What we do. ( Besides being your fifth Beatle ).

5thbeatle.net offers the following services:

*Social Media Network analysis, network authoring, strategy consulting, redesign, execution, and maintenance
*Facebook Fan Page creation and maintenance, ad buys, custom fan page tabs
*Twitter Custom Page creation and use strategy
*Myspace friending, custom page design, and commenting campaigns
*Additional Social Network seeding for SEO
*Website Production ( hand coded, FourFour, or WordPress ), and maintenance.
*Total Web site content migration to CMS system ( Want to blog / update yourself? )
*Basic Sysadmin projects ( moving Websites, e-mail creation i.e. you@yourband.com )
*iPhone app execution and launching, maintenance
*iTunes Digital Booklet Production
*Entertainment PR
*Physical and Digital Distribution
*Special Project Management
*Graphic Design

Curious? Check out the About Page.

Want some free DIY advise? Click the top images ( WEBSITE – MYSPACE – FACEBOOK – TWITTER – WEB RADIO – PR ) for informative tidbits on using the Web and Social Media to market your music on-line.

FREE PDF of sites original content?

Google Buzz Gets Privacy Patch

Ok, so Google Buzz got a privacy patch? And what was that? Turning it off? Hmmm. Here is an interesting article from CNET about turning it off successfully. Myself I have, for now turned it off, as it is an overload as this specific moment. But I do wonder how this new “Buzz” can be used successfully to engage fans within a Social Media campaign for music. Join the 5thBeatle.net Facebook Fan Page and I’d love to hear what some of you think of how the new Google Buzz may play into Web Music Technology in 2010.

Social Networking by the Numbers, 2009

Well we all love statistics, here is a very interesting slideshow by LeeAnn Prescott of www.venturebeat.com and www.research-write.com on Social Media usage by
using data from US Comscore and Hitwise. We want information like this so we don’t waste our
time when trying to market our music. Check it out, it’s a good quick read.

Europe or BUST: Spotify opens indie floodgates

I’ve done a couple outreach campaigns with my band to European countries on a network-to-remain-nameless and I must admit, they like my music more that America does. So far at least. Last.fm is cool , but Spotify of course is all the new rage. So maybe 4 weeks ago I went through Cdbaby Digital and asked to just be put into Spotify as I have already put my music into stores via Tunecore. I am imagining I should be up and available very soon. CDbaby was keeping this somewhat low key I noticed, but the cat is outta the bag now, and you have other options too.

Just got this e-mail from Spotify:

Dear Artists,

First of all; we are really glad to hear that you are interested in getting your music onto Spotify.

We appreciate your patience since you signed up to the Spotify Artist and Label list. Since we last communicated to you we have created some pretty cool things. For instance, it’s now possible to listen to your favorite music (and hopefully soon your music) using Spotify on your mobile phone. Also, our time and energy has gone into uploading thousands of tracks every day from the 80 thousand labels we currently have agreements with. However, getting more independent artists’ music onto Spotify is important to us, so we’re working on various solutions to assist you.

The current solution we offer indie artists is to make your deliveries through Record Union, Zimbalam, CDBaby or Ditto Music. They are artist-aggregators, whom we work closely with; and through them you can create a standard agreement and upload your music onto Spotify as well as deliver your music to other great digital services such as 7digital, iTunes, Amazon etc.

So if you want to join Spotify we strongly recommend you to go one of the following sites:

http://cdbaby.com/

http://www.recordunion.com/

http://www.dittomusic.com/

http://www.zimbalam.com/

We’re really looking forward to having your music on Spotify soon!

Regards,

The music team at Spotify

Nice note eh? Now go get your music everywhere! Europe or BUST!

Todd Rundgren West Coast AWATS Tour

HOT NEWS – Thanks to PRThatRocks I got a short gig helping out with the Social Media campaign for the upcoming Todd Rundgren West Coast AWATS Tour. Check it out; he will be performing the entire classic album “A Wizard A Star” live with Jesse Gress, Kasim Sulton, Prairie Prince, Greg Hawkes, Ralph Schuckett, and Bobby Strickland!!

PRThatRocks, with some consulting from yours truly will be executing a Social Media campaign around, Facebook, Myspace/iLike, and Twitter to help spread the word about these highly anticipated performances.

One main job was to author and Official Fan Page for Facebook and help migrate some fans from his personal profile over to the new page, that is sure to increase in fans numbers very quickly. Also to consult/assist the management in grabbing the vanity url. Be sure to join it at Facebook!

Stay tuned, just getting started.

Cash Music doing good

Sometimes time just breezes by and you see things go across your Web sphere with the speed of light. Not always having time to absorb the many cool things going on in Web Music Technology and to reach out to cool people doing cool things. Today I took a time out and found some good stuff mang’.

Cash Music. A non-profit organization doing some really sharp Web presentations and marketing for music ; take heed to *up to date* techniques being rendered. Take a look at the impressive list of projects on their Website at the link above.

Note a couple great examples:

50 Foot Wave
One page minimalist approach like a MUX Tape, or 8 Tracks page. Futuristic, forward thinking. I should do this
Nice big artsy graphic
One button play
One button FREE download
Link to buy from AMAZON
Link to donate through Paypal

Family of the Year
Again, excellent execution here, note upper left corner under “Find Us Elsewhere,” adhering to my “triangle” concept of 1) Main band Website 2) Facebook 3) Twitter, and including Myspace in the secondary “triangle” of Fan Outreach or Social Media wrangling.

Man, I should practice what I preach to the minimalist level ! Effective use of Web Technology and Social Media tools here, with minimal distractions. It’s all about *The Music*.

Hats off to Cash Music!

DigaBand enters Saas Social Media Music Dashboard space

Hmmm another new Social Media Dashboard enters the scene? Nifty. www.DigaBand.com . I’m going to put this in my “widegets” category as I simply do not have a “Dashboard” category. A dashboard let’s you control your status updates and say, similar to the likes of ReverbNation or iLike.com, an array of widgets can be deployed/updated/controlled/tracked. With yesterday’s implementation of the iLike.com Artist Dashboard and fan, music player, analytics into Myspace, the Web Music Technology / Social Networking space is getting very interesting. Who will be king?

From the description on the Alpha site, regarding the Beta launch, it seems to be just that, a Dashboard “+” other perks, such as the value add of networking with other “indie” bands “with less than 1000 fans” … ya know, the ol’ “team up with other bands” thing. Share fans, put on a show, sell stuff, drink beer with your combined fandom assets. Great article on TechCrunch this morning.

I have not got into the program yet, and I’m kinda guessing it’s a Dashboard play… but I can say perfect timing to enter the space. Good luck guys, can’t wait to tinker with the new diggs! Ok, gotta gig, gotta go!

Music Marketing with Facebook

Well, they are saying right now ( July 2009) that Facebook is indeed the new Myspace in terms of music and well….Social Media in general.  I will leave that up to the purported “experts” lol …. but truth be told in my own opinion there is still enough life in Myspace Music worth some time promoting music fro a little while, but Facebook Fan Pages are indeed an effective way to keep in touch with a community of fans and are very popular.

Looking at some popular Independent Artist I see:

Pete Yorn enjoys 13,700 fans on his Facebook Fan Page in which he actively engages with tour photos, news updates, and special never-released tracks. One post can generate up to 40 comments, which albeit not “huge”, says something about his fanbase in the USA.  The page today 7/27/09 : overloaded with Birthday wishes.  He recently appeared on “Good Morning America.” My Mom would dig that if I could pull it off.

Band “Of Montreal” enjoys 14,700 fans and they are all actively engaged.  I went to the packed house show at Oakland’s jaw-dropping renovated Fox Theatre where I’m sure the band enjoyed some healthy merchandise sales. My date bought 2 T-Shirts at a $40 price tag total. The floor was packed with screaming teenagers. I mean…if this band comes off tour broke, I quit.

Band from across the pond “Stereophonics” enjoy 76,000 fans. One  post from the band can generate up to 500 comments! I love this band, especially the album that arrived in my mailbox for free one day from from Girlie Action, Manhattan … Language. Sex. Violence. Other? I think it’s still stuck in my cars’ CD player. Posting is irregular, and looks to be handled by one of the bands members. Not to worry, 6 albums into their rock n’ roll fantasy they have earned each and every fan.

Just an educated guess I suppose, but Facebook fans seem much more engaged than Myspace “friends”, the platform simply allows it to happen in design. Like Twitter.

As an artist, you really do not have not much control over how your Facebook Fan page looks, unlike Myspace that does give developers and hackers a chance to modify the look and feel of the page via modifying the CSS. But you can perdy up your Facebook Fan page with various “tabs” and third party developer applications. i.e. applications that were not developed by Facebook and are not always guaranteed to work via Facebook.

The iLike artist Dashboard

Let me save you some time and frustration; the iLike Artist Dashboard and the ReverbNation Widget banquet are simply the best way to control content across a broad platform of Social Networking sites; especially Facebook. Via the iLike.com Artist Dashboard they have the *only* way I know of currently to successfully mount a image banner on your Facebook Fan page.  It’s pretty cool and also mounts a music player to your page so Facebook Fans can stream your music. ReverbNation has a very comparable arsenal of Widget tools also.

You can also mount a few other effective tools from iLike such as :

• Artist Banner and player widget
• A la cart player widget only
• Fans widget
• Play my town widget
• iLike this artist widget

And ReverbNation offers :

• TuneWidget
• Exclusive Downloads
• Retail links
• Grab Box
• Fan Collector
• Street Team Collector
• Video Gallery
• Music Player (4 different versions)
• Show Schedule (2 different versions)
• Shows Map
• Press

The sheer volume of active people that use Facebook daily makes it a reasonable target for your ad dollars to try to “acquire” fans via Social Networking. From my observations, the fact that many folks mainly use a “triangle technique” tells me that Facebook is red hot right now. You ask “what is the triangle technique?”

Triangle Technique

Twitter – Tweet your knowledge – informative links/witty banter – drive followers to:
a) Follow you
b) Friend you on Facebook
c) Go to your Website or Blog (Point of Purchase).

Facebook – Sync status updates with Twitter, drive friends to:
a) Website or Blog (Point of Purchase)
b) Follow you on Twitter

Website or Blog
a) Home base ( Point of Purchase)
b) Ultimate fandom destination with scarce “offerings” or “prizes” that cannot be obtained at Social Networking sites (if you’re smart).

I’m not suggesting that you should only use these 3 Web destinations, #imjustsayin . I have observed many Blog gurus, etc., and this seems to be their practice. If they are on other Social Networking sites, it is merely a place marker at times. Attention should be focused where fans are actually engaging your band, brand or Super Hero.

Facebook ads

Back to buying ads on Facebook. I have a couple examples.

One friend bought say 1.75 million ad impressions for an one-day event for $480.  This combined with an active Tweetplan with his 8000 followers sold a bunch of tickets. At $50-100 a piece. Which one worked? The Tweeting on Twitter or the Facebook ads? We do not know to this date! We could not get many folks to say they saw the ads on Facebook. All we know is that the event was a smashing success. Imagine if your, or your clients’ music, just “caught fire” and garnered a large number of friends and/or followers.  When I have $500 to spare in my marketing budget for my music I will definitely be experimenting, regionally where I already have fans on Social Networking sites or where it is reasonable that the act can actually travel there to perform.

I have another friend whom plays and records a lot of music and has been involved in Digital Music for many years. He spends his hard earned money on Facebook ads “acquiring fans” and he has a formula that he has shared with colleagues.

Facebook Fan Pages are “on” and must be manned in any good Social Media Marketing for Music campaign. No time and you have more than a dime? I may be of some assistance if I am available. Let’s continue this conversation if need be.

Most of the information on this site is painstakingly formatted in this PDF file below so you can print it on white paper with easy to read black text. Or you can print for FREE by subscribing to the RSS feed at the top of the page, and also be in tune with any and all updates. Try Google Reader, its’ pretty cool. Also many hyperlinks will take you into the Web and show you the examples given. In some cases better then the Website! Ha!

Ebook – ” Web and Social Media Presence for Music Marketing and Fan Engagement” by Todd Tate –
Take it for free!