Music Startup Academy – LA
June 7
1:00 – 5:00
Grammy Museum
800 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, California
(corner of Olympic Boulevard and Figueroa Street), in the L.A. LIVE district

The Music Startup Academy is designed to reduce barriers to entry into the music business for entrepreneurs, by providing a clear roadmap to success through actionable insights into the core structure, legal framework, content deals, business models, and the “nuts n’ bolts” of getting things done to build a legal, streamlined, and competitive music property.  These sessions have been held in NYC, San Francisco, at the SXSW Accelerator, and most recently a 100+ standing-room-only session in Nashville. Upcoming sessions include this L.A. session, Washington D.C., and another to be announced shortly in London, at the UK GeneralAssemb.ly space.

The GRAMMY Museum is an exciting and interactive celebration of the power of music occupying a vibrant new space in downtown Los Angeles, minutes away from the Staples Center and the Convention Center.

A full agenda and registration can be found via Eventbrite.

It’s time we pulled back the curtain on the newly launched Eurovision download store produced by Jessie Scoullar of Wicksteed Works. The Eurovision Song Contest has been held annually since 1955 when it was created by the European Broadcasting Union in a bid to bring countries together with a light entertainment program. Check out the 2012 entries to the Contest, complete with custom preview players, lyrics to sing along with your favorites, and the back catalogue from 2007 through to 2011. All tracks are available for individual purchase or as whole albums, in full-figured high quality 320kbps MP3. This is one of Wicksteed Works’ most ambitious projects to date, in partnership with a world-leading brand: over 270 pages and 400 buy buttons! Eurovision has a broadcast audience reach in the hundreds of millions and there is a fantastic team at Universal Denmark. We’re looking forward to seeing who wins the Song Contest on May 26!

About Wicksteed Works: Jessie’s company emerged from the simmering crucible of the experience and know-how distilled from two years on Topspin’s Creative Services team, compounded with broad music industry experience in artist management, live event production, touring and merchandising, on top of a background in licensing, commercial law, student radio and journalism. To inquire about their services, send a message to: hello@wicksteedworks.com or follow them on Twitter.

Topspin features: Custom HTML Store; WordPress Plugin; Linkbuilder

Produced by: Wicksteed Works

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Very rough day on the news of Adam’s death. I may try to collect some memories in a blog post at some point. No idea what to say at the moment.

Please hit play on Bad Brains’ ROIR cassette this weekend. Adam would appreciate that, I’m certain.

Official statement up on BeastieBoys.com.

ian c rogers
Topspin

Wednesday, May 9
8:30 – 10:45AM: Breakfast & Opening Session
At NARM and digitalmusic.org’s Music Biz 2012 Opening Session, which will be held Wednesday, May 9 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, Robb McDaniels will be interviewed by Topspin’s Ian Rogers in a live episode of the “This Week in Music” web series. It will be McDaniels’ first public speaking engagement since INgrooves’ March 2012 acquisition of Fontana Distribution, a leading distribution company for independent record labels, to create the merged company INgrooves Fontana. McDaniels, Founder and CEO of Isolation Network (IN) and its pioneering digital music distributor INgrooves, is now CEO of the newly minted INgrooves Fontana.

“Robb’s long history in the digital space and recent entrance into the physical distribution market make him an extremely interesting interview subject with many important lessons to share,” said Rogers. “I’m looking forward to exploring his take on the current distribution landscape and excited for the opportunity to present ‘This Week in Music’ live from MusicBiz 2012.”

2:00 – 3:30PM: The Internet and Independent Labels
Ian will be in this Breakout Session with fellow panelists Bill Armstrong (Side One Dummy/The New Record Service), Adam Farrell (Beggars Group USA), Brian McNelis (Lakeshore Entertainment), and Molly Neuman (eMusic/Simple Social Graces Discos). The panel will discuss how Internet access has opened up countless opportunities for independents, but at the same time has also opened up opportunities for unlicensed/unpaid access. The conversation will explore best practices being enacted like the “Copyright Alerts” program, which the major ISPs have embraced here in the U.S. and the finger-printing and content ID blocking measures that many digital partners are starting to include as standard for their platforms.

Thursday, May 11
9:15AM: Product Packaging/Bundling In The Digital Age
Bob Moczydlowsky will be moderating the “Product Packaging/Bundling In The Digital Age” panel. Confirmed speakers are David Dorn (Rhino), Christina Dunkley (3D Management), Jason Fisher (Epitaph), Jeff Nicholas (The Uprising Creative), and Mark Reynolds (Cinderblock). The session will address the productization of digital content with a focus on what the fan wants, and how the industry must meet these demands through standardized metadata, condensed licensing strategies, and interoperable databases and backend systems.

Bringing Together The Developer Community And The Legacy Music Business
digitalmusic.org was created to reduce the friction between the entrepreneurs/developers and the legacy music business, and this year’s Music Biz 2012 focuses on bringing together these two communities to discuss best practices to reduce the friction in how they do business and tools to better help them navigate the complicated landscape of rights, standards and relationships. Music Biz 2012 is offering a Special App Developer Registration Offer, a steeply discounted registration fee of $199. If you are a developer, use code ’199-app’ at this registration link for the discounted registration fee.

Please say hello when you see us kicking around the various events next week!

Quick announcement from Topspin-land. We are excited to announce we’ve just hooked up with our pals at TuneCore to create a real technical integration that will save artists both time and money. Coming in late summer of this year, you will be able to have your music auto-delivered from Topspin to TuneCore or from TuneCore to Topspin without having to re-upload. You’ll also be able to send your Topspin direct-to-fan sales proceeds and information into the TuneCore artist dashboard, so it can be displayed along with all of your other sales data from iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, simfy, iHeartRadio and a whole bunch of other services around the world.

In fact, in the interest of celebrating, we’re making the discount available immediately. Click “Get Started” below and TuneCore is ready to give you up to 30 percent off right now.

Already Have a Tunecore Account?

Hopefully this simple but powerful integration will keep you from going crazy uploading albums and videos all over the place, and it will save you some money, too. Partnerships with MTV and TuneCore? Giving artists the ability to put their work on the URLs where fans discover and consume music? Hmmm… seems we’re up to something, doesn’t it?

Stay tuned. We have at least two, and maybe more, important announcements coming soon.

Thumbs up for rock-’n'-roll,

-bob

With over a million subscribers on his YouTube channel, DeStorm is another DIY artist winning in the game of music. His first release ever, the “Be Careful” mixtape, is available today via Topspin’s out-of-the-box Spinshop. DeStorm promotes his Spinshop link right inside his YouTube video descriptions to sell his offers: http://destorm.spinshop.com. And because he is a YouTube partner, DeStorm has his Topspin offers available in a Store right inside his YouTube channel. Learn more about YouTube’s Partner Program HERE.

DeStorm’s “Be Careful” mixtape, is for sale on a really cool KEY USB Drive which has all 14 songs + a bonus song for $15.00. The physical SIGNED CD is $9.99, and a digital version is just $4.99.

Thanks for all the Topspin shout-outs in your new video on YouTube, DeStorm! Keep up the great work!

Topspin features: Topspin Spinshop

Installed by: DIY – Artist

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RSVP on Facebook

Ramona Falls new release ‘Prophet’ is available May 1 and their robust pre-order page is made with love by Fanfare Media! Learn about the embedded streaming player above by visiting our Knowledge Base HERE. Our documentation spells out how to combine a video with audio in the streaming player. This player can then be shared on Facebook, Twitter, or any online property, extending your reach beyond your own site.

The Prophet Artwork video is a must-see! Do not pass go before watching how innovative this artwork is.

Topspin features: Email for Media; Pre-order; Download Anywhere

Installed by: Expert Installer – Fanfare Media

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On May 12, 2012, in Los Angeles, California, the Film Music Program will host ComposersLab: LA

The Film Music Program connects composers and directors, giving them firsthand experience of the collaborative process of creating music in film. Since 1998, the Film Music Program has held a summer Lab at the Sundance Resort in Utah for a selected group of film composers. The ComposersLab: L.A. will be a condensed version of the summer Composers Lab, with the goal of offering a new opportunity for aspiring and seasoned film composers to gain insight into the development of film music.

This program is supported by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation.

ComposersLab: L.A.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Downtown Independent Theatre
251 South Main Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Enrollment for the special event is $125. Click here to register:  http://www.sundance.org/programs/composers-lab-registration/

Sundance Institute Mission Statement
Sundance Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the discovery and development of independent artists and audiences. Through its programs, the Institute seeks to discover, support, and inspire independent film and theatre artists from the United States and around the world, and to introduce audiences to their new work.

What you’re seeing above is a great music video cover by Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers of the Hall & Oates classic I Can’t Go For That. The band has been recording from the dashboard of its tour van for some months, presumably between traveling from show to show. These great performances have been dubbed the “Van Sessions,” posted to YouTube and nicely curated into a playlist here. If you’ve seen it before, you’re in good company: This video hit the Internets on March 23, 2012 and has steadily been racking up views thanks to posts on Reddit.com, shares among friends on Facebook, showing up on Buzzfeed, thedailywh.at, boingboing.net and isnichwahr.de, among many others. You can see these stats (if the uploader makes them available) from video’s Youtube analytics, the little bar graph button under the video.

THE 1 % RULE OF YOUTUBE MUSIC VIDEOS

Keynote speaker at many of our workshops, Gavin Mikhail, has had great success in his own music career with cover songs on YouTube — not only amassing hundreds of thousands of views, but “converting” those views into clicks to action. That action may be to come to a website, download a free song and signup for a mailing list, and even buy a song (or more). From his experience, he can count on about 1% of views to convert to action. If artists like Gavin can generate hundreds of thousands of views per song, that 1% adds up — and because the songs are forever searchable, his “old catalog” videos can continue to bring in clicks.

SETUP BUCKETS TO CATCH THE DRIPS

The series of Van Session videos had received tens of thousands of views, but at this point, none as many as the I Can’t Go For That cover. From March 23 to April 2, 11 days, while NB&G’s H & O’s cover video was “going viral — collecting some 400K views,” its YouTube description matched many of the other Van Session videos, including general links to the bands website, links to social media, and a link to the band’s existing albums on iTunes, but nothing specific to the cover in the video.

Michele: On March 26 – when we realized the video had legs, so to speak – we began the YouTube channel monetization process, which included becoming a YouTube partner as well as submitting the fingerprint audio for the video. Becoming a YouTube partner gave us the ability to have a store enabled INSIDE our channel, as well as installing a clickable banner with an Email for Media (E4M) widget in that banner. We used the Topspin Labs Download Anywhere TWICE: once, so a lightbox opens on top of the channel with the download offer, then a second time after the recipient receives the email and is asked to “Confirm and Download”. When you become a YT partner, follow the instructions in this post to set yourself up! Click the pic to see our channel’s example:

Michele: By using a trackable link in the banner, we were able to observe its traffic. Relative to the volume of view counts on the video pages, it appears the Channel page is not where viewers are hanging out. We wonder if there could be a bigger opportunity with a clickable area controlled by the channel on the video pages to yield a greater conversion.

For the video descriptions, we added the routes where the band was driving to and from, to personalize the videos.

REACT AND ADAPT

Alex: About a week after that one video began to increase its views, Team NB&Gs added some new links in the descriptions of all the Youtube videos. Trackable links — using a great URL shortening services called Bit.ly — allows them to see when people clicked and went to web sites that are not their own website — like Facebook, iTunes, etc, so they could see how effective their efforts were.

Alex: On April 2, a new trackable link was added to the I Can’t Go For That cover which provided a free download of the mp3 song in the video, in exchange for subscribing to the band’s email list. This pop-up “widget” provided thru Topspin appeared over the video itself, not requiring the fans to leave the video just to add their email and download the song.

Michele: Nicki’s husband and producer Tim Bluhm was cleaning up the 1-mic iPhone audio content while we were researching mechanical licenses to stay compliant with the cover song liabilities. Rightsflow was our solution. By this point, we were clear we needed to be strategic about branding Nicki’s original music alongside the cover song/s. We were also seeing a huge demand for downloads of the Van Session cover songs by way of YouTube comments, but were hesitant to release such low-quality recordings, especially if this was most people’s first time hearing the band.

Nicki’s 2011 release Driftwood reached #3 on iTunes Singer Songwriter chart, #36 on Billboard Heatseekers and #17 on Billboard’s Folk chart, as a result of making her originals a priority this month. And after a cost analysis ($0.091 per download), we decided it was worth giving away the low-fi H&O audio in exchange for an email address and we purchased the song clearances. The Download Anywhere modal pop-up that was used to collect emails has proven very effective. Fewer hoops means more emails collected and Team NB&Gs was able to increase our list by 200% in a short amount of time. Screenshot of E4M overtop the YT video below:

Alex: Since April 2, you can see the band’s click stats to the free mp3 download link here. As of 4/4/2012, there were about 3500 clicks to download the song for free. If all the people (not likely, but let’s suppose) who clicked the link actually downloaded (something that isn’t public, but the band would be able to see in their Topspin backend), that’s some 3500 names on their mailing list. Many may not be new, as surely some existing fans were signed up to the mailing list. They’d also know what subscribers as a result from this video were new from their Topspin data.

Michele: Still less than 3 weeks young, and around 400k views later, that trackable link now has over 9,100 clicks — from 76 countries! And while not all 9,100 have indeed gotten the free download (just barely less than half), we do know that the number of our unique email addresses collected from the download offer more than doubled the mailing list prior to the video upload. See for yourself what all the fuss is about by getting the download below!

Alex: From April 2 to today (post was written April 5), according to the provided Youtube stats, the increase in views of the video was somewhere between 100k to 200k. The clicks Bit.ly reports attributed to Youtube were about 1,350. That puts the clicks right around 1%, following Gavin’s 1% rule!

If 1% holds true, had the bucket been in place to “catch the drips” to add fans to their mailing list from day one on this video alone, that number could be 7,000.

Michele: This is a great measure and one worth noting for bands releasing content. It’s not always possible to have every single duck in a row, but why not be ready if something pops? In January, I optimized Nicki’s YouTube channel with the new layout, created the (aforementioned) Van Session Playlist, added Channel description and tags, website URL, social media links, new photo, Featured Channels… general prep in case something got traction — 110 subscribers at that time. In a short 4 months, we see a 7545% increase (over 8,300 subscribers). And all possible, of course, with the incredible content of the band. Click HERE for YouTube’s Creator Playbook, a great resource for anyone putting content up on YouTube.

MONEY STILL ON THE TABLE?

Alex: Nicki Bluhm and the Gamblers did take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of views that their creativity warranted. Hopefully they’ve added some newly excited fans to engage with via email and social media.

Michele: In less than one month, unique email mailing list grew 408% (and climbing), Facebook Likes increased by 270%, YouTube Subscribers increased by 1100%.

Alex: But is NBG still leaving money on the table?

YouTube is running ads against their video, which may be bringing in some additional revenue. Others may also be paying attention, including Daryl Hall himself, as well placed ads for Live From Daryl’s House videos are popping up at the top of recommended videos.

Michele: We mobilized to get a splash page with offers up after the bulk of website traffic hit, so we did miss opportunities there. There is still about 10 times as much website traffic as before the video. Had the splash page been up during the peak days, the direct-to-fan conversion likely would have also been as impressive as the other numbers.

In summary, these videos — that were done in the band’s spare time (but stuff they were having fun and passionate about) — have essentially changed their careers! There are great opportunities arising for Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers. Guitarist Deren Ney recounted the H&O Van Session at Virgin.com, they now have a full-time management team steering their ship, a sold-out Los Angeles Hotel Cafe show on Friday, April 20 and for me, this is a real kicker, the video being part of Ian’s panel this afternoon at ASCAP Expo. It’s been a surprising few weeks. And it’s really just the beginning.