Rebecca Black made it into the iTunes Top 100 this week. While Jay Frank’s analyzing the songwriting mechanics that make Rebecca Black’s “Friday” a chart success, I’ve been getting lots of e-mail and DMs about a new wave of song sharks using the viral video bandwagon to convince parents to sign their kids up for […]
Grow Your Audience
My @SproutSocial Experiment: Setting Boundaries on Social Media
I’ve been teaching some workshops on social media lately, and one of the questions that comes up very often involves how to keep Twitter and Facebook status updates from taking over your life. In the new edition of Grow Your Band’s Audience, I updated my advice about staying accessible and available. To stay focused on […]
How microfunding sites like Kickstarter can stifle success.
Michael Epstein suggests that microfunding better suits a label model, where funders on a Kickstarter-type campaign can invest in a slate of projects rather than in a particular artist. Scott Andrew notes that sites like RocketHub encourage some acts to put the cart before the horse, raising money from an audience they haven’t yet cultivated. […]
Finding the Twinsumers in your perfect audience.
I love reading the monthly briefings from the Trendwatching team. This year, they called out “Twinsumers” and “Social-lites” as part of their 11 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2011. Grow Your Band’s Audience charts a course for finding “your perfect audience.” That’s not the audience in your scene, your family, or your neighborhood. Your perfect audience […]
What’s Culturally Significant? (Part 2)
A few weeks ago, I joined a gathering of about a hundred professionals from the arts, entertainment, and creative communities in Philadelphia to discuss the concept of “creative vitality” in our city. The fact that all of these talented individuals still see themselves in silos gives credence to the idea that Americans have very different […]
