Twitter Leak Generates 14,000 Downloads

How would you like 14,000 downloads? Over the weekend Moe Arora, a music industry tastemaker, leaked a Lil Wayne and Mack Maine track, "Throw It Back," over the microblogging service. He also used another upcoming social music property to host the download - Soundcloud.

Here is the Tweet:

Here is the buzz from Twitter Search:

Great job Moe. He is going to be writing a more in depth analysis, but I wanted to get on here and note that if you create a great community, have genuine conversations and then create amazing content, it is not that hard to have your friends help you out. Just note that you need all 3!

(Update) Here is Moe's recap post. (Update)

-Greg Rollett

Getting Involved With Causes

A low cost way for Gen-Y Rock Stars to get exposure is through nonprofits. Nonprofits and causes look to leverage musicians, actors and celebrities to promote their cause and often times as the artist you can help promote yourself as the official songs in their videos, supply photos for their campaign or create new material with a message.

More and more nonprofits are looking into Social Media as a means of getting their message across to Gen-Y and younger volunteers and this means your music can be heard in YouTube clips, on Podcasts, with free downloads, on picture sharing sites and more. The exposure can be viral and help you get into the ears and on the playlists of people that truly care about a cause.

A recent campaign with Trojan condoms and MTV, Evolve One, Evolve All, put together work with the Aggrolites, All Time Low, Animo, Charlotte Sometimes, Cobra Starship, Everytime I Die, From First to Last, Gil Mantera, Madina Lake, Protest the Hero, Reel Big Fish, Shwayze, TAT, The Academy Is, The Bronx & The Randles and more to promote their latest campaign. The effects of the campaign were spread wide with the addition of this video playing widget:

Safe Sex | STI | Contraception | STD

This Evolve One, Evolve All campaign has even allowed fans and followers to contribute their own videos and allow for commenting from these advocates. This is a great audience to be seen in front of.

Steps to finding a nonprofit:

• As a band, see what causes would fit with your style of music and your beliefs. Come up with a general list, homlessness, rebuilding communities, the green movement, etc.
• Look for local organizations by looking at sites like Volunteer Match to find contact information, locations and ideas about what the organization.
• Set up Google Alerts for "Your City" + "Your Cause" to get up to the minute information on press releases and news regarding these companies and organization.
• Look to contact a marketing director or go after the executive director himself. Most nonprofits are looking for exposure and the price is right for them.
• Be sure to have a "What's in it for me" (WIIFM) and tell the nonprofit why you are a good partner.

Good luck and Happy Thanksgiving Rock Stars!

-Greg Rollett

Getting Local Bloggers to Pimp Your Tour

photo by comicbase

Every once in a while you come across one of those no-brainer ideas that can help you exponentially. This is one of them. To all the bands going on tour, looking for free promotions to a built in audience. Bloggers are the journalism that you should be looking for and more specifically, you should be looking for local bloggers, that write about their community and what is going on there.

How do I find these Bloggers?
Google Blog Search- In the screenshot below you can see that I searched for "Orlando Blog" and got 500,000+ results. Not all of these are going to be relevant but there are some diamonds in the rough. The related blogs give you a few options to look at right away including Downtown Orlando Blog, Ultimate Orlando Blog and Living Orlando.

(click image to enlarge)

Placeblogger - This is the MacDaddy of local based blog tools. Once you have your target city or state, just drill down till you find the info you need. Drilling down to Orlando, FL gave me 10 blogs to look into. The other great thing is that knowing an area well, I can also see 1 blog in Sanford, FL, 1 in Altamonte Springs, 2 in Lake Mary and 1 in Lakeland. You can see in the screenshot below the data is represents when you get to your final place destination. Placeblogger is also a community driven site, meaning that if you know of a great location based blog, you can submit it into their directory.

(click image to enlarge)

Which Blogs Do I Reach Out To?
Not all bogs are created equal and your time is extremely important, espicially if you are contacting sites while on the road. You want to be sure that you are getting in touch with the most relevant writers with the largest audience.

By going to these pages you can assess things like Google PageRank and Compete Traffic for the site to see their reach. Even those PR and Compete Data are not 100% accurate, it gives you a clue as to how many readers and how big their influence is. For instance, Living Orlando has a PageRank of 3 and Compete Traffic at 5,400+. As a small touring band I would attempt to reach the author and give him a reason to write about your show, your band and a story to get people interested.

(click image to enlarge)

*Music Marketing Tip* If you browse with FireFox, there is a plugin called Search Staus that gives you all this data and a whole lot more everytime you visit a page. Download it now!

Musicians using bloggers to their advantage with ultimately spark their total music marketing package. This tactic is time consuming, but getting 3-4 press mentions online, to go along with any street teams, mailing lists and on site promotion will only increase you bottom line and allow you to continue rocking out for fans all around the world.

-Greg Rollett

User Generated Contests

Contests are a great way to get people excited about your band, product, show or promotion. With the advent of Social Media it is extremely easy to get your fans to help spread the word and build that contest for you. All you need to do is pony up some prizes, make up some rules and leverage the tools of Social Media to make it happen.

Some examples of user generated contests would be:

• Make a short video of yourself playing karaoke to one of our songs, upload it to YouTube and tag it with our band name and the name of the contest so we can find it.
• Make your profile picture the flyer for the next show, drop us a comment and we will give away 2 free tickets to that show to a lucky winner.
• Post the craziest song titles you want us to write about on your blog. We'll pick one winner and create a track on our next album with the winner's suggestion.

There are countless other ways to get your fans involved in user generated contests. Be creative and make the barrier to entry as easy and fun as possible.

My good friends at Endavo Media have created a great new white paper that outlines some tips to creating these contests, how to promote them and how they can grow your fanbase exponentially. Head on over and grab a copy, its free and filled with great info!

Now I'd like to turn it over to the Rock Stars. Have any of you had a successful user generated contest for your band, music or product? What was the prize? How did you pick the winner?

Let us know, so that we can help other bands see the benefits of a contest!

-Greg Rollett
To learn more about Social Media for Musicians, get our free eBook now!

100 Social Media Resources for Musicians

Boy am I excited for this release. Have you been struggling with your Myspace returns? Are fans just not there like they used to be?

The web is a very big and interesting place and music fans are spread out across many different Social Networks, Internet Radio Stations, Live Streaming Sites, Online Stores, Music Discovery Blogs and a multitude of other places. If you are putting all your eggs into the Myspace basket, you are missing out on the omelets that are being made elsewhere.

That is why I wrote this eBook. I wrote it because my conversations, my friends and the music I was discovering over the last 12 months has dramatically changed. When we first started our band 4 years ago, Myspace was the end all be all of online music marketing. Now it is just the beginning. We all need pages on the mecca of Social Networks, but we also need to see where our fans are.

Through running around the country, speaking at events, talking to bands, interviewing Web 2.0 designers and developers to putting out my own music, I have crafted this report of 100 Social Media sites to get your music into more ears than ever.

To get a copy of this eBook/report all you need to do is put your email in the form below and hit submit and you will be sent the link for your free download immediately!

You are also going to be entering a new world of music promotion. Every month, we will be sending out the Gen-Y Rock Stars Newsletter. This newsletter will be your source for the hottest news in music marketing as well as proven tips and strategies to getting more fans and sales online through the power of conversations and social media.

Our goal is to help every musician become a Gen-Y Rock Star. To do this you must be ready to commit time, effort and open up to communication. You can no longer be a musician that half-ass markets. You need to be a conversationalist machine who makes kick ass music.

Cheers to you for choosing to go in this direction.

Here is what people are saying about '100 Social Media Resources for Musicians'

“Hey indie artists, drop what you are doing and go read 100 Social Media Resources for Musicians for Free. Social Media Marketer Greg Rollett has put together the most comprehensive, most needed indie music resource guide on Social Networks. If you are not utilizing even a handful of these free, YES FREE!, social media sites you are surely missing out.”

-- Madalyn Sklar, founder of GoGirlsMusic.com, IndieMusicCoach and Social Networks for Musicians

Lots of time and hard work went into creating this guide, which covers all kinds of music related social networks, tools, forums, blogs, and other resources which every musician needs to know about. Whether you’re new to social media or a vet like me, you’ll still find some great resources inside 100 Social Media Resources for Musicians (I found some great collaborative sites that I can’t wait to check out!).

--Eric Hebert, founder Evolvor Media, Music Marketer

Sign up right now and start seeing the possibilities that Social Media gives to your music career!

Enjoy and please leave feedback below so that we can update the list and make it better next time!

-Greg
Follow me on Twitter.

Coming Clean and Transparency

Today I posted a Tweet to the post I wrote last night on 5 Sites for Social Music Promotion. I got a reply thread from Justin Boland, the DIY hip-hop master, author of Audible Hype and founder of World Around Records that went down like this:


I am a firm believer in transparency, just like Social Media Superstar Chris Brogan, so I want to lay it out there. I am creating a social media music promotion course. It is one that I have been working on for a few weeks and probably won't finish until the 1st of the year. It's also a course that I am going to be selling. Yes, marketers need to eat too, and I am working really hard to make the course really useful and informational.

I am putting all of my Internet Marketing knowledge into building this site, including keyword research, PPC, link building, list building, social media tactics and the power of the network I am building. So yes, I am trying to pay my bills off what I have to offer.

With that said, I do have a few more disclaimers. I run a Social Media Agency, Endagon Innovations, where I work with clients all over the board as well as musicians. They are the reason I continue to learn, continue to test and continue to find new ways to reach people that want to hear from you. Nothing on this site reflects the values and thoughts of Endagon Innovations and that of our clients.

There, wanted to come clean and be completely transparent. In the mean time, the blog posts are completely free, as is my first guide that is coming out on Monday. There will be a forum too that will be free to registered users who will be test artists for some tactics.

Here's to becoming a Gen-Y Rock Star and continuing the dreams of being a full time musician!

-Greg
(btw, Audible Hype is a part of the 100 Resources List, so add that to your RSS Reader as well!)

5 Sites For Social Music Promotion

Every band lives and dies on music promotion. Having people hear your music and then keeping in touch with them to spread the word is an important element in the life of a musician. With the rise in Social Media entrepreneurs focusing on the music industry, there is a vast opportunity for expanded music promotion, well beyond your local gigs and Myspace bulletins.

Marketing and promotion is the epicenter of being a Gen-Y Rock Star.

Below is a sneak peek into the 100 Social Media Resources for Musicians that is being released on Monday. It is comprised of 5 sites that you can start using today to get your music into more ears and headphones to get you into bigger vans and playing better shows.

5 Sites for Social Music Promotion
The Sixty One - It's been dubbed the Digg for indie musicians. A great place to being social music promotion, The Sixty One allows bands to upload songs and have the members of the community bump a song up or down on the quest to tackle the front page. Ultimately its the fans and their promotion that can drive a song into excessive plays, bumps and fame!


Fuzz - Get your music on Fuzz and begin inserting your music and message into a great group of niche indie music fans. Have fans and users add your tracks to mixtapes and playlists and even create your own mixes from other bands on the site. Remember, we are in this together and the more great music you promote, the more fans will trust you when its time to unveil your new tracks!


iMeem - I used to think this was a hidden gem, but the masses have spoken as iMeem is one of the top 5 Social Networks in the U.S. and is build around the playlist principle. Get you music on as many playlists as possible and watch the viral spread as users embed these players everywhere.


StumbleAudio - It's channel surfing for new music. Get your tunes on StumbleAudio, let music lovers find them, love them and increase the chances of your songs being heard. One of the top music discovery sites there is.


DopeTracks - For my hip-hop peoples, DopeTracks is a collaboration site where artists, producers and DJ's can come together to make great music. Jump on enough collabs and let your new partners promote you on their sites to their network. That's what its all about right? Building your network? You bet it is.


If this list of Social Music Promotion sites got your appetite wet, be sure to get back here Monday at 12:01 am to download the full list of 100 Social Media Resources for Musicians. It's free and it will make an impact on how you promote and market your music to your fans and future advocates.

-Greg Rollett