep up with everything as much as it is to stay consistently present. It is possible to be present without actually logging into Twitter in two ways: first by populating your timeline using Twitterfeed or another RSS tie-in, and also by spacing out updates with the help of Hootsuite, a tool which allows you to queue your posts. This way you will have updates spanning the day while only logging in about once. It’s also important to have a diverse timeline and not constantly pound away at your brand and add a link to your website every other post. It is too easy to be tuned out if all you produce is white noise. Instead, a personable and interesting variety of posts to capture the attention of new fans and followers.
Another important and very practical tool we will focus on will be creating iMixes on the iTunes Store. These (and other playlisting tools) will help put Artist X’s music into context for new listeners. Over time, this also helps generate recommendation links between Artist X and better known but relavant artists. Not to mention, this can also helps sell music outright.
Much of our approach to Awareness will follow this mantra:
Create a consistent, focused web presence using minimal and consolidated time effort.
The music always comes first. While using Twitter and other social networking sites to raise awareness is important, ultimately we want people to visit his website and listen to the music. The artist’s website should be the hub for everything pertaining to his music. Once people become interested in Artist X as a person, they will be more interested in his music. This is the true function of Awareness: Capture people’s attention, then impress them with the music.
Be sure to visit the other sponsors’ sites to learn more about this project, and keep track of the Indie Artist X Music Marketing Plan, it could very well help you out with your own D.I.Y. music business plan. And finally, please feel free to make suggestions in the comments below or in our forum. What has worked for you? Have you read other useful blog posts that relate to artist awareness? All suggestions will help the greater good of the independent music community.
You can also follow the project on Twitter: @Indie_ArtistX, and with the hashtag #IAXP.
About the author
This is a great project. I look forward to seeing how ideas and advice turn into real world results.
7/7/2009
Me too, I just twittered it. Promises to be fascinating.
7/8/2009
This is a fantastic idea! I love it, and will be watching closely.
7/8/2009
I am loving this project. It seems very NOW if you know what I mean. The budget is actually realistic for many artists and the tools are easily accessible via the web. Viva the tweeting revolution….
Andrew Potterton.
7/23/2009
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