Quarantine concerts are playing an interesting role in keeping public arts alive while life is on lockdown. When the lockdowns started artists and celebs started live-streaming as a way of staying connected and lifting people’s spirits. Some more successful than others.

At this point, every concert is canceled through at least 2020 placing pressure on artists to make more of their business digital, live-streams included.

This is the good, the bad, and ugly of livestreaming.

The good

Many mistakenly approach livestreams as a video streaming platform or in place of live — mediums that both reward polished rehearsed entertainment.

Livestreaming is more akin to radio with a built-in social network. …

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When you start a record campaign, your label lays out Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to evaluate a campaign’s success or failure, which govern whether your project continues to be funded or phased out.

Streaming and social platforms allow us to see the real time impact of marketing efforts via a wall of metrics that when pieced together tell a story. However, few artists know which metrics are the right metrics. …

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Some catch-phrases often thrown around the room in label marketing meetings…

“It’s a summery record, so it needs to be released in summer” — a&r person

“nope, terrible idea to release a record early March or April because SXSW and Coachella, there’s just too much noise” — marketing director

“Basically everyone starts checking out by November so don’t release then or December because there’ll be no-one here to fix your stuff should anything go wrong” — project manager

These broad claims bear truth but I wondered, just how much truth? To find out, I analyzed 691 album releases from 2019 in the US trying to find answers to: when are the best and worst times to release an album, how style of music effects release windows, and how can marketers strategically plan their record campaigns around optimal release weeks in 2020. …

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Creative directors take the audible message of the song and create imagery that conveys the emotion and message of the song. In music, where budgets are generally strapped but ambition runs high, they are the ones that deal with these constraints to bring the artist’s vision to life. At the very base level, they should be able to define the artist and music’s look and feel — which contextualizes the songs and draws listeners to the music. …

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Two conversations I keep having as a music marketing consultant:

1. “We’ve got the money, we just don’t know where to spend it. What actually matters?”
2. “We have high hopes for this release but the budget’s tight because we’re already so far in the red”

When thinking about marketing a record, the first place I start is with the overall budget. It’s your greatest predictor of marketing activities and provides the following:

1) Viability of your marketing ideas

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As a music marketing consultant, I spend a good chunk of my day working with artists and their teams to figure out how to make their music stick. The trend right now is to market at the distribution level — give content away to Apple or Spotify in hopes of playlisting, follow closely the best practices prescribed by Amazon or Pandora for support, work with SoundCloud on something creative etc.

While that’s all important stuff, the platform that’s most underleveraged and misunderstood by labels and artists is YouTube. …

When I start working with a new artist client the very first meeting I do is a discovery session where I to get up to speed on their brand and understand how I can help as a music marketing consultant.

This article is part 21 of my go-to questions I ask the artist before the album campaign and part my process for what I’m trying to uncover at each stage of the interview. …

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This piece is pt.II of Playing to Strangers — why your most profitable fans are those that haven’t heard of you in which I debunk the myth of fan loyalty in building an artist’s brand arguing that scale comes from amassing many light, casual listeners. You can listen to me break this down in depth with Cherie Hu on her Water + Music podcast.

Here are 13 ways to market to light listeners, engineering demand for an artist’s work without diluting the integrity of their core product and creative vision. …