Pas­sion Pit — A Mod­ern Music Mar­ket­ing Suc­cess Story

Pas­sion Pit is a per­fect exam­ple of how giv­ing away self-produced and released music can lead to big things.  Lead Vocal­ist Michael Ange­lakos took songs he wrote for his girl­friend, burned them to CD, started pass­ing them out around cam­pus and next thing you know?  Sold out tours, major labels, and glow­ing Pitch­fork reviews.  But what can you do as a begin­ning musi­cian to fol­low in their footsteps?

• Step 1: Have good music

It may sound ridicu­lously obvi­ous, but this is some­times a major fac­tor musi­cians over­look in the mar­ket­ing process.  Why spend money on a tour van or radio pro­mo­tion if no one will even show your music to their Face­book friends first?  You could lit­er­ally spend $50,000 on mar­ket­ing and have it go to waste if your music isn’t up to the top qual­ity stan­dards in terms of pro­duc­tion, song­writ­ing and mix­ing/mas­ter­ing.

If you are just start­ing out, and don’t have the abil­ity to hire a pro­ducer or engi­neer at a pro­fes­sional stu­dio, there are plenty of pro­grams that will allow you to, after alot of trial and error, get close to pro­fes­sional qual­ity sound.  I use Logic Pro, some Pro Tools, and Able­ton Live for pro­duc­tion.  A full on tuto­r­ial of how to pro­duce music with these pro­grams is another arti­cle entirely.

• Give it away for free on “the Inter­net”

If I have never heard of your band before, I am prob­a­bly not going to buy your music.  Espe­cially if there isn’t even a free iTunes pre­view avail­able.  This is because there are plenty of bands that I already like giv­ing away music for free, and in the age of Medi­afire and Hype Machine, I can down­load any album I want in about 4 sec­onds.  So if a poten­tial fan shows up to your web­site, has to turn off your FLASH AUTOPLAY WEBSITE (caps because seri­ously every­one hates these sites), and then gets propo­si­tioned to enter their credit card infor­ma­tion, odds are they aren’t going down to the car to get their wal­let.  And that is a cat­a­strophic fail­ure on your part.  Give your music away for free, at least ini­tially.  Get peo­ple excited and inter­ested in your sound and what you are doing.  Think about the old adage “Fake it till you make it”, and how that relates to music — you will make sig­nif­i­cantly more money down the road using long-tail eco­nom­ics — so stop think­ing lin­early and start think­ing expo­nen­tially. Con­sider this:

Chris Ander­son wrote a very pro­found book called The Long Tail: Why The Future Of Busi­ness Is Sell­ing Less Of More that explains how the inter­net changed the way we do busi­ness on a global scale.  A good exam­ple is what hap­pened to SEARS, the depart­ment store.  It all started back before most farm­ers could afford an auto­mo­bile, let alone the fuel to drive into town every day.  Sears had the novel idea of pass­ing out cat­a­logs to each farm­house, that not only sold things, but sold EVERYTHING.  Wrist­watches, thread, light­bulbs, kerosene lanterns, you name it, you could order it right out of the cat­a­log.  This is because Sears invested in the ini­tial infra­struc­ture of large ware­houses and trucks to ship things from all over the world to Good Lord, Iowa.  This was great ini­tially, and gave the masses things from far away lands they only dreamed about.

Yet as time wore on, the farm­ers started show­ing up to Church with the same wrist­watch from the same cat­a­log.  Con­sumers demanded prod­uct dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion.  They now wanted spe­cial­ized, niche mar­kets. Com­peti­tors and new nation-spanning high­ways gave peo­ple the free­dom of choice and cus­tomiza­tion, which in turn led to Sears’ down­fall, and sub­se­quently it is now  mar­ket share leader in wash­ing machines.  So, what does this have to do with music?

Back when there were only a few chan­nels for wrist­watch dis­tri­b­u­tion, the same held true for music.  There were only a few chan­nels on the local radio, and only a cer­tain num­ber of CD’s could fit on the shelves in the record store.  The major labels owned the only dis­tri­b­u­tion infra­struc­ture that could phys­i­cally get your music to the major met­ro­pol­i­tan areas, and if you didn’t fit their style or genre, you were con­demned to play cof­fee shops and Bar Mitz­vahs for the rest of your career.

Along comes the Inter­net.  Whoa, wasn’t there a record store here last week? The new par­a­digm of music dis­tri­b­u­tion allows for infi­nitely reducible niche mar­kets in music.  Nowa­days, the New Age Polka enthu­si­ast can not only find their favorite artist’s music, but auto­mat­i­cally and instan­ta­neously receive rec­om­men­da­tions of other New Age Polka artists they may like as well.  As an old friend used to say, “there’s a seat for every ass in the house”.  If you make good music, you will find fans, regard­less of how obscure it may be.

Just don’t expect giv­ing it away for free to work as well as it did for Radiohead.

• Get 1,000 true fans

I went to a music con­fer­ence in 2011 that was basi­cally a big waste of time, but I did come away with one new idea of what being a musi­cian will be like in the com­ing years.  Con­sider this arti­cle, writ­ten in 2000, about the then cur­rent state of the music industry.

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/financial/sunday/062500biz-berenson.html.

In that year, Eminem, Brit­ney Spears, and N Sync all helped paint a pic­ture of a music indus­try that was still expand­ing — a record-breaking 312 mil­lion CD’s were sold — that’s an 8 % increase.  The warn­ing signs were there — as most of the arti­cle debates whether or not Nap­ster will have a long-term effect on major labels.   But state­ments like “Peo­ple do like CD’s. They con­tinue to buy about 900 mil­lion CD’s every year in this coun­try. I don’t think peo­ple are going to change their behav­ior dra­mat­i­cally,” offer a glimpse into the preva­lent short­sight­ed­ness that was going around at the time.

LOL I crashed the music indus­try sry guys

What hap­pened next was a result of that year.  Based on 2000’s growth pro­jec­tions, the indus­try kept expand­ing while the actual sales started to dip.  Labels started los­ing alot of money fast, and could no longer give out big advances.  Thus, the days of the mega-stars like Brit­ney Spears are now over.

Yet there is still a boom­ing music indus­try out there, with bil­lions of dol­lars in annual global rev­enue.  So how will it be dis­trib­uted in the com­ing years? We will start to see the expan­sion of the musi­cal mid­dle class.  No, you prob­a­bly won’t make $10 Mil­lion dol­lars per album like they did in the year 2000, but your chances of mak­ing an hon­or­able $40,000 per year are very high if you can attract at least 1,000 fans that will spend $40 on your brand per year.  Think about it — that’s basi­cally a T Shirt, a ticket sale, and a ring­tone. The best way to attract fans is to be real with them, and to be hon­est.  The idea of being a reclu­sive, mys­te­ri­ous musi­cian that hides in the stu­dio for weeks doesn’t really mesh well with the age of blog­ging and Youtube.  Talk to peo­ple online.  Share sto­ries and infor­ma­tion.  Com­ment on people’s pic­tures.  Post videos of your new song idea and ask for input.  Over 50% of the entire internet’s traf­fic runs through YouTube.  That is a HUGE resource.

Your new best friend in music marketing.

Make cus­tomized merch that only your most loyal fans can access, and even think about VIP con­certs and events.  It may sound strange, but some­times it feels like the inter­net has only increased the dis­tance between peo­ple in real life — be some­one peo­ple can always rely on as a dig­i­tal friend, and I promise, they will always sup­port your musi­cal endeavors.