The other night, I was a guest at Berklee College of Music’s “Social Media Panel.” Despite a couple of cool panelists, the advice of the night actually came from a student. He related a story of going fishing with his grandfather, but the fish simply weren’t biting. His grandfather asked, “well, what’s on your hook?”
While that may be simple and folksy, it’s the best question to be asking in this “new music industry.” The Berklee panel spent way too long discussing the (questionable) benefits of creating a viral video, promoting their own respective companies, and one CEO in particular tried very hard to promote his company as having “tastemaker” power and being a true filter.
While they all talked about the benefits of having a viral video (and please, I’m tired of hearing about OKGo), nobody explained how to capitalize on the exposure generated. The experts failed to offer any of their valuable expertise.
Even more tragically, they danced around the less sexy, harder to achieve talk of getting something on your hook.
In the music biz, step one is “don’t suck.” As discussed previously, no viral video or marketing budget overcomes the flaw of making shitty music. But beyond that, once you’ve got tasty bait on your hook, it’s time to start enticing the fishies. Â And unfortuatnely for them, in exchange for your tasty treat, they’re giving something up.
Without taking the fishing analogies much further, stop thinking that music should be free. It can’t be. Free implies it has no value, and therefore is worth nothing in return. That’s just not the case. It can’t be. Ever.
Anytime you give a track away, people should be buying it — and the currency of choice is an email address. Second to that, let them pay with a tweet, by becoming a Facebook fan, or creating a post about your music. Any of those currencies may actually be more valuable than the 99 cents they may (or may not!) want to spend.
Building that mailing list, growing your network, and creating a foundation of fans to engage with ties it all into the fishing metaphor. Once you’ve caught a bunch of fish there’s all kinds of things you can cook. And the more fish you have, the bigger the potential.
But without collecting an email address, the best you can do is talk about the one that got away …
