Well, I’ve been doing this commission project for over a year now. There were a few months of it that I wasn’t pushing it very actively. Most of the people who got commissions from me, though, were people with whom I already had a connection. This is not surprising. You wouldn’t buy a CD from a band that you’d never heard, so why would you buy a commission from somebody whose music you didn’t know at all.
Still, I wanted to get the idea of the project farther out. I think the best way to spread is organically, by word of mouth and via social networking. But the idea of direct-to-consumer advertising is also compelling. So I approached the writer of the Comics Curmudgeon, which is rated as one of the top 100 American blogs. His blog has nothing to do with music. I asked him if I could trade a week long banner ad for a commission. Josh was extremely enthusiastic about the idea, so I made a one minute piece for him.
So far, everybody that’s gotten a piece has been happy with it, Josh included. I think that people are more likely to like a piece of music that they feel a connection to. Personally, I’m more likely to think positively of music written by bands I already like or by my friends. Everybody has that. This seems to be especially true for people who commission pieces. In this case, Josh was happy enough that he dedicated a blog post in which he recommended me and embedded a YouTube video I made of the piece.
It’s been a couple of weeks and the banner ad has timed out. The number of people watching the video has slowed to a trickle. I don’t know how many thousands of people saw the post, or subsequently subscribed to my podcast, but I know that more than 3800 watched the video, which is a fantastic reach for me. I got zero new commissions.
This is exactly why my career in marketing was so short (no really). While it’s true that I want to reach everybody, a one-off ad in a totally unrelated medium is not the way to do it. So my failure to get any new commissions is not necessarily an indication that the project is doomed. Most people have to hear about something three times before it clicks. Commissioning music is a totally new idea to many people. So if I want to get people to understand the idea, I need to make certain they hear about it multiple times. This effort was, therefore, much too small to work. However, there’s another problem in that I can’t do 100 commissions in a week. I can do maybe three. If four thousand people suddenly understood what I was up to and thought it was cool, if less than 1% of them tried to commission me, I’d be swamped.
However, one thing that I learned when I worked in marketing is that competition is correlated with growth of the category. For example, if there was just one time of sugary, fizzy water, the manufacturer might have to explain to people why they would want to drink such a thing (I, for one, am unconvinced it’s a good idea). However, having multiple pop companies means that more people have heard of pop and the overall demand is higher. Is this cause or effect? Who knows. However, in the case of commissioning music, every other composer who starts doing this is also letting people know that such a category of goods exists. So I want more people to start doing this. I can’t say for certain that it’s going to work, but the startup costs are low.
I wonder, also, if I should retreat to a lower cost. At a time when people are losing their houses and the price of food is rising, commissioning noise music is definitely going to seem like a luxury.
Finally, while my advertisement experiment failed to gather me any new business, I’m still quite pleased with the number of ears that I reached. A number of them probably considered it to be a novelty, but that’s the path musical genres take to reach popular acceptance. One small step for noise music, one giant leap for my hit counter.
Tag: marketing
Virtual Installations
I’ve spent much of today trying to figure out how to do make virtual sound installations in Second Life. From what I’ve seen for sale, it’s probably possible. But SL is not a sharing sort of community. It’s more of a capitalist system. If you want to upload stuff, you’ve got to have the Lindens (10$L / file). If you want land, you need Lindens. So you can get them by sacrificing real money or you can make stuff in SL to sell (but it will cost you to upload the raw materials, so you have to recover your costs) or you can get a virtual job.
there’s no better way to relax from spending all day staring at a computer screen at work than to come home and stare at a computer screen doing my second virtual shift for (semi-real) play money. No wonder the IRS wants to tax this game. No wonder the NYT and other papers are happily wildly inflating the numbers of regular users. No wonder corporations are busily putting up ads. They love this. It’s a model they get. Money buys stuff. There’s no weird “sharing” or other hard-to-grok economies. People sell stuff to each other and so rich folks and corporations get all the cool stuff because they can invest in finding and paying people to create it for them. Second Life is a lot like Real Life.
I think it is on the upswing and will continue to grow, but probably without me. I would have put in the effort to photograph my favorite shirt to upload it as a texture map for my avatar to wear (in human speak: I was taking pictures of my shirt so my player could wear it), but I’m not going to pay for the privilege of generating content on a private network. I’m not opposed to paying for things. I pay for flickr. Because my free account had upload limits that I wanted to exceed. I wanted to exceed them because of positive experiences I had after I uploaded some stuff without paying. First I got positive feedback, then I gave out some money. The new economy is not dead. First, prove to me that you’ve got something worthwhile, then offer me more if I pay you. It’s a good model.
Christi told me that it would be good to include the first 8 minutes of Virtual Memory. I think that she doesn’t want to move to Los Angeles. What was I thinking when I recorded that? Bad day? Wanted to assult my listeners? I used to rename the file to new_britney_spears.mp3 and log on to Napster with it. Then I’d get on the napster top 40 chat rooms and tell folks that I had some brand new pre-release or something and try to get them to download it. The plan was that they would and then they wouldn’t bother deleting it, even though the ID3 tags revealed it to be me (and a url pointed at my web page). Then someone else would see that they had some new Britney song and download it. I deliberately misspelled her name. Anyway, this plan might have worked, except that it wasn’t an exerpt, it was a twenty minute long file and I think that Macster, the macintosh client, was messed up since nobody ever downloaded anything from em at all. and sometimes people would IM me wondering why they couldn’t get things from me. Anyway, this plan is an example of what used to be called “Guerilla Marketting.” Remeber that? Dot coms would assualt you with advertising crap, like spray painting their logos on the sidewalk and hiring people to march down the street protest-like holding signs with the name of your product on it. Something I worked on hired a flatbed truck to drive around rush hour with a billboard on the back. At the time, I worried that extra traffic in rush hour would just piss people off. Now I wonder why all the computer companies weren’t burned to the ground by angry mobs. Sheesh, the things that seemed normal then! Anyway, I think maybe I should go with Headerless Data #1 or #2 instead of this exhausting, static, assaulting thing. Actually, I secretly suspect that playing it loudly may damage your speakers. Perhaps any volume. I have no data to back this up one way or the other. Actually, the mp3 has got to be safe. The original audio file that I just listened to tho, that’s questionable. I guess if I do use this, I should convert it to mp3 and then back. That would get the hard edges out of it, like playing guitar through a speaker or playing a recording of a guitar through a speaker. Anyway, if you have hated enemies, let me know and I’ll send you a CD of possibly speaker-unsafe audio and you can play it loudly through their stereo when they’re not home. (You may want to leave while you do this and evacuate any pets.)