Unique-Frequency.com

Social Media For The Local Music Scene

I’m writing this with Singapore in mind, but I think it could work anywhere.

Rubin and I had a discussion tonight about bands in Singapore, whether they’re talented or not, whether they could make money or not, etc etc. Towards the end of the night I needed to blog and turned to him for inspiration and he said “write about the local music scene”. Brilliant.

So here’s social media for the local music scene.

1) Get repeat plays.
One of the podcasts I listen to mentioned recently that in the music industry, frequency is your currency. So you get people to play it as many times as you can. Give it away free to everyone on MySpace, give it free to the polytechnic radio stations, give it free to the university Campus Radio stations. It doesn’t matter if you’re making money out of it at this stage, just give it free.

I can’t say how many times I haven’t liked a song on first listen, but it grows on me after three or more listens. I’m sure it’s the same for many other people.

2) Pimp yourself.
In a lot of ways, the local music scene is like the local blogosphere. There’s a lot of crap in there, but there are gems too. So how do you get people to notice you? Make yourself searchable. That means pimping up your website, going on MySpace, maybe creating a fan page on Facebook, whatever works. When someone hears your band name and goes home to search for you, you’d better turn up on page one of Google.

Case in point: Origami. I think that’s how it’s spelled because I was only walking past, but I liked their rendition of Kelly Clarkson’s Miss Independent, so much so I wanted to get in contact with them and offer to try to get their track on Campus Radio. So I come home, Google Origami and zilch. How do I help you get your music out there when I can’t find you? Do yourself a favour. If your band name is called Hystericks Stickz, change your name to something Google-able. That advice is free.

3) Get help.
No, don’t get someone to buy you a $30k ad on national radio. There are free (or at least cheap) ways to go about doing it. There are many, many polytechnic or university students out there who would probably be willing to help put your name out there or build you a blog, or pass your cd on to three friends. What could you offer them in return? Well that’s up to you. But remember: your most loyal customers are also your best.

Finally, a disclaimer: All this only works if your music doesn’t suck. As with everything else, content is king. If the content you’re producing sounds like screeching and/or cawing, no amount of publicity is going to help you.

So, now that you know all that. You want a social media/digital strategist to help your band out? Start a conversation with me. Here, Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, whatever works for you.

Tags: blogosphere, campus radio singapore, facebook, Google, myspace, origami, pimp yourself, Plurk, self-publicity, singapore local music, singapore's local music scent, smu campus radio, twitter

Posted in Google, Search, Singapore, Social Networks, collaboration, community, mainstream media, social media, twitter | 5 Comments »

Follow Up: Ogilvy’s Open Room - Too Harsh On The Companies?

Going through the name cards I exchanged from tonight’s event, I count four from Ogilvy, one from SMU and Nadia’s. (Note: no companies)

Looking around the blogosphere on ping.sg, there are four posts from Jean, Ian, Ridz and Plaktoz (for now). Now I don’t mean to go back to flogging a dead horse, but there is little to no brand coverage. The blog posts are either on the fellow bloggers they met, or the stuff in the goodie bags.

I don’t know about you, but I think there are bigger and better products to get people excited about and posting images (and generating media about) than collaterals in goodie bags.

I don’t mean to be critical or harsh on companies. But I think if you’re paying money to engage an agency to do your PR/marketing/advertising/whatever, and they do something like this (certainly with people like John Bell and Brian and Tania who know what they’re doing), then you really need to make the most out of it and bring some value back to the office.

Tags: blogosphere, companies engaging in social media, ogilvy open room, ping.sg

Posted in Blogs, Singapore, social media | 15 Comments »

Yet Another Centraliser: LinkRiver

Louisgray is very quickly becoming one of my top “must reads” whenever something comes from his RSS feed. Late January he alerted the blogosphere about AssetBar, and now he has the latest on LinkRiver.

So we already use Google Reader or some other RSS reader, why LinkRiver? Without trying it out yet, the biggest draw for me is that is aggregates everything from your RSS feeds to Twitter to Del.icio.us bookmarks into one central location. As Louis says:

harnesses your RSS streams from multiple services, including Google Reader shared items, Twitter, del.icio.us, Yahoo! Bookmarks and others, and posts them to a single “Stream”. As your friends join the service, or you choose to subscribed to other LinkRiver users, these small streams become a “River” of shared links, hence the name.

 

To get a real good idea, check out Louis’s stream right here. I for one am already sold and have sent in my beta application.

The one negative that I can see coming out of it is if someone is pushing similar feeds on social bookmarks, Google Reader and Twitter, and then it could get very tiresome to deal with. I suppose we’ll find out soon won’t we?

Do you keep your feeds/updates central? Or is there some other way you keep on top of everything? Let me know.

Tags: aggregator, assetbar, blogosphere, centraliser, delivious, google reader, link river, linkriver, louis gray, louisgray, must read, must reads, rss, rss feeds, twitter

Posted in social media | 3 Comments »