Market and Manage your music online

This is just something I made up for fun and giggles when you’re missing those long drives, frayed emotional states and uncertain circumstances that tours so generously provide

If you’re interest in music marketing, online promotion for gigs and tours - get in touch it’s what we do, the basic standard is 10 hours for $250 we offer a full range of online music marketing services to promote your music, gigs tours, whatever you need to do online contact me, Matt: kurbpromo@gmail.com

How about a board game called Tour Promoter?

It’s a board game where you get to organise your very own tour, so choose the colour of your van, start with $500 for gas and off you go.

The board looks like trivial pursuit, you can play with a trivial pursuit board. The vans start in the middle and have to drive off to the 6 cities to scout acts, so it’s a bit of a scramble like monopoly to get to the cities and start getting your line up sorted. There’s no dice, you simply pay in cash to drive your van across the country. You’ll need a drummer, a bass player a guitarist and a frontman to make your band, but to put on a gig in another town, you need a support act too, so you’ll need to put a DJ and/or a singer/songwriter in your van.

The aim of the game is to put on a gig in every town on the board and get back with the most money for your album release.

Promoters make money when they play a new town, but they must have 2 acts. If they only have 2 DJ’s and/or Singer/songwriters they will only pick up $200 for the gig, $300 for 3, but if they have a Band it will be $500 but a band AND a singer/songwriter or a DJ it will be $600 and if it’s all 3, it will be $800 per gig.

A band can still play without a singer but is still regarded as a support act in terms of gig fees. A singer can generate an extra $100 at gigs with a DJ but no band.

The issue is you have to pay $10 per turn for every musician in your van, so that’s up to $70 a turn for 7 muso’s.

You can’t play the same city twice, and you must play every city before you can head home, so it’s wise to fill up the van early and get the well paid gigs and then finish the tour with smaller acts to save costs and return to base with the best kitty for your album release.

Once the first promoter returns from tour, the other promoters can still win if they return with more money for their album launch, but as each town gets played it gets harder to bring the tour home with a higher net profit - promoters coming in later are forced to tour with larger line ups to maximize profit as quickly as possible to minimize loss, but also, the musicians returning from tour will be retired from the game, making less muso’s available as each tour ends.

You cannot play a gig if you have recruited muso’s in that city 2 turns in a row without moving. This means that in the early stages of the game, players must recruit in 1 city and usually hold their first gig in the next.

Every turn spent in a city or town not moving as they are playing a gig or recruiting acts, must end in drawing a “What goes on Tour” card, which will often add or deduct funds, or advise on movements such as “a bass player joins your tour” or “if you have a drummer, they have just learned their partner has moved out in their absence - place a heartbroken drummer back in his home city if you currently have a drummer in your van.”

Most cards will be negative to mix the game up and encourage players to not hang around for too long, this way players can also “take the scenic route” - by not driving directly from city to city they will incur less draw cards and have a lesser chance their functioning tour party will be broken up.

Between each City is a town, which can be played for $200 each once in the game, this helps bands who run out of gas, as each player can call their parents once in the game for $50 that will have to be repaid once they are back from tour, but of course stopping to play towns does waste time.

Often a player with no money and a larger line up will be forced to play towns for several turns to build up gas money.

If a player runs out of gas a second time their tour is over, the only way they can win is if other promoters fail to complete their tour with less gigs paid.

So there’s not only strategy in budgeting for gas and securing a line up to make the most profit, but there are only a limited a mount of musicians in the game, so if one player can fit 3 drummers in their van, they can prevent other players from forming a band and securing maximum performance fees.

You can not have more than 7 muso’s in your van, and of course each muso costs $10 per turn. In this way smart players can transport band members other players need to cities they’ve already played, thus creating more delays and costs if they choose to return to that city to collect them.

Finally if two vans land on the same square and neither band refuses to back down, only one band will be paid. A roll of the dice favouring the bigger line up 2-1. A Promoter can still play for free in a city they’ve played before to stop another promoters gig going off but in that case, no band gets paid.

This makes it easy for a small line up to be a nuisance to a bigger line up as they incur less costs and have less to lose by challenging the bigger line up.

Alternatively, a tour promoter with their van on the same square as another van can attempt to poach a musician from the others party with a dice roll, but the instigating promoter cannot play a gig the turn of the attempted poaching.

The game lends itself to 2 distinct tactics - tour with small line up, get the gigs done, and play politically to thwart other threats from completing their tour with a larger line up, principally throwing obstacles in their way that will create delays that in turn incur costs so that their tour is less succesful in net profit.

The other way is to spend confidently in securing a robust line up and get the course completed as quickly as possible. It take longer to establish your line up, but once you had it you could collect large fees on gigs to cover your higher overheads, but you must be particularly sensitive to delays and potential risks.

The tone of game play would suggest that whoever has the largest line up is the biggest threat as they collect the most money from their gigs, other players will be aiming to sabotage the larger line ups tour and then complete their tour quickly and cheaply while a larger line up wallows.

The smaller line up already has a head start and can knock off more dates cheaply, but the larger line ups can get into trouble if they lose a key member either from a card draw or a poaching or get caught out logistically zigzagging across the board to complete all gigs and incurring higher overheads.

If a larger line up does lose a key member, they may have to switch tactics, drop the band altogether and go on with a smaller line up of support acts, or their could be a city nearby with a muso available.

Once a promoter has completed their tour, they may decide to opportunistically attack another threatening player by playing free gigs on the night of their gigs and poaching key members before bringing their profit home.

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Need some decent music marketing services? Join the queue, buddy!

HAHA no seriously, we had to put the price up again, it’s now $250 p/month for a place on our books getting comprehensive end to end online music marketing services! We know what you need, we know how to make money from music, and we can do it all ourselves for a lot cheaper than anyone else out there who will stand by their reputation for solid online music marketing!

We’re talking about comprehensive marketing, business AND creative support here, so email kurbpromo@gmail.com, send us a link to your website or myspace so we can see what you’re doing and maybe we can chat on skype and see if we can get a music marketing campaign happening for you!

So what I was talking about in regards to blogging and video and various content was a few details to bare in mind if you think you’re really ready to meet the appetite of new music fans for entertainment content.

You’ve got to start with a few tips on search engine optimisation, and move right on to not be boring and actually finding something your fans want to know about, that sounds interesting because unfortunately, that’s not as they say on twitter “what you had for breakfast”.

My personal theory was that artists are so used to faking it, and it’s so natural to assume that putting up some kind of front will impress people, new artists need to go the other way and

Do you think that I work a job? No way.

Do you think I wake up in the morning and go to work?

No, I wake up when I like, grab my laptop and I head out for breakfast.

Maybe I’m showing off, but I’m also illustrating a point, that I actually am I real music marketing entrepreneur guy. I make good money from music and promotions online. I don’t get a weekly pay cheque, and I can only hope people realise it probably wouldn’t be that way if I wasn’t good at my job.

So in this way, I’m outlining to you about how you can use content to paint simple pictures.

Do you stay home and work late on weekends? Well I do, and plenty, but I’m not glamourising that! Again, making the point, work what you got! If you and your band are “totally wild” then lets hear no more talk and see some vigourous youtube videos that will have crazy people who like your music telling their friends and saying “check these guys out - they are TOTALLY WILD!”.

In my case, I always thought the fact that I don’t rely on my music for income means I don’t have to be humble to the powers that be in the music establishment, because I’m totally independent. It means that I can say what I like, and be as irreverent and uncensored as I choose to be knowing that it won’t make or break my career.

I already have a career and it’s not kissing butts in the industry which is such an unfortunate part of being involved in the music industry these days, you do have to get good at greasing people up, and I am utterly terrible at it.

But as I say, it gives me an angle which can make my content interesting and different. How is your music, and the content you use to frame the whole image projected by it, interesting and different?

This is what I’m doing with artists, for the first few months we work on websites and campaigns and setting up various systems - email newsletters and social media and compelling video but then what?

You think you’ve done enough to be considered an entertainer now?

Modern entertainment and attention spans require that you continue to roll out new content, new iterations, new narrative concepts that get fans connected to you through powerful stories.

That’s why you need guys like me around for the long term, and probably me by myself won’t be enough if you’re actually going to breakthrough, because month after month you’re going to need to create ideas that your fans respond to.

It’s only after these repeated interactions that you take someone from being a mere fan, to someone who is going to stick with you and follow your work and continue to support you and make your presence felt in an increasingly noisy and anarchic environment for entertainment.

There’s no point in thinking about a few years in it if you’re actually wanting to make money. If you just want to have fun, that’s great, keep reading my blog, keep your money in your pocket. Otherwise, you’ll need help building a platform that will work long term, and you will always need fresh ideas to keep your audience interested, engaged, and ready to hear - and possibly buy - whatever it is you’ve got on offer.

I’m not worried, I do this every day. Fresh ideas will always be needed and I’ve always got them, we’ll brainstorm a few soon, but don’t muck around because one day I’ll be doing the same thing, but charging even more to do it and you won’t be able to hire  me then.

We’re talking about marketing, business AND creative support here, so email kurbpromo@gmail.com, send us a link to your website or myspace so we can see what you’re doing and maybe we can chat on skype and see if we can get a music marketing campaign happening for you!

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Hi I’m Matt from the famous and enduring Kurb promotions - did you know we offer a full range of service to help musicians market themselves and make money from music online? It’s marketing support, it’s business support, you get 10 hours over a month for $250 and believe me, places are limited, we don’t take everyone. You’ve got to understand what to expect and best way to do that is email me, Matt: kurbpromo@gmail.com

Send us your website, send us myspace, we can get on skype and talk about what we can do.

Don’t you really just want to quit your day job and become a rock star?

Maybe you think maybe just once you’re a litle bit more established in your day job you’ll have a few more resources to devote towards your music.

I’m exactly the same. I figured since I’m getting pretty successful at music marketing and general online marketing stuff, I might as well get a bit more into my music, even if I could make a little bit of money out of it just to replace the fact that working less would mean, obviously, less money.

Then it wouldn’t seem irresponsible to go off an chase my dreams so much now, would it?

It’s a grinf to establish yourself online these days, you’ve got to outlast and outsmart. So I started off blogging because thats a big one for me - you know what I say about online music promotions - when in doubt, make content. Post a blog about something.

The main reason I say that is because of how well I’ve done here just by posting blogs.

If I can post 300 blogs here in 2 or so years and use that to make money, then so can you.

Except there’s some pretty big differences to recognise between what I’m doing here on this blog and what I do at my artist blog. On this blog, I talk about music marketing and it’s a good thing that the blog is also called “Music. Marketing. Management.” because it’s fairly obvious to visitors and to the all powerful google bot.

On my artist blog, I just have some unique neologistic name that means nothing and I don’t really talk about much outside of what is interesting to me, and nothing really in particular.

I haven’t done anything or said anything important or that mattered enough to make anyone want to link to me there, so I don’t have nearly the strong backlinks that I have back to this blog.

And that’s because on this blog I’ve actually made an effort to post information that will be useful to a significant group and made it as easily accessible as possible.

So really what I’m getting at is that if you want to take my advice and use blogging as a way you can cumulatively build the influence of you site, because it’s really a no brainer if you just relentlessly write like I do, well . . . it’s best to have a plan of what you can blog about thatpeople actually going to want to read without getting bored.

I’ve been blogging my little heart out on my artist blog and no one’s particularly interested in whether I felt like working on my songs and why. Because it’s pretty boring.

I need to start blogging about something that relates to what I’m doing creatively that a lot of people are interested in.

But there’s a lot of improvements I could make to help myself out and the first one that’s most important is using video in the same way, posting a lot of videos but also working to make video that people are going to be into.

A bad video is better than no video, but not by much. The point is that as an artist I’m trying to make an important point. Most other artists can’t make good videos because they’re not creative and awesome and real and full of awesome personality like I am, that’s really what I’m trying to say when I make videos for my site. That way fans see that I’m real, and forget about that faceless other guy who has no personality and makes no impression but not really saying anything.

In fact if I come back to this site as an example it works perfectly here, because a lot of people watch the videos and become connected to my message simply because I’m actually fronting up.

Half the time the don’t even know what I’m talking about.

All they see is that I’m passionate

People aren’t stupid. We know there are people who talk, and we know there are people who do and be, and this stuff is important online because hordes of people are looking for authenticity amongst all this bland fakery and attention seeking we’re bombarded with. The moment you give them the opportunity to recognise where you’re different from the typical fake wannabe superstars the net is littered with, you have a chance to connect.

When I’m trying to do my videos that’s what I’m conscious of. My videos aren’t incredible but as long as they’re better than the average lacklustre efforts, I’ve got a look in. And if you’re doing something on video or on your blog that is big people are going to turn onto it.

But it’s not easy doing video - but that’s why so many artists aren’t doing it, they’re hiding in their bedrooms. Lighting, planning, shooting, uploading editing, all that stuff - it’s work, and hen, your video still looks amateurish! I guess that’s what we’re here for - to lift you above the amateur in the knowledge that just being slightly better than above amateur in music marketing makes all the difference to getting your professional career rolling.

But if you’re not doing something that’s big, that’s bold, than why not? This is important stuff and the kind of detail I often end up working over with musicians. You have a message, you have confidence, how do you communicate that to the fans using the tools you have?

Short videos, podcasts, blog posts, facebook, twitter, where are the ideas coming from that will install you as an entertainer for the modern era?

That’s what we do. We don’t just execute campaigns, we talk with artists one on one about how ideas spread and what actually appeals to people. We don’t want musicians to think that it’s enough just to settle, but to keep striving and building using all these new tools that have never been used until now to make a difference in how you communicate your creativity in away that fans can feel it.

We charge $250 for 10 hours which you get over a month, in that time we can address basically every detail of how your online music marketing is planned and executed online.

Email: kurbpromo@gmail.com - we can chat on skype if it’s appropriate and you feel genuine about us helping you long term to build your online music promotions.

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Hi de hi music marketing campers - as usual, I’m way to busy to be keeping this blog updated but I guess that gives me the licence to add a little of my own personal flourish because I certainly can’t keep up with the amount of clients wanting to use our music marketing services and unfortunately, from now the price is definitely going to $250 p/month for 10 hours of online marketing services and development.

The good news is that’s only $500 updfront, and then drops down to $200 p/month after that - but you should take note! I never put the prices up on a current client so I’ve still got clients paying $125 and $166 p/month because they’ve been with me since before the last price rise, and as a reward for their loyalty - as I say - THE PRICE NEVER GOES UP FOR ESTABLISHED CLIENTS!

So if you need all over online music marketing and management,- web design, online advertising, social media, online distribution and merchandising, affiliate marketing, seo, video production and promotion, blogging and copywriting, publicity, the works - we do it ALL! It’s an all over professional operation!

EMAIL: kurbpromo@gmail.com

And look at this big ugly ad here.

I’ve been putting ads in horrible places, right in peoples faces recently like this and it’s really increased my income from ads, not that it makes that much difference, but it’s almost enough to hire me and well, I’m just saying you CAN make money from this stuff but in online marketing there’s a fine line between putting it together and making some cash, and getting one detail wrong and basically chucking your money out the window.

But anyway back to the music marketing services on offer right now

- you’ve got plenty of time to think about it because there’s still a queue of people who are finding out whether what we do will be right for them, because these prices are real - these are prices for services that take months to put together, there’s no magic formula, and we can’t do the hard work for you - we just do all the tricky marketing stuff so you don’t end up doing it all wrong, and keep slugging away until you eventually get there without running out of gas.

Because that’s what I see, performers and artists going about their career all wrong and running out of juice when they should of played long game of being prepared to go all the way and make this into a career instead of a bunch of jumped up dreams.

Man, I’ve got a whole bunch of half written blog posts about this and that I just wanted to stop by and announce the price rise now, because you know one day I’ll be getting big money in this business and you won’t be able to get my email any more, so if you want some of what I can do, you better make sure we talk sooner rather than later.

But what else did I want to say?

Having the skype connection and consulting my clients every week is great, that’s another reason prices are going up, because results are getting better now it’s up to an hour each week really getting those details down pat with clients and getting into the nitty gritty of what builds strong campaigns.

Detail and execution is everything.

Is a music marketing course or ebook or product right for you? It’s better spending $47 or $147 dollars on that than giving me $500 when you’re not ready, but you must understand that a music marketing product won’t do all the complicated stuff for you, and what’s more it doesn’t know exactly what is the right way to do carry out these processes for your music - unless your music is so featureless that some generic set of instructions will work.

But it doesn’t work, I got amazing insight into the industry on a recent campaign and full blown hype and spectacle is as alive as ever. You think the net is transparent? You think all these leaks and scandals are engineered to use the net as a tool to market major label fodder?

think again.

But hey - music marketing products sell and the people who sell them do well.

I don’t have time to write a music marketing product and pretend it will work for everyone, because I know the reality: If you make great music, why do you want to read a book about learning how to build a website a write endless newsletters, forget it!

Pay me to do that! You can $250 per month now, and in a year when you’re actually making some money you can double it so we can step it up and you can quit your job and go at this thing.

But like I said with publicity, hype and spectacle is alive, you must be ready to talk to me, get on skype and get some really strong concepts out there that people want to blog about, want to talk about and share, ans we need a steady stream of them.

There’s a lot of work to do.

But if you want to get me on kurbpromo@gmail.com $500 upfront means you’ve still got a chance to get someone like me and team who do this stuff everyday in begind your music career and building a music marketing strategy that will get you there in the end.

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Hi I’m Matt, my company Kurb offers a full and comprehensive range of online marketing services and strategies and you can jump on skype and have me consult with you personally on issues releveant to developing YOUR music career - not some cookie cutter, read the manual solution - a PERSONAL music and artist marketing solution

For just $200 a month, with a comprehensive range of services, you get 10 hours of work, that’s value you won’t get in the states or europe (I work from New Zealand) , and not only to we provide the full range of services you’re likely to need, we have great resources and contacts and now . . .

ALSO - you can now jump in skype and get in touch with me to discuss your campaign. Regular skype sessions with me will bring you right up to where you need to be, and just this week in June we’ve got some powerful new youtube promotions and music blog publicity strategies on offer.

All you have to do is contact me at:

kurbpromo@gmail.com // +64 27 684 8250 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting +64 27 684 8250 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

We do - website design, graphic design, social media marketing, search engine optimisation, youtube promotion, video production, copywriting and blog management, ad campaigns with free credit, and email list management and set up! All the strategy, the content, all the marketing! We’re even doing publicity now so you can hit those blogs!

You can’t really avoid hard work online if you want to make it in music these days.

You can’t really take the old approach that it’s all about the 6 week lead up to your album then baboom!

Try 6 months! That’s what I’m seeing with my artists it takes 6 months just to get their platform established for both dealing with fans and selling them on valuable propositions, and for the artist to get their head around what exactly the new landscape is like, that you must keep pushing, you must always be present and connecting with your fans, you can’t wander off for 6 months and expect people to care because suddenly you’ve got a new song.

It’s constant now, and we help artists manage the level commitment that is now required. Because this is the

Man I have learned a lot about publicity and music marketing campaigns recently - record labels still do an extraordinary job of sculpting an artists image and manipulating how the artist is portrayed and we have got to bring that level of scrutiny and development to the artists we work with or nothing will happen, and opportunities will be lost!

You can’t expect to buy the clout of major label’s marketing machine for $500 but you would be suprised at what is available, and what can be done with preparation and development for your online music marketing.

You also can’t expect that a $47 ebook is going to gibe you the answers because an ebook can’t give you the personal attention that is required to turn your image into a powerful concept that gets traction.

The labels are experts at this. But they have full teams of highly qualified and experienced music marketing people and resources that would cost you tens of thousands of dollars to match.

So unless you’ve got $10,000 handy - well your other option is me and my team. for $200 a month, covering 10 hours across the full range of services you could hope to need from design, to marketing, to publicity - you won’t get the value and experience we provide any where else.

Right so what’s in the artist promotions round up today?

my issues are at the moment -

- the video and the sign up are nice and prominent, but there’s no room for the opening spiel to be right there pushing the free song and giving fans directive - the still have to scroll down, its not really hitting them in the face. this could be a challenge for my skill level, but its really important to think about wowing the visitor from the get go, and getting them to do what we want them to do:

- sign up for email, download a free song, and buy something - either an affiliate offer or a

The difficult part is deciding what to push, so when we start advertising we’ll be watching carefully for what is working - what people are responding to, and when a pattern emerges, thats what we’ll start to make more prominent on the front page.

if it turns out one particular affilate product starts to sell, we’ll push that prominently on the front page. If it’s one particular song that people are buying, we’ll push that - its about giving fans what they want.

- where the slide show happens of the old time baseball pics - this is where I want to be pushing our free “no strings” download, affiliate offers and sales of the actual album and songs. this shouldn’t be too hard, but soon we’re going to want to have a whole pages dedicated to selling affiliate offers and for selling the album so that when visitors click on the panels they are taken through to sales pages pushing either songs or offers.

so it basically be sliding along 3 variations of panels:

- get your free artist track - click here!

- Support the artist with this great range of artist products - click here!

- Buy music and songs from the artist- click here!

and finally
- perfect our final spiel now that the front page is done - this is easy so its the last thing I’ll do before we’re ready to say that the website is ready for advertising. Long term it would be good to make the spiel realllly long, so you have lots of info, punctuated by offering the reader the option to click off and buy something or do something else we want them to do. ideally for google, 2000+ words would be good. I can put this together from material you’ve sent me.

its just differentiating what we need to do now before we can start advertising (such as pushing sales and offers), and what we can leave for another month - lots of little things like the myspace buttons and making the background a litle bit moreappropriate for your brand

regards

ps - now you can see where the video will be positioned, its time to start thinking about having an intro video placed there. again over this year, you may want to do this regularly - ultimately you’ll need

- intro video
- video especially for our affiliate product page
- video especially for the songs + albums product page
- regular “artist stories” and “artist update” videos

if we can aim to be doing one p/month by the end of the year we’ll get a nice momentum going.

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Hi it’s Matt from Kurb here, we’re still rolling out music marketing campaigns for artists and what’s more, here in New Zealand, we’re providing international artists based overseas with exceptional value!

The big publicists and music marketing guys in LA, New York, London etc. - they don’t know anything I don’t know, they just charge a whole lot more!

For just $200 a month, with a comprehensive range of services, you get 10 hours of work, that’s value you won’t get in the states or europe, and not only to we provide the full range of services you’re likely to need, we have great resources and contacts and now . . .

ALSO - you can now jump in skype and get in touch with me to discuss your campaign. Regular skype sessions with me will bring you right up to where you need to be, and just this week in June we’ve got some powerful new youtube promotions and music blog publicity strategies on offer.

All you have to do is contact me at:

kurbpromo@gmail.com // +64 27 684 8250

and we can start talking about the musc marketing campaign we can put together for you. I’m interested in hearing from musicians who’ve got ideas and something to offer.

We do - website design, graphic design, social media marketing, search engine ranking, youtube promotion, video production, copywriting and blog management, ad campaigns with free credit, and email list management and set up! All the strategy, the content, all the marketing! We’re even doing publicity now so you can hit those blogs!

Alright I’m getting set for a big day working on my artist’s promotion, so in true diary style, I’ll be discussing each of the things I’m doing

Had an amazing week this week learning about new strategies being used on youtube for music video promotion and also a behind the scenes look at what’s been going on with some of the publicity and promotion for artists at higher levels, and what’s really going on at some of the most forward thinking labels.

The techniques labels used haven’t changed that much, they’ve just changed the medium from print, radio and television to using the internet in much the same way as they always did.

Now I can see how this works, I’ve been given some amazing insight, and am feeling more confident in offering publicity services to artists.

I’ll have to do a piece on Lefsetz’s recent series of posts which were really strong.

You’ve got to go in with some powerful stories and connections or nobody cares.You’ve got to have a platform established so at the exact moment someone does start to care, you’re ready to accomodate and activate these fans - otherwise it’s pointless trying to do this promotion and publicity.

That takes work to develop a concept and then prepare the platform for what could possibly eventuate from it, so don’t leave it until your release is just coming up, you’ve got to start putting this foundation in place now, because if a song of yours blows up on the music blogs, you’re not going to be ready to harness that attention to create real fans, the type who buy stuff and keep buying - and impress influential connections.

First up I’m working on west coast hip hop MC Al Coe’s youtube promotion campaign.His budget is $750 to get a guaranteed 150,000 views across 3 videos to be promoted online within 2 months.

Now he’s getting some heat around the internet, but he has not in put in the necessary preparation and foundation - his videos are hosted on other youtube accounts and he doesn’t have his own website. Now those things are so important to maintaining control over your developing online brand that I’m going to take care of that before we get started.

Then I’ll be using some of our new youtube music video promotion strategies do hit these targets for authentic and targeted views. The stuff we’re doing now is some of the most effective I’ve seen in terms of getting large amounts of real views - it’s not just about increasing youtube views, it’s increasing the quality of the people actually seeing the videos, and prompting that fan involvement so it goes to the next level of artist to fan engagement.

check out my ads - this is just one way we help artists to earn - I can set up your blog, your site and add advertising just like this to create income streams.

Now Ganga, a denmark chill out artist with established credits on some of the most well known chill compilations is my longest regular client, so he’s still going a regular payment of $130 p/month because I wouldn’t raise the price of my services for a long term client who has stuck with me.

We did a great free artist advertising campaign earlier which brought in 87 fan email sign ups with $100 free credit we secured, so we need to keep those fans engaged, while building an automated email management solution that continues to engage more fans as they sign up to the list, promoting a range of music and profitable affiliate offers, but without putting time stress on the artist.

And each newsletter we d, adds to accumulated string of artist-fan rapport that we’re creating

So as the artist creates regular blogs each week - often reviewing other artists in the genre, then I take the blogs and edit them into a press release for article marketing which gets exposure around the net, and in the case of some artists, republished repeatedly, and it’s used to add to the string of newsletters.

Each newsletter is an opportunity to reconnect with fans and present options for sales.

In this way, content IS marketing - content allows you to connect to the fan and present your propositions that escalate engagement towards purchases.

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Who is running your online music marketing services?

You could make a big impact with the time and resources to execute a solid plan. Do you have a plan?

Do you even have a website, an ad campaign, a social media presence, an email list, a music video?

Then let’s get started!

For just $200 a month, with a comprehensive range of services, you get 10 hours of work, that’s value you won’t get in the states or europe, and not only to we provide the full range of services you’re likely to need, we have great resources and contacts and now . . .

ALSO - you can now jump in skype and get in touch with me to discuss your campaign. Regular skype sessions with me will bring you right up to where you need to be, and just this week in June we’ve got some powerful new youtube promotions and music blog publicity strategies on offer.

All you have to do is contact me at:

kurbpromo@gmail.com // +64 27 684 8250 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting +64 27 684 8250 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

and we can start talking about the musc marketing campaign we can put together for you. I’m interested in hearing from musicians who’ve got ideas and something to offer.

We do - website design, graphic design, social media marketing, search engine ranking, youtube promotion, video production, copywriting and blog management, ad campaigns with free credit, and email list management and set up! All the strategy, the content, all the marketing!

If I had big success stories, I would be charging a lot more than $200 for 10 hours, and the moment I do, I will be!

This is what I’ve realised recently, I have a similar skill range and experience to many working in the music industry providing these services in London, NY, LA, but because I’m based in New Zealand, I don’t need to charge nearly as much.

However, I have been working with smaller artists for over 5 years now, and now that I’m starting to work with bigger artists in the UK I’m really starting to expand my knowledge of the all over process, and my skills are basically having all round knowledge of the modern music promotions landscape from constant application.

From what I can see, your artist is already established and getting good initial traction through social media, so a lot of those services I offer would be somewhat redundant, but as this area is constantly evolving, you may benefit from the input of certain strategies I use.

There are distinct other services I offer artists that you may benefit from - mainly my advertising skills and my website optimisation skills - general knowledge of both the major aspects of search engine ranking and using advertising effectively.

In terms of viral promotion, you need an ideas factory that can not only brainstorm, freestyle and develop innovative concepts, but also action them swiftly.

As my clients campaigns mature, it becomes an intricate orchestration of regular content and concepts to keep fans engaged and this is valuable work, when coupled with knowledge of the practical outcomes. It’s about unifying advertising campaigns, social media platforms, video and email management under the theme of short, revolving campaigns that keep current fans engaged, and also bring in new fans - ulimately, activating the estblished fan based to share with  their networks and recruit new fans.

I have knowledge of solid business and revenue models, but as you are going for a major label connection, again this may not be necessary.

I’ve also started moving into publicity since realising the techniques modern publicists use are not that much more sophisticated than what I’ve been doing, especially regards to getting blog coverage etc.

I’m available on skype for discussion of this, as well as regular input and consultation. As usually I am required to fulfill quite a broad range of services for artists whereas you may require me in certain roles, it may be appropriate to define the role i’d play distinctly based on what holes I could fill in your current campaign strategy.

WHAT WE’RE WORKING WITH HERE - is this what you’re working with n your artist promotions? You might need our help on that!

• YouTube: 30 cover videos; 700K legitimate video views; 100K + channel views; 2K subs, several honors and # 12 musicians recently.
• Myspace: 6M views and 19K friends
• Twitter: 2K followers
• Website
• Press release of new artist released on free internet distribution services (20)
• Tools: TubeMogul use; Tweet adder; YouTube TubeTool;
• Professional photo shoot completed yesterday —this is going to be some of the most incredible artist photography ever.
• Online Store in process
• Original songs in the works - first single due out in 3-4 weeks.
• Recently signed up with purchsing some video views.
• Plan to promote excepton cover in 2-3 weeks.
• Demo/promo kit and media kit in the works
• Several celebritiies are following blare on Twitter and YouTube
• Signed up Itunes account; CD Baby and one cover song on itunes.

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Hi it’s Matt from Kurb here, we’re still kicking off big music marketing campaigns for artists and what’s more, here in New Zealand, we’re providing international artists based overseas with exceptional value!

The big publicists and music marketing guys in LA, New York, London etc. - they don’t know anything I don’t know, they just charge a whole lot more!

You got to accept a music marketing campaign is going to cost some money. You can’t build a career or a music busines with $500, but $500 will take you a lot further with us then it will anywhere else.

For just $200 a month, with a comprehensive range of services, you get 12 hours of work, that’s value you won’t get in the states or europe, and not only to we provide the full range of services you’re likely to need, we have great resources and contacts and now . . .

ALSO - you can now jump in skype and get in touch with me to discuss your campaign. Regular skype sessions with me will bring you right up to where you need to be.

All you have to do is contact me at:

kurbpromo@gmail.com // +64 27 684 8250

and we can start talking about the musc marketing campaign we can put together for you. I’m interested in hearing from musicians who’ve got ideas and something to offer.

We do - website design, graphic design, social media marketing, search engine ranking, youtube promotion, video production, copywriting and blog management, ad campaigns with free credit, and email list management and set up! All the strategy, the content, all the marketing!

we’re even doing publicity now because we may not be hotshot publicists - but at least we do the job at a reasonable price!

We offer all the services, strategy at a low low price that means you don’t miss out - what are you waiting for - contact us!! kurbpromo@gmail.com // +64 27 684 8250

Okay well I’m going to get started on ideas here, they may not be fully formed but it’ll be a start.

If if you have a designer, covering the design angle that probably works because although I design myself, it’s not my strong suit and I often have a lot of problems cracking the whip with my design guys, since I’m I’m focused on affordability for new artists.

My initial thoughts were to take a stripped back upfront kinf of guerilla style with the website so it was not to ornate in any way but if these guys are handling it then thats fine.

All I’ll be concerned with in the design process is that key items such as email sign up forms, video and other important content are present and correct.

Also something to consider is our various audiences, i think it’s worth considering that perhaps musical enthusiasts and politicized individuals which we’ll be targeting maybe better targeted by seperate “landing pages” (the page visitor arrives at after clicking link/ad)

However stage 1 is having the site as a hub for the centre of engagement which right now qualifies as:

- Getting email sign ups in order to maintain and develop relationships with fans over time

- getting any content - whether video, blogs etc. designed to create a specific fan reaction or outcome prominently displayed

- and finally making sure those directives are very clear and obvious - the “call to action” to make sure a visitor responds to whatever propositions we’re pushing ie:

*sign up for email = get hi quality dl

*take action related to spreading campaign in line with outcomes = reward incentive for fan who participates

Then we need a strategy to get people to those pages

- first is advertising because I have a proven track record there. also “higher concept” viral/interactive strategies (based around fan participation or action) can be used to spearhead advertising

- advertising can be launched quickly and will give us valuable feedback, whereas higher concept stuff needs a little bit of thought and perhaps testing - there needs to be a strong concept ie a strong proposition that the fan will participate in willingly.

we get them to sign up for email = they get the single

now what can we ask them to do next to push out the word, and how can we incentivize it?

Facebook and twitter, social media marketing strategies are one way, we get sign ups on facebook, tweets and updates on twitter and facebook, we can look at social music platforms but again, a lot of work building up there.

also you mentioned producer/filmmakers being encouraged to work with this material, this is effective in reaching their small micro audiences without

- search engine strategies - powerful but not effective short term, this is something probably discussed later as it takes months to build up solid search ranking authority for a new site.

- classic PR: many blogs are obviously going to be keen to get in behind this, but we need a strategy to reach them. There are companies who offer this service but I am reluctant to trust them, thats why I would employ my own solution - although not my strong area - solid research on blogs where MIA has featured, then a proffesional follow up put together by us and executed by my staff.

Again, it’s the  connection with other artists that will open the door here where usually bloggers would turn their nose up, still professionalism in this matter is required to ensure a good take up.

Finally addressing what you mentioned about communicating with potential audiences such as politically disenfranchised youth, more active creators - DJ’s, videgraphers etc.

Again this is about a powerful strategy to appeal to them, and then incentivize a direct outcome on their part.

What will we offer to make the casual fan want to share? A producer or filmaker can be incentivized simply by the opportunity to have a platform for their creation to have credibility by association and I’ve seen nine inch nails use this very well.

again we may be dealing with 2 seperate audiences - a hipster audience who sees value in being perceived as having knowledge of free music, and a politicized audience looking for strong concepts and ideas to identify with.

It’s really about giving people - music fans / politicized fans / creators / bloggers and other new media sources - the right motivation and incentive to push our agenda.

advertising to push the sign up in exchange for the single is our first tier strategy, our second tier strategy is a powerful enough concept and incentive to then motivate people who do have the tune, to share through their personal and contibute where appropriate.

In terms of solid planning - I would also be thinking about a video on youtube / the site that will encapsulate our general concept in order sell our second tier strategy.

This way the process is very clear - visitor arrives via advertising, social media, blog etc - the understand the first proposition as its laid out - email for song - then we use the video to present whatever 2nd strategy we have in place to push a sharing / mashup / interactive / viral strategy.

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You know me, still doing lots of work in music promotion and online promotion!

I’ve just started selling affiliate products from my blog - this blog and guess what? It actually works!!!

I couldn’t believe it! I’ve been getting $20 on single sales! If I can do it, artists can do it so it’s time for artists to embrace where the revenue is coming from in terms of the resources they need to succeed in the music business.

Get with kurb promotions! KURBPROMO@GMAIL.COM

$200 still gets you 12 hours promotion work - web design, email list and affiliate marketing management, social media, video, ad campaigns, seo, copywriting, all the service you need for online music marketing!

Let’s make a music business plan to make money and go to it.

Just been working away setting up basic structure for the ad campaign, it will still need some work before its ready to launch, but this is quite intensive work. It’s ready to test now, but again I’d like to take some more consideration on it to optimize, and bring your brand through more.

So now that these basics are at least underway, we need to start discussing what we’re going to be approaching people on facebook with and the more important bloggers.

I can come up with something but as usual, I think it would be better to get your thoughts, or I can present something, and I can then revise based on your suggestions.

As I say, I wish I could get this done faster, but I think it’s better long term to take a more considered approach - I could’ve banged out an average ad campaign in 2 hours and told you it’s done, but I think your work and your approach calls dor  a bit more thought.

Also, I have to underline that point that this promotion needs the website at its centre point - most of this promotion is ineffective without it, because without the site and the song available, there isn’t much to promote aside from social media, which you’re relatively new to in terms of your profiles developments.

so I’m going to finish up on the ad campaign tonight, also started on the research for which blogs and forums to target for the release, so I can provide a report for that.

usually I’d have the same person who does twitter help me with that but I’ve already sent them instructions for the twitter so I dont want to overwhelm them too much, we’ll see how we go, but this could be a bit of a slog getting through them all so we have a comprehensive list, then we’ll need to finalize our approach.

As I mentioned, if we’re asking them to promote it, they’ll want to see the website up and running as some kind of proof that this is the real deal, again we want to think about the approach because some bloggers may want to host the mp3 themselves, as I say it depends on the approach we want to take, striking the balance of keeping the bloggers happy but retaining some control.

I can put a staff member onto generating facebook fans/”likes” to get the ball rolling but it’s about how you want to use your allotted hours.

ust sorting your Facebook promo now, that should be no problem,

Twitter promo is underway,

Issue with the myspace promo - you didn’t set up your profile as an artist profile so you could upload music? You may have to set up another account by signing up as an artist / musician. We can promote this personal account, but I think it makes more sense to promote the official music account, so I have instructed staff to standby on this.

With the article marketing (this is backlink driven, designed to make your press release available for republishing and distribution - as seperate from the publicity angle we’re taking with the blog research + approach) we can start an any time since you have something up for your site, but I don’t think we should press the button until we know the full version of the site is to go live within 48 hours.

Good news, with a bit of hustle I managed to secure 100 euros free advertising credit - please note this did cost $US25 - when I’ve finished up with the campaign, you can add your credit card number and the code I provide and you’ll start with a 100 euro budget.

The idea you had about creating the discussion is possible - and i think its a good idea, too - it just again, has to be managed carefully. I’ve never done anything like it before other than generating random comments on youtube, its doable, but I cant anticipate the result.

from here:

I’ll continue to tweak the ad campaign and my list of sites and blogs to approach to promote the release, let me know your moves on myspace. I’ll be thinking on the best way to orchestrate this discussion.

once the social media stuff and ad campaigns are all sorted then I can focus on these more complex issues, thats my problem I’m having, because I usually do all this stuff over 3 months, it gives me a lot more oversight than I feel like I’ve got right now.

list below is the list of sites I’ve researched so far. This is all good, but my thoughts really are on hypemachine and pitchfork and those calibre of blogs/sites that have real clout behind them.

again, as we refine our approach, then I should have more clarity on the issue - as I mentioned publicity is not my forte, so we need to tread a bit more carefully here - as I say once the social media staff are all set up and the ad campaign is too, then I wont have so much going on in my head and I’ll be a lot more useful to you.

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