Kind of amazing that he actually did this. I am really looking forward to the time where these kind of events are not amazing anymore but rather standard like they should be. It is also interesting to see what technology he chose. Well I guess it was not for Google Plus’ publicity but rather for the brand recognition of Youtube. Anyway I didn’t see Facebook around there. Also I think questions like this should not be decided by how a president behaves it still is interesting to see how Obama chose Google over Facebook in these days… ]]>
Everything is growing:
- $10 bn revenue / quartal ==> more than $100 mio. / day!!!
- 90 Mio Google+ users
- over 60% of plus users engage daily with it and over 80% weekly!
- 350 Mio active Gmail users
- Youtube makes $5 bn revenue
- 700’000 android devices installed daily
- 250 Mio. Android devices in total!
- 11 bn downloads from the android market
- chrome is growing (sadly no numbers) But in an interesting (on its own) blog post of reddit you can see 42% of reddit users use chrome (which might not be representative)
- Google apps has 5000 new businesses signing up per day (among them: harvard, berkley, states (like wyoming), and a major bank bbva >100’000 employees) ,…)
- 1 mio. Google+ pages have been created by brands (it is mentioned that there exists a sales team (I knew it all the time (-: )
Larry points out again:
But have a look for yourself and listen to the annual report!
Filip: Even though I wasn’t agreeing with your Facebook skepticism in the beginning, I realized that I was overestimating Facebook in its promotion role. I’ve been creating extremely successful, targeted (extremely low budget though – just 5 or 10 euros at a time) campaigns for my band on Facebook.
Results?
Even though I managed to inflate the number of fans (with 12 fans/1 euro average), the interaction stayed the same. These campaigns aren’t entirely useless, though – having this number of fans or more looks nice in a smaller Croatian market and can help in booking bigger shows (thus getting to more fans)..but still dissappointing. I won’t campaign until we release a website/album/have something to sell.
Rene: I like your observation. The first was that gaining these paid likes does not really increase interactions and increase your reach. As I am saying to the In Legend guys all the time: “Money invested in facebook or even effort in facebook reach is not the best way to increase one’s reach” I am very glad that you came to the same conclusion and shared your insights!
Secondly I partially agree with the effect of large fan numbers while booking gigs. It certainly looks good to business partners like bookers, labels, distributers,… if your social media numbers burst. But again I would say the price is too high. With 1 Euro / 12 fans you would need to invest 1000 Euro for 12’000 fans an 12’000 isn’t even skyhigh (well I don’t know about croation standards). But as we know only a very small fraction of these 12’000 fans would actually become real fans and start interacting with you. All this for getting a gig! I guess this money could much better be invested in a high quality video which especially for a young band is a very good investment. With the video in combination with smart music downloads you will be able to increase your reach. Maybe not to 12’000 fans but still to a solid number of real fans that actually come to your concert because they really care! In this way your social media fancount (especially facebook) will also grow.
Filip: Question1 – sharing music!
About the thesis of providing music only on the band site – I think it’s hard for someone to become our fan if there is no music on Facebook. Choosing one song for preview and directing a fan to .com might work, but they are attracting entirely different audiences – think poppy indie rock vs. oriental, modern metal ballad. Is it okay to let this promo run free and spread like wildfire until the album release? Or should I provide 2/3 of songs for free, and ask for a mail adress for the 3rd one? This might be a good model.
Rene: I agree with what you say. At the time of writing the blog post you are referring too I wasn’t aware of the existing facebook music apps. The important thing is getting a sustainable contact to the person interested in your music. This is achieved ultimately by his email adress. But your question is very important. Of course you have to give people a bait. This could be
- snippets
- entire song(s) on streeming
- a music video (In legend offers downloads under every music video)
- a free download (without registration)
and I really don’t know where to set the boarder.
In the beginning times of In Legend we had 3 songs for streaming on myspace and 4 songs on the ep for download in exchange of an email adress. That turned out to be a good solution. People who liked the first songs where curious to download them together with one additional song. So I guess a 2/3 split would work as well. I will just warn you. Asking people for their mail address scares 4 of 5 people away. But hey at least you get the adresses of your fans that are really willing to give something for the music!
Now about the place where to make the connection. If you achive getting the fans mail adress via a smart Facebook music player or via download on your homepage I don’t care. Once people like your music (and chances are higher once you can talk to them frequently) they will also turn into facebook fans. So I recommend switching from rootmusic which you are using right now on your facebook profile to bandRX or Songpier since both services allow you to give access to your music in return of mail adresses. Songpier is a very new service but they also offer a cool mobile app (right now also without collecting mail adresses)
Here is a video about bandRX
Filip: Question2 – What do you think of Bandcamp?
I personally think it’s a great platform for selling music and there is an option of collecting mail adresses. The downside is that there is no valuable content that can be published, like blogs. It would be perfect if it was just a music-streaming, checkout widget on my site.
Rene: One of my Favourite (but retired) bands Jester’s Funeral have just published all their songs to bandcamp and have linked to their homepage and from the homepage to bandcamp. It is not quite the widged you are asking for but I guess this stays an option especially if you don’t bring the technical know how of programming a homepage that enables you to offer your music as a download in exchange of mail adresses.
There is only one thing that bothers me about bandcamp. They only let 200 fans per month download your music for free (email exchange) and offer a pay as much as you want option. From the money raised they keep 15% as a service charge. If you want more free downloads you have to buy them or have people pay for your music.
To some extend they offer a fair deal. It is a good service for a reasonable price. I as a programmer would just do it on my own have the full controll of my data and keep the 15% but I am pretty convinced that bandcamp should be a pretty good option for many musicians
I hope I could answer your questions to your satisfaction! Sorry that there isn’t always the clear black our white, right or wrong. Things are complex on the web but by reading your mail I am very convinced that you are asking the right questions which means that at least in online marketing you are far ahead of 95% of all musicians!
Record industry as well as many companies that are in the business of publishing are complaining for years that illegal file sharing is killing their market and destroying culture and art. I don’t want to fall into the discussion about how copyleft is superior to copyright. Also not about how wrong all the whining is as there are many reasons that show, that the industry was just not smart enough to listen to the customers and adapt to the new possabilities given by the internet.
But then it is just sad to see how musicians like DJ Sammy (probably together with management and record labels) seemed to take a (viral) video from a charity organization and use the idea and story for their own music clip. That happened without giving public credit to this organization and as far as I know – please proove me wrong – without sharing profit from this song with the jubilee project – the organization that had the original idea. If this is true I am very disapointed since it has no moral at all and the ethics are just not given.
As I was active on the boarder of music industry I know that I should not even talk about this sad event as bad promo is also promo and therefor my blogpost is even supporting DJ Sammy and the people responsible for this video (well maybe they will even adjust their behaviour!). But I hope that this blog article will help even more to promote the good thing and really nice video by the jubilee project! Feel free to watch the original here:
And of course to show the similarity check out the DJ Sammy song look for love! I was thinking about re uploading the video and making a front screen and back screen giving credit to the original video but still link to i tunes and all the shopping possabilities. But I wasn’t couragious enough since I myself would commit a copy right violation and I have no interest in some annoying law suit.
final thoughts
I have to admit that the song is great (though I usually listen to heavy metal) and that the video is really well recorded and produced. I wish they had just officially helped to spread the good idea of the jubilee project. Anyway I hope the user discussion on youtube will last and maybe in this way the jubilee project will receive even more attention.
I can understand that musicians are frustrated and feel betrayed but I can only remind you to act with moral and good ethics on the web. There are so many great opportunities on the web also for musicians. Noone would have objected if DJ Sammy had used the video and worked together with the jubilee project!
If you know more about this topic please tell me in the comments. I’d love to be updated how the story continues!
- Youtube only lets you download statistics for a periode of 30 days. So if you want to download your statistics for an entire year you have to download 12 files.
- Next the statistics are only available as rawdata and you need to process them in order to receive some useful information.
For me and in legend these statistics are very interesting for three reasons:
- We want to figure out from which websites people come to youtube in order to watch our video. This is important for us so we can contact the webmasters of theses sites as soon as new videos are available.
- We want to to analyze if the user behaviour is influenced by our Youtube ballads n bullets dvd and if so we want to see weather the influence is actually positive (which we of course expect).
- We want to see from which videos our video is linked as a related video. This could enable us to have some really useful collaborations.
Since there are so many reasons to process the statistics I wrote a little python script in order to analyze the statistics and retrieve them in a human readable format. Because open source is really important for our society and the web I made the decission to share this little tool with everyone on the web under a GPL licence (which means you can use it for free!).
So feel free to download this little python script and run it on your website. It is also avail able in the google code svn repository
Screencast and instructions:
Since the script is only displaying some information there is almost no configuration to be done. But I know from the time when my programming skills were not as good as today that it was always hard to run the source code of someone else. To make it even easier for you I created a little screencast that explains you how to download the programm, How to download the statistics from youtube and how to run the statistics tool.
Oh by the way this is some background knowledge about youtube insights can be found at the official youtube data api documentation
I hope you like that tool. If you find some bugs or you have some suggestions I would be more than happy to hear from you about your thoughts!
Motivation: Compare theoretical reach and cost of youtube ads vs print media
- The current situation in youtube is the following. Right now you pay 1 Cent per person watching your video / listening to your piece of music after he by himself has choosen to click on it by seeing an interesting title and description.
- In print media on the other side you pay 500 Euro for a quater page of advertising. At least that is the number that I know from Metal Hammer which is read by 40’000 people. This means you pay 1.25 Cent per Impression!
You think this sonds like a similar price to you? WRONG! That is much more expensive! Let me tell you why:
Not only 1.25 Cent is more than 1 Cent. But recall that an impression in a magazine full of advertising is not seen by many people. Also we know that even the people who see it don’t take an action and buy your CD or search for you on the web. On youtube again every Click means that a person spends at least 4 minutes with your music and you have the chance to score some points. Think of your self! Do you become fan of a band just because of a silly ad in a magazine or after watching a cool video and listening to a great song?
I have to admidt thogh that there is the positive fact that ads in magazines give rise to stories in mags which have a huge conversionrate and a reach that probably goes far beyond the audience of the mag. Well on the other hand sharing a Youtube video with you friends also has a huge reach that goes beyond the audience you payed for.
So we conlude Youtube Promoted videos is the much more superior, efficiant and much cheaper way to reach new fans!
what is going on on youtube and what do you have to watch out for?
Let me first explain the difference between Conversion rate and Clickthrough Rate (which is called viewthrough rate = VTR in the context of youtube):
View through rate: In the dashboard of your youtube ad campaign google tells you about your VTR and says the higher the VTR the better. Well that is technically true but there is one little thing missing. A high VTR is helpfull for Google/Youtube. You don’t have to care. VTR means how many times does Google have to show your video as a promoted video untill someone sees it and you have to pay. so if your VTR is 1% it means that after 100 display ads you have one person watching the video and you have payed youtube once. Let’s assume the rate is 2%. Well then with the same amount of impressions youtube has earned the double amount of money. You should not care about this rate. As long as you get the viewers you payed for everything is cool
Conversion Rate: A metric that should be of your interest though is the Conversion rate. Unfortunately this is hard to track and google does not really help you on this. It tells you how many of the people your reached turn into fans / recommend the video / sign up to your newsletter / buy an album to make it short take any action. You are interested in a high conversion rate since it gets you the maximum out of the viewers you payed for.
This rate is probably increased by choosing good keywords and being really honest in the ad text about what to expect. Despite what youtube is saying you’d rather have a lower VTR and increase your Conversionrate!
Ads within the video. As soon as you have your video in a promoted campain you can controll the ads that are displayed within your video. This enables you to display something in the video with a link to an external website which is impossible otherwise! The funny thing is if the campaign is paused due to the fact that your google adsense account is runnin out of cash those display ads are still visible. I will write an entire article about this nice little trick!
My personal Experience
I have the feeling that on my first test on youtube I did not get a high conversion rate. Only 0.8% clicked on the download this video for free link! (but most of them actually registered to the site an downloaded it)
I was lazy and made a campaign with 150 different keywords (which I choose as popular metal related words from metalcon (mostly band names)). all ad’s had the same ad with the same title and text. For example I bought the keyword: “hard rock” well our music is not really hard rock. Since we also used this word in the ad text I guess a lot of people have been disapointed and did not convert.
Since youtube seems to favor ads with a high VTR (this happens if add text and the keyword you pitch for) are similar (because users think the video is of interest to them) we recieved 40% of our views on hard rock which is as I said not even a good keyword at all.
Next time I will group keywords together in smaller groups and make ads particularly for these groups in this way I push VTR which is good for youtube but I also find fans on keywords that will convert better and I can drop off the campaigns for keywords like hardrock…
Overall I have to say that I bougth 1000 clicks per day for 10 Euro a day for a German audiance. Which was nice overall. I spend 80 Euro for 8 thousand views which gave our video a nice little push.
Summary of my Experiences
- I think Youtube ads are very cost efficiant and are a great tool for musicians. It is a product where advertising really makes sense / not like a tv commercial for diappers or some other FMCG…) It is especially good for small musicians that need to introduce their music to many people.
- Right now ads on youtube are totally undervalued (which will most certainly change over time). I cannot imagine that in 5 years from now youtube ads will still be that cheap.
- However youtube has the problem that high quality advertising material is rare. so maybe the price might stay low for a pretty long time.
- Youtube ads can probably be even more efficiant if good keywords are selected!
- If it was my decission for a band as small as in legend I would buy advertising on youtube for thousand till two thousand euros.
- I would not need to depend on any label or promo company or any other person to reach a very large audience at a rather cheap price! I would have real people who spend time getting to know my music!
in other words we again see a situation in which the web can help people to solve a problem. A new comer can reach out to hundres of thousands of people at very low cost and independent of other people!
So tell me what is your experience with youtube ads?
Inspired by the master thesis of Stefan Wilk about his research on navigable hyper video systems I had the idea of using Youtube navigation links and jpg graphics to create a DVD. I talked back to Robert Naumann and the guys from In Legend who were about to release a couple of music videos anyway.
Everone was convinced right away that the idea of not only putting a video on Youtube but creating the first Youtube Music DVD in the world was exactly what we wanted to do.
So here we go! The first video I’ll show here is the main Menu. It is the hidden track Remedy from the Ballads n Bullets record and consists just of a jpg. from here with the help of overlays users can choose the songs they want to listen via a simple mouse click.
For the Youtube DVD we did not want to release all tracks right a way so only the first five videos are available. Among them there is the brand new Video for the song Vortex.
Interesting about vortex is that it was taken on the In Legend Wacken Camp. I had the idea for such a camp and posted it in the in legend message board. Even though I couldn’t go to the Wacken open air more than 50 fans organized this camp and took this video on the camp ground! I am amazed how the internet is connecting people and really helping musicians to create things they might never been able to create in the past!
Besides being a really cool idea and product the youtube DVD has some other really nice and positive side effects for band promo and marketing.
- the dvd enables us to advertise our products (concerts, merchandise, records, online activities…)
- the lyrics of the songs can be displayed
- the dvd will help us to keep the user with OUR videos and not keep on surfing to some other related content
- Pleased by our good experiences with the free Pandemonium Download In Legend agreed to make the videos available for free download on their website which will contribute to In Legends viral marketing!
I am really excited to see how the idea with the Youtube DVD will develop. How the videos will spread and if the users like and understand the menu! It’ll be also interesting to see if other bands will adopt to the idea. If people are interested I will post some instructions how to create such a Youtube DVD. If you guys have any suggestions comments and thoughts I’ll be happy to hear about them!
]]>If you want to have a look at the business plan (in German language!) contact me. But I can’ publish it here.
Our concept was basically driven by the idea that the internet is an incredible source of information and knowledge and yields huge potential to bring education at very low cost to African countries (once you change the rules of how education is delivered and once you bring the infrastructure to africa) and the assumption that a country basically needs good education in order to develope!
Today I came across a video from Google search stories that totally supports this idea. I know from verious sources that google is rather active in brining internet to africa (e.g. there is o3b networks = other three billion networks: A company heavily supported by google with the goal to bring internet to the rest of the world!)
So have a look at this video:
what is your oppinion on africa and the internet? ]]>
“Sorry you requested some content which is not available in Germany.”
After several rounds in this battle between youtube and GEMA we have a third party entering the battle field. This morning the hacker groupd anonymous hacked the website of GEMA. if you visit the site now you will find a german message looking very similar to the message that is displayed on the youtube videos that are not available in Germany. This parody message displayed on the GEMA website roughly translated says:
“sorry this site is (not only) in germany not available, since it is conected to a company for which anonymous doesn’t like the standards of freedom. We are not sorry about this”
I am kind of excited to see how things between GEMA and youtube will develope in the future. As someone connected to music industry I can understand both sides very well. Let us see what the future for music & internet will bring. Till then I will listen to lady gaga on simfy.de
edit:
oh and by the way I just looked a little bit into the data traffic of the hacked GEMA site. the background music that is playing on the hacked gema site is an hidden youtube video on autoplay. if you wish to see the video here you go!
GEMA co-workers data base also been hacked?
I just received a chat message from a friend that it seems to be that the data base from the GEMA CMS also has been hacked or leaked to the public in some other way. I don’t know if this data is valid but it says that it displays the passwords of many people working at GEMA.
Honestly: “Who is still building IT systems that saves passwords in a non encrypted way?!?”
For anyone working at GEMA: “These passwords don’t look secure. People change your other passwords.”
The following data snippet ist taken from pastebin
]]>(username,password,email,*plainpw*)
cdode:895cfbf5add9e56b40ee2e193de2fff9::kihnkim
testredakteur:128ecf542a35ac5270a87dc740918404::bla
….
….
….
vbley:def5ebb4aa81ae49a9847503bc942579:vbley@gema.de:07verena10
bdorn:f14f831a9badfe0af03043106af04591:bdorn@gema.de:bdorn
….
….
….
+——-+——————–+———————–+———–+——————-+———————————-+
| admin | email | realName | usergroup | username | password |
+——-+——————–+———————–+———–+——————-+———————————-+
| 1 | NULL | NULL | NULL | _cli_scheduler | f95b8ddef737a31bed2dc320e8464ffc |
| 0 | NULL | NULL | 2 | ahaberkorn | bla |
| 0 | NULL | NULL | 4 | bdorn | blabla |
| 1 | saur@aicomm.de | Rainer Saur | NULL | cdode | rsaur |
…
…
…
| 0 | NULL | www_redakteur | 2 | vbley | hilftuns |
| 0 | smai@gema.de | Sabine Mai | 5 | www_redakteur | smai |
+——-+——————–+———————–+———–+——————-+———————————-+
What do you need for an youtube video
- a song
- a camera team (and an idea for the video)
- someone to cut the video
Well these things where already mandetory in an offline world so I won’t discuss them any further.
What is important while uploading the video?
First of all it is important to understand how your video will spread through the Internet
- On webzines if you contact them an tell them about your video
- It will pass on from person to person once they find, watch and like it
- It appears as a similar video besides other videos
- Via search functions (be it google search or the video search of youtube)
The first two points are mainly your responsability. Once your video is great and you contact a lot of magzines and give them a press release the video might appear on a lot of websites. If your song and video are really great people might spread the word. But be warned everyone is talking about becoming viral. If all the music videos out there became viral everyone would be constantly watching music videos. So don’t forget that becoming viral hardly ever happens.
The 3rd and 4th point are your responsability. To some degree youself can decide where your video is supposed to appear. Search and recommendation engines are responsible to battle with these two points. But machines can undersand text documents like websites much better in comparison to rich media content like your video. That is why the algorithms on these machines probably pay a lot of attention to the tags you use while tagging the video, the title you put in and the description text. Of course they will probably also look at the websites on which the video is embedded and analyse what users this video watched an which other videos these users watched.
Anyway: your video should have the following title: “Bandname – Songname on Recordname” because this is what people are most likely to search for.
A short discussion on cover songs and guest musicians
Doing coversongs is by the way a great method to gain publicity. Look at the Van Canto videos. They have covered many bands and have those names in their title. If you search for “wishmaster” in youtube you easily find the van canto cover of wishmaster! Imagine how often people search for music by a famous musician in comparison to your music!
I did the work for you and just looked it up for Wishmaster and Van Canto:
On last.fm 317.207 people listen to the record wishmaster by Nightwish. On the other hand only 49.164 people listen to Van Canto! So you can do the math and decide what kind of songs you want to upload for promo reasons.
here you go with a title for a song with a guest musician: “your band’s name – songname feat. musician’s name from his band’s name”
illegal content on your videos
Most songs are on youtube in some form. Be happy about the fact that people like your music! A lot of artists wish they had so much attention. My article Why open source is the way to go holds perfectly as my contribution on copy rights in music anyway – also compare my article on sharing music. So what can you do to profit from the fact that most songs are on youtube anyway?
Upload them yourself. Use good tags, nice pictures, and provide the lyrics. Promote them! Put them on your search engine optimizied pages and ask people to connect with you and buy the album or donate for your music.
THINK ABOUT IT!
If you are Lady Gaga and your videos are being watched million times and some one else put them on youtube you don’t have as much benefit as they are watched on YOUR youtube channel. Where people could become subscribers or where you are able to embed AND change messages for your tour / album within the videos.!
So do you really want to be angry if someone else puts your videos on youtube. A very nice example is Blind Guardian. About one year ago they uploaded all their videos to their youtube channel. But the videos where already out there and other videos already made rank1 in search for videos. Again algorithms are just not that smart and the user doesn’t care as long as he sees the video!
new forms of marketing
This is the best part of the message. have a look at this great video (thogh it has nothing to do with music!) and realize that you have to act differently on the internet.
Understand?
Well here is a list of things you can do to be interesting and attract people on youtube if you are a musician:
- Fans love interviews: make a video interviews. Have your fans ask you questions and answer them in a video
- medleys (album introduction)
- have a prelistening session of your album. You can tune into every song and discuss the song. What do you need print media or similar for? You can reach your audiance in a much more interesting way
- live videos: Ask your fans to tape your show. You will easily get a 20 + cam mix of a song. This will create much more feeling and will be much cheaper than any professional music video
- Record short stories,
- Interact with the world. Remember what old spice – even though not a band – did? If not have a look at my upcoming blog article on old spice.
- Make competitions: Ask your fans to create funny videos using your songs. Don’t be afraid that the quallity might be bad. (if the quality is bad it won’t spread on the web)
Be creative be fun and especially forget about the old business models! On the internet you want to be open!
]]>