So I have been testing out ways to promote music online. In the future I intend to be fully immersed in the launch of a project that I get to be a part of. For now, let’s focus on learning by trial and error and let me show you some of the things I have found effective in online music marketing. Being an SEO expert (SEO Evangelist @ Wpromote Inc.) I have the insight into what most musicians wouldn’t likely be as experienced in.
So Headliner.fm 
Has an interesting setup. But its BROKEN for one reason.
They don’t allow you to edit the messages you send out. and for THAT I stopped using it the way that they intended it.
EXAMPLE:
On Myspace: I have about 6200+ connections (mostly fake accounts so true reach is likely about 400-600)
on Twitter Its the same: 5150+ followers, (850 likely true reach)
and on facebook its about 1250 from my personal and 300 from my fan page, which I’m sure overlaps immensely.
So when you ‘sign up‘. other bands will give you ‘Band Bucks”
The trick here is to not lose all of your followers by spamming them with the artist’s sent out spammy looking messages.
First of all, if the artists and promoters who were using this system were savvy with social media, they would make the messages appear organic and real.
e.g. instead of : “CHECK OUT the new single from ‘blah ARTIST promo CRaPP that looks SPAMMY’ or blah”
use something like: ..listening to Out of reach cool track by kronis
where you don’t even use the linking or branding tactics that scare off your facebook friends and twitter followers.
SO how do you do it?
Easy. I just disconnected facebook, myspace and twitter to make sure nothing would be sent out as anythingI’ve done in the past seemed very, ‘Spammy’ and obviously sponsored to me.
I lost a lot of real folllowers because of that. @KRONiS lost some true reach. AT that time I decided to create @SEORockstar to separate my music meanderings from my friends in search who were beginning to unfollow me when ‘sponsored’ headliner.fm tweets or facebook messages went out. No one cared about myspace messages. it probably helped on that site which is still launching SUPER ad heavy. yet again making it useless, at least so far. (sorry @tonyadam I want to help..but what can I do..its TOO slow and the interface is hard to learn/use should be just html/php or wordpress->that would be a great backend for myspace).
So next I switched over to use my staminarecords twitter account. (one i grabbed for my company, but never use). It has about 9 followers..so now I only accept twitter promotions. As the Twitter account I use only has 10 followers, maybe 8 now! I only get 8 points for each promotion I tweet out.
So by doing 10 promotions, i earn aobut 80 points, sending messages ONLY to that one twitter account. NOT to my facebook, or myspace or real twitter connections.
What’s the trick?
for every 10 times i sent out tweets to those following @staminarecords, I get like 7,000 bonus band bucks, which I can then use for REAL promotions that I write and others have to tweet out.
SO why am I outing them? Exposing this ‘exploit’ which they will probably change soon….I’m not mean. I’m a good person, and I want to help musicians…its a dog eat dog world and they are broke and won’t know this shit and probably can’t afford to hire and online marketing team to help out…so they gotta do it on their own.
Well I reached out to headliner to ask them :
“Hey can you please make it such that I’m able to edit the messages with the bands before I send them out”
answer: NO.
reason: he explained that they simply wanted to avoid yet another layer of communication.
my thoughts? this is dumb. I can’t control something that I send out? nope. not happening. So I decided to do this instead.
What should Headliner.fm do?
This: they should make it so you can hit: Negotiate… then you decide
A) how many band bucks (if you want to do fewer)
B) what the message will be with the option to send over your own version.
If they say no, then you can modify. they can permanently reject those who argue too much, however at least they know you will be doing it right and will likely engage in a longterm way.
Right? anyone have any thoughts on this? Try it here:http://headliner.fm/
So i’m getting 7000 band bucks every time i send out a bunch of tweets to nobody because I don’t wanna be Spammy. I also paid for one month of the premium service, but I’m not in a realease right now so its pointless. i’m just testing and getting a few ‘feedback comments’ on some of my new material.
-KRONiS-
