Podcast Directories & One Cool Player

Here's a followup to my recent post on how to Create a FREE Music Podcast ...

I just discovered a cool Flash-based podcast player called the PupuPlayer from Pupu Studios. It's free and involves no messy installation by you or your fans.

Test it out by listening to my Artist Empowerment Radio podcast now:



Offering an easy streaming option to test your podcast might be a wise move to cozy up to those folks who are still unsure about podcast feeds, subscriptions and downloading.

Click Yourself Into Submission

And here are four directories where you can quickly submit your podcast:

Yahoo! Podcasts (this is new and in beta mode)

Podcast Alley

Podcast.net

Podnova.com

Get busy doing your thing, baby!

-Bob

Creative Commons 365 & Newsweek

Here's a cool idea masterminded by Grant Robertson of Indieish.com. It's a podcast called "Creative Commons Three Sixty Five." Starting Jan. 1, every day it will deliver one song licensed under the Creative Commons.

According to the site:

We're diligently working to build the music library, with a large portion of next year already in the system and ready to feed. If you're a musician who releases music under the Creative Commons and want to be included in the CC:365 calendar, let us know.

Check it out.

Making Their Own Breaks

How did I miss this one? The Oct. 3 issue of Newsweek magazine featured an awesome article called "Making Their Own Breaks" and subtitled "Technology is helping aspiring writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers go from amateur to pro. Who needs an agent when you've got the Net?"

My indie-minded friend Gilli Moon is prominently quoted, as is Buzz Factor patron Dave Cool, self-published author Angela Hoy (who was featured in my Branding Yourself Online book), author Peter Spellman and several other do-it-yourselfers.

Great article. Read it and let their stories inspire you to greater indie heights!

Tag You're It: Amazon's New Marketing Tool

Bookselling behemoth Amazon.com has been adding some cool new interactive features to make its site more community oriented. One of the newest holds the potential to be a powerful online music promotion tool.

Go browse the pages of individual music CD titles at Amazon, and you'll notice a field under the CD title labeled "Your tags." What is this? As Amazon explains ...

Tags provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify any item on the Amazon site for later recall. For example, you might be shopping for holiday gifts and tag items with the names of the people on your shopping list. At any time, you can review the items you've tagged and make final gift decisions. You might also want to tag items you've purchased in the past. This allows you to organize your collection in any way you wish ...

Because people's tags are (by default) visible to others, a great side effect of tagging is that you can navigate among items through other people's tags. What items have people tagged "gift" or "Tuscany" or "robot?"

How you can use Amazon's tags: Go to the pages of the most popular CDs in your genre and start tagging away. You'll need to log into your Amazon account to do this. Then make sure your personal profile on Amazon is complete. Upload an image and give a compelling description of your music and what you do. Also, be sure to list your web site.

Why go through this trouble? Because your name and tag will show up right on the sales page of every CD you tag. And thousands of music consumers will be able to link to your profile, where they can find out more about you and your music.

Example: Go to the page for Peter Spellman's The Self-Promoting Musician. Scroll down to "Customers who tagged this item" and you'll see Bob Baker, with a link to my Amazon profile page. Just for fun, I even tried it with the bestseller The Da Vinci Code. And there I am.

Hardly anyone knows about this new feature yet, so you'll be one of the first to stand out by doing it. So go to Amazon now and start tagging!

New Podcast, iTunes & How I Goofed

On my latest podcast I admit that I goofed. Yes, I'm secure enough to admit it. And I share a new perspective on how long it should take you to succeed with music. Long term or short term or somewhere in between? Check it out to learn more.

You can listen to it on my own podcast page or at GarageBand.com. Stream it, download it or subscribe to the feed. Whatever you do, just listen! Okay?

Super Cool News

This just in: My Artist Empowerment Radio show is now listed in the iTunes podcast directory. To find it, just go to the podcast page of the iTunes Store and search for Bob Baker. New shows will be automatically downloaded into your iTunes Podcasts folder.

Of course, you can also do the same thing with the "podcatchers" listed here (scroll down and look at the column on the right).

Free Music Downloads: The Truth

There's been a lot of debate over the years regarding the effect that illegal music downloads and file sharing have on actual sales. I've had my own theory on this -- but it was only speculation until a Harvard PhD student named David Blackburn published a paper on it.

As reported in this post on Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog, Blackburn's research concludes that P2P file-sharing "does indeed depress music sales overall. But the effect is not felt evenly. The hits at the top of the charts lose sales, but the niche artists further down the popularity curve actually benefit from file-trading."

The New Music Math

You probably already figured this out on your own, but it's interesting to see the numbers once they've been crunched. The most fascinating factoid is this:

If you took all musical artists and placed them on a graph from least popular to most popular, the 25% of artists on the popular end of the scale would have lower CD sales because of file sharing, but the remaining 75% of not-so-popular artists actually benefit from fans freely sharing their music.

Anderson writes, "The Long Tail implications of this are pretty clear. For the majority of artists further down the tail, free distribution is good marketing, with a net positive effect on sales. Which is yet another reminder that the rules are all too often made to protect the minority of artists at the top of the curve, not most artists overall."

Take-away marketing lesson: If you're not on the Billboard charts, don't be so tight-assed with your songs. You won't sell more by hoarding your recorded music. Give a few of your best songs away to any fan who will listen, and encourage them to share and spread the word.

Despite the old music business cliche, it's not who you know that matters -- it's who knows you!

The Psychology of Crowds

It's the day after Thanksgiving -- widely known in the USA as one of the busiest shopping days of the year. And it's always amazed me. Why do people go out in droves to crowded malls and risk trampling just to save a few bucks on a DVD player or crock pot?

One answer has everything to do with crowd psychology.

I learned this lesson years ago as I watched people file out after comedy shows. (Yes, in a former life I performed stand-up comedy and music parodies regularly.) I sold my own comedy tapes and usually parked near the exit to catch anyone who wanted to buy the recording I had plugged onstage.

One show in particular stands out. The audience was about a hundred people strong. Nearly half of them marched right past me. Then one person stopped to buy a tape. Then another.

One of the buyers noticed I had a stack of promo photos and asked how much it would be for an autographed copy. No one had ever asked that before, so I said, "If you buy the tape, I'll give you an autographed picture free."

The other buyer overhead the conversation and said, "Then I'll take one too." By then, other patrons who were filing out had stopped to see what was going on. I heard a number of remarks along the lines of "What's going on? Oh, he's selling tapes. Let's stop and get one." Within minutes, there was a long and growing line. Each person saw that I was signing photos and wanted one too.

It was an eye-opening experience. What was so appealing to the second half of the audience that the first half couldn't care less about? You know the answer:

They were at first curious just to see what all the commotion was about, then interested in getting a piece of what so many other people were enjoying.

Mel Torment of Finger Records writes, "The packed house, frothing crowd mentality creates a sheep-like response, and when everyone suddenly thinks a band is cool, it is automatically assumed that so and so is the only band that matters ..."

And Stephen Bucaro writes about the importance of "consensus" when selling: "Consensus involves getting prospective customers to believe that 'everybody's doing it.' Everybody is just waiting in line to purchase your product. Everybody can't be wrong, so the product must be fantastic!"

This topic may be worth covering over a number of blog posts. So check back for more thoughts on the psychology of crowds.

In the meantime, start thinking about ways you can stimulate curiosity and attract a crowd feeding frenzy.

Indie Music News: Feed Your Head

If you're like me, you know the benefit of keeping up with the latest ideas and news stories related to music -- especially independent music. But maybe you don't visit the sites and blogs you need to be reading as often as you like. Perhaps you haven't taken the time to set up a free news reader like Bloglines and subscribe to your favorite blog feeds.

Regardless, you should check out the new Indie Music News Feed page I just set up on TheBuzzFactor.com site. There you'll see the latest headlines and summaries from some of my favorite independent music promotion blogs.

I used a new service at FeedDigest.com to set it up. It's pretty cool. Maybe you can use it to create a news feed on your own site focused on your particular genre. Check it out.

On another note ... Have a great Thanksgiving! I hope you have a true "attitude of gratitude" toward all of the things your life has handed you -- the good and the bad. It's all part of the evolution that is you.

I am sincerely thankful for your support and encouragement. Big hugs to you!