MySpace COO Explains Massive Music Marketing Expansion Plans

NewsCorp's MySpace, which was recently eclipsed by Facebook as the world's largest social network, is massively expanding its music services. In this video interview, MySpace Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur details the new move that will make the social site more attractive to bands, fans and music-marketing companies.

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Alan Jackson’s sales top 50 million

Alan Jackson has crossed the 50-million album sales milestone. Alan Jackson has crossed the 50-million album sales milestone. Since his 1990 debut, the country superstar has released 16 gold, platinum and multi-platinum albums. When his latest project, Good Time, came out in March, it was the fourth album of his career to debut simultaneously at No. 1 on Soundscan’s Top Country Albums and all-genre Top 200 sales charts.

Contributing to his stellar sales record have been numerous hit songs, a majority of which the Newnan, Ga. native wrote himself. As the first artist signed to fledgling Arista Nashville in 1989, his streak of chart-toppers started with his first project, Here in the Real World, which produced four No. 1 singles. The title track to his most recent album became his 33rd No. 1 hit.

Joe Galante, chairman of Jackson’s label group Sony BMG Nashville, said, “It’s a short drive from Georgia to Tennessee, but it’s a long way to 50 million albums sold! Alan’s songs and shows have propelled him to this incredible level of success. He has never lost touch with the fans, and they’ve shown their appreciation year after year with No. 1 singles and Platinum sales.”

Mobile Music: Marketing vs. Retail

"I heard it through the grapevine…" or maybe on my mobile phone.

The music industry is learning a hard lesson: The mobile platform works better as a marketing and customer relationship tool than it does as a retail sales channel.

"Bands and artists are increasingly using mobile to form direct relationships with their fans that are then monetized through other means, such as tickets to live shows, merchandise and fan clubs," says John du Pre Gauntt, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the new report, Mobile Music: Ads to the Rescue. "In addition, given consumers' reluctance to pay for music on their phones, marketers are finding new opportunities to partner directly with carriers, labels and even music artists themselves."

It's not that there won't be mobile music sales, they just won't be as large as many in the industry hoped for.

eMarketer forecasts worldwide mobile music retail revenues will grow from $2.4 billion in 2007 to over $13 billion by 2012.

To replace the drop in CD sales, alternate revenue streams must be developed.

"Marketers will account for a greater proportion of that overall spending as the ad-supported model for mobile music gathers steam," says Mr. Gauntt.

eMarketer expects marketers will spend over $1.5 billion in 2012 to subsidize or sponsor mobile music to targeted customer demographics, up from $42 million in 2007.

ILike launches music concert promotion ads, targeting social network users

ILike, the music fan site that has gained millions of new users through applications on Facebook and other social networks, is releasing a new form of ads that enable concert promoters to reach fans based on location and musical tastes.

The Seattle company has already offered ways for bands to display concert dates within its applications, but these ads (sample above) are more advanced. They appear in banner-ad positions on Facebook “canvas” pages for third party applications, and include features to help spread the word about the concert. There’s a link that a user can click on to tell friends about the event, or find other local fans of the performing band who plan to attend. Users can also click on the link to buy tickets.

An advertiser can set the time frame in which they want the ads to run, similar to Google’s AdWords, and get data about the total number of people who saw the ad, how many people interacted with it, and how many people clicked on the link to buy tickets. Advertisers are charged based on the number of impressions the ads receive.

This is the latest act by iLike to connect the music business with fans, and make money for everybody — except for traditional media competitors. Concert promoting has historically relied on finding fans through methods like printed fliers, email lists and radio ads, so this is a new way for any promoter to reach social network users — typically teens or 20-somethings who might not otherwise hear about a concert.

Through a partnership with Rhapsody, iLike has also recently started letting users listen to the full recordings of songs within its applications. Previously, users could only listen to 30-second clips. After you’ve heard 25 songs, you get asked to sign up for Rhapsody, or get reverted to the truncated clips. Rhapsody covers the royalties due record labels for the service. The songs include affiliate links to iTunes and Amazon, so iLike and Rhapsody can earn revenue from any referrals. These streaming tracks are already available on iLike.com and will shortly be introduced to its applications.

The new ads also include songs that Rhapsody doesn’t have, such as those uploaded to iLike by an unsigned indie band that has fans on iLike’s applications. The company is separately introducing ways for other developers to integrate songs from its service into their own applications, although this feature is not live yet.

ILike has a total of 30 million registered users, up to 20 million of which are active every month, the company says. Users of its Facebook applications make up around 40 percent of its total users — iLike was one of the companies that managed to grow big, fast through its Facebook applications, when the Facebook application developer platform launched a year ago. The company has more recently launched applications on rival social networks hi5, Bebo and Orkut. The company’s applications on those sites are also seeing big growth, iLike cofounder Ali Partovi tells me; he says the company hasn’t focused on MySpace and its new platform, however, because MySpace has its own music service, and rivals like imeem and Project Playlist have had simple, popular music-sharing widgets on the site for years.

While it doesn’t rule out focusing on MySpace in the future, the company doesn’t seem to need to do so. It has already been proving itself to the music industry, recently streaming entire new albums for bands like R.E.M. and Lady Antebellum, helping those bands to sell more albums and fill more concert seats.

iLike Hits 30M Users, Adds Major Features

Concert Promoter Ad Platform,
Full Song Streams, Artist Royalties & More

Social music discovery service iLike has hit 30 million registered users and announced new features that include a new ad platform for concert promoters, limited full-length song playback and artist royalty payments via Rhapsody, and an initiative to enable music syndication via third-party developers.

AD PLATFORM: Promoters, clubs, agents and bands can now use iLike’s social, self-serve advertising tools to reach music fans across the top social networks. It enables advertisers to:

• Target fans based on location and musical tastes rather than key words;
• Quickly create multi-media ads, including music playback and social links
• Manage campaigns in multiple markets via auto-generated ads with self-populating concert data
• Tap into potential “viral spread” of concert info via built-in social hooks that encourage fans to invite friends to concerts.
• Info @ to iLike.com/advertise

FULL SONG STREAMS: Free full song streaming is now available up to...

25 plays monthly. Then users can sign up for a Rhapsody account or song samples are reduced to 30 second song samples. This feature will soon be extended to iLike's hugely popular Facebook application.

ARTIST ROYALTIES: Royalties will be paid for full song streams via Rhapsody's existing agreements. This differs from the more nebulous share of ad revenue payment offered by imeem and Last.fm.

DEVELOPERS: The new initiative which will launch later this quarter will allow developers to add song playback (songs and playlists) to their websites or Facebook applications.

iLike has built and launched dominant music applications on four of the top 10 social websites: Facebook, Orkut, hi5, and Bebo. With this initiative, iLike features will be available to any developer for use on other website thus expanding iLike’s footprint. iLike is now accepting early registration for developers at www.iLike.com/developer.

Inside Sonicbids: EPKs & Opportunities

From hypebot

Sonicbids is that rare Music 2.0 business that is not only more than 5 years old, but one that people are actually willing to pay for. At a time when everyone expects free, 150,000 musicians pay $5.95 a month or $50 to $100 a year to create a electronic press kit (EPK) on Sonicbids and use it to get gigs on their own or via the site's expansive list of opportunities.

But with all success comes criticism, and a few indie artists have been vocal critics of what they see as Sonicbids' pay to play offers. While maintaining a belief that paying a small fee to submit to, for example, play at Milwaukee Summerfest is a "filter", Soncbids CEO Panos Panay is working to make the process more transparent and the "opportunities" stronger.

"In the beginning, we did not do as good a job as we should have weeding out the gigs and other opportunities that did not present real value to the artist," admits Panay."...

"After an ongoing series of advisory panel meetings around the country and in Canada, we're changing that." Some of Sonicbids' offerings like showcasing at SXSW, CMJ or the NACA college booking conventions and submitting a song to international songwriting competitions always carried a price tag. Sonicbids simply streamlined the process by taking it electronic. Other Sonicbids opportunities were simply off limits for artists without insider contacts.

"We're very proud to provide the opportunity for an unknown artist to get their songs played during MTV's Video Music Awards or the $20,000 we spent so a few bands could tour China," says Panay. "Last year we spent $500,000 on gig sponsorships and Sonicbids members booked 60,000 gigs."

Beyond providing more "aspirational" gigs, the site will also offer some free sponsor supported opportunities later this year, and all offerings will come with more transparency. "The talent buyers providing the gigs are becoming more visible members of our community," says Panay, and each submission will soon come with a money back guarantee. "If you submit, you deserve a response," he states. "If you don’t get a response or your EPK is not reviewed, then you can get a site credit.”

• Promoter “Quick Chats” like this one with X Fest
• Site changes and updates: The Builder’s Blog
• Community news via SonicBlog
• From the CEO: Panos’s Brew
• Educational Resources: The Lounge

"Our real product is not just the EPK, but rather our network and the opportunities we present for musicians to connect with gigs and people they could not reach on their own," concludes Panay.

Widget Enables Radiohead Style Distro

At first glance NoiseTrade is a simple widget that enables Radiohead style pay what you want music distribution. But as two dozen indie acts including Sixpence None The Richer and Sandra McCracken learned, it also can be a powerful viral promo tool which in the two weeks since launched has delivered 20,000 full albums for purchase and fan promotion

Artists distribute their music via NoiseTrade's embeddable widget where fans can sample then either choose to tell three friends about it or pay any amount in exchange for an album download. Name plus an email and zip code are captured along the way. Fans can also embed the widget into their own blog or social networking profile.