I know because I teach it that there is a lot of clutter on the Internet and in the world around us. Breaking through this clutter is awfully tough. The single greatest way to break through the clutter is to create a culture. What I mean by culture is a movement behind your music. This can come in many forms.
Tribes
Seth Godin, the legendary marketing pro and author dedicated an entire book to discussing tribes and their impact on society. To him, and others like Kevin Kelly, building a tribe is nothing more than leading a group of people. In your music, you can be a leader, whether for a movement of political scale, humanitarianism or just for a certain scene that you partake in. The goal with the tribes is to create a culture and have a dedicated number of fans that are willing to do anything, pay anything or go anywhere to experience what you have to offer.
Story Tellers
(Greatful Dead concert)
The best stories of all time in the music business go back to amazing story telling. From the Greatful Dead fans telling stories of legendary shows to stories of seeing the Beatles for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show, stories helped create a culture around those bands. Modern day stories may include 50 Cent and his shot 9 times into riches story or even (as lame as it is) the Britney comeback story. If you can create a story, one that will be retold and retold for the hands of time, you will have a culture that will grow as quickly and passionately as any advertising campaign.
Youth Movement
photo by Conor Keller | fortysixtyphoto.com
Young people love joining cultures outside the norm. Most of these cultures are a result of music or art that populate locally, grow regionally and are eaten alive by companies and corporations all over the world. If you can connect with youth culture you have the ability to connect with movers and shakers that are responsible for over $200 million in recreational spending every year in the U.S. alone. The new youth generation, Gen-Y or the Millennials, are the largest generation in the world, and in some countries like Iran, make up 60% or more of the country’s population. Targeting them based on their wants and mental assessment can play a huge part in your growth and development as a band, or in the music industry.
How to Market to These Groups
Marketing your music to these groups can be tricky. There are many downfalls to doing it wrong. Creating a bad first impression is a hard thing to overcome especially in youth culture. Keys to developing a culture through your music can be created both organically and through brainstorming and great planning.
Organic Culture Creation
Live Shows – Playing out live and making an impression on your audience is the biggest way to spread your message and build a culture. Solillaquists of Sound from Orlando have toured the country and built a large independent following almost solely through live performance. Crowds leave the room talking about Divinci on the MPC or Swamberger’s passion in every lyric that comes out of his mouth. They never go through the motions and just play songs to fill a time slot. Think of your live show as a performance and create a culture around the songs and the people enjoying your songs.
Your Online Attention – I called this online attention because it boiled down to two attention spans. One is getting the attention of your fans online. This is no easy feat. The second part is after you have their attention, following up and talking to these fans so that a culture is created with you leading this culture. As a leader you need to share information (in this case it could be songs, lyrics, video, live appearances or some type of education) and you also need to communicate this information. Think of a CEO or a boss. While they have the big office and the big paycheck, if the information that leaves his office never gets relayed to his team, the company will fail. Same for your music. The Internet makes it very easy to close that communication gap and lead your tribe.
Planned Culture Creation
In this aspect, you would be spending marketing dollars towards getting fans involved in your culture. This can range from widgets that showcase your music and interactive media or media buys on influential sites that your fans visit frequently. The key with planning a culture is to take aspects that make your music special and see how they fit into the culture around your music. It can never be forced or it will not work. Talk to your fans, talk to your friends, producers or other artists and see how they view you and your music. This will help you in the planning stages.
So, does your music have culture?
What is your band’s story?
What do you want your fans to say about you?
-Greg Rollett
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Justin Boland
898 days ago
Have you found any useful tools for assessing the health of your culture?
Back when I was managing a couple forums, I found a great book called WikiPatterns, a book about how to diagnose online collaboration projects. I dig Godin’s book but his writing is so bare-bones it’s hard to glean a process from his explanations.
A lot of readers would probably be turned off by the thesis, which is bleakly honest, but Howard Bloom’s book “The Lucifer Principle” is an excellent look at how human culture organizes itself. The most useful tool in the book is his breakdown of “Complex Adaptive Systems,” subcultures being a great example, and the five critical parts:
1. Diversity Generators
2. Conformity Enforcers
3. Inner Judges
4. Resource Shifters
5. Intergroup Tournaments
These aren’t all directly correlated to individual people, like Gladwells maven/salesmen/connectors framework. Systems of social control have always been an interest of mine and it’s remarkable how often the 5 elements Bloom is describing will spontaneously self-organize around a new subculture or music movement. Think about how often we’ve read stories of fan forums growing exponentially, self-policing and doing huge collaborative projects.
Obviously, these process would go off better when you build a framework for it and anticipate it…I was always impressed by the “Fight With Tools” campaign Flobots have been doing, to ground all this in real-world examples.
Long rant — just to get back to the question: when you’re consulting with clients, how do you help them assess this part of their operation?
gregrollett
898 days ago
Man, you are always making me think! Love the comment and here is what I think is a good (not great or perfected) approach to judging the culture around your music.
Set up listening channels for everything. Every mention of your name, your band name, nicknames, album titles, song titles and anything else important to you. Ideally, with major label clients we like Radian6 or Techrigy, but for ballers on a budget, things like Google Alerts, Twitter Search RSS feeds and Facebook Lexicon can do the trick. Add that to BandMetrics or RockDex and you should know everything that anyone is saying about you online.
From there you are looking for patterns – intricacies about songs, about events, etc. It may sound corny, but see what they look like, what brands of clothing they wear, their accessories (everyone wears a Yankees hat or something) and over time the pattern will start to repeat and give you some evidence of the culture around your band.
One of my favorite things to do is have the merch guy go around before a set with the flip cam and perform a “focus group.” Why are you here, how did you find out about the show, have you seen them live before, etc.
A last thing is an old marketing trick, surveys! Using Survey Monkey is easy and free and I would ask similar questions to the ones posed above. The cool thing about surveys is that you can email them in segments – based on regions, purchases, etc – depending on how in depth your mailing list is.
One thing I am experimenting with now is private FB groups for super fans. Getting their feedback on product offerings, special deals, etc. I hope to have some more evidence from this soon.
I hope that helps to answer your question. Again this is a good method, but not the end all, be all. Oh, and yea I agree with you about Seth Godin. My thing is that I can read one chapter and know the entire rest of the book is fluff based around the theme. The theme is generally good though.