Getting personal makes money
You want to launch a new EP, but to pay for it you need $2,000 (£1,300) you haven’t got. What to do? US singer-songwriter Allison Weiss used Kickstarter, a website that matches creative types with mini-patrons, to sell personalised products and experiences: $40 (£26) bought a signed copy of the EP, $100 (£65) got a handwritten thank-you letter and $300 (£195) earned a CD of Weiss performing five acoustic songs. For $500 (£325), people got songs written especially for them. Weiss used Twitter and Tumblr to promote the scheme and within 10 hours had raised her target sum. But it’s a work-intensive method: another musician charged fans $40 to come to his house for a meal, while another asked fans for $70 (£45) to contribute handclaps to her album at the recording studio.
Rascal’s dizzy about marketing
British rapper Dizzee Rascal hit the press for dismissing The X Factor as “just another marketing tool”, contrasting it with his new Sky 1 talent show Must be the Music. Yet the rapper is at the very pulse of music promotion, from featuring in the VIP Room of the PlayStation 3 SingStar game space, to directly interacting with fans using the Mobile Backstage application for the iPhone. With an interaction rate of 1:46 (for every 46 activities performed by users, the artist interacts once), compared with 1:780 on Facebook and 1:20,874 on MySpace, this is the closest way for artists to inhabit fans’ space. But the marketing impact of an X Factor appearance is undeniable even for established artists: Shakira sold 358 per cent more copies of “Did It Again” after her performance, even though it had been available for purchase five weeks earlier.
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