WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO GET YOUR music video on the Internet? It’s not important at all—that is, unless you realize the tremendous advantages of using technology to successfully promote your band or yourself as an artist. It’s not important unless you want to have a leg up on the competition. (You’re not even in the competition if you’re not creating your own promotional media.) It’s not important unless you still believe in the old models of the music industry, replete with record companies, Top 40 charts, and radio as the primary means of reaching your audience.
In short, you’re living in a brave new world of do-it-yourself music creation and distribution. At your disposal are music creation tools that would have been a dream—a utopia, an absolute nirvana—for a producer such as George Martin and those other four guys (The Beatles). Depending on the size of your budget, your video production can easily be at Internet-quality levels, and on the high end, it could be high definition, widescreen, and ready to show at a theater, let alone on the Internet. In this brave new world, there are fewer walls between you and your audience. As the Internet has democratized many aspects of our lives and leveled the playing field, it has also had a major impact on your ability to get heard, to get known, and to get ahead.
Long, long ago, in the twentieth century, there lived an author by the name of Alvin Toffler. More than “just” an author, Toffler became known as a “futurist” by the success of his well-known books, Future Shock and The Third Wave. Without getting into a full book report, one can summarize Toffler’s thinking by the phrases he coined (or expanded upon): super-industrial society, the information age, electronic era, global village, and mass customization. Toffler has an uncanny ability to see into the future through the eyes of history, current trends, and the ways in which change interacts with other change.
Years ago, he was able to predict the evolution of the prosumer—a fusion between the producer and the consumer. Prosumers not only consume, but also produce—in small quantities or large. Prosumers can fill their own needs. Prosumers can utilize technologies to become more independent; they are less likely to need the corporation and more likely to be an innovator, entrepreneur, or even a maverick. Today’s musicians, recording engineers, video editors, directors, and artists of all types are the ultimate prosumers. You, more than likely, are a prosumer.
Never before has such great power been in the hands of so many people through technological advances as it is today. This book focuses on the production of music, of music videos, and of Internet marketing—all of which are great examples of powerful technology in the hands of the individual. Combined, these disciplines comprise a new method of marketing in which you—the prosumer—have more control than ever before.
Just as the face of music production has changed, so has marketing and promotion. The standard marketing techniques that used to work in the music business no longer work with the “new rules.” A large component of the new rules is that there are no rules.
But before throwing out the baby with the bathwater, let’s make sure we preserve some general marketing practices that seem to have worked in the last century as well as this one. The accepted guru in this department is Al Reis, whose books (such as The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Focus, The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Marketing, and many more) contain valuable marketing principles that are easy to understand and apply to marketing music videos on the Internet as well as they do to soap and cereal. These principles include positioning your product in the mind of the consumer, repositioning the competition, being first, being best (and, if possible, both), focusing on your strengths (and remaining focused), and the willingness to embrace change.
All of these concepts apply to you as much as they apply to Coca-Cola or Xerox or Federal Express. You are the product. You are the marketer. And you are also the distributor.
That’s a lot of work for one person or a small group of people to handle, so, with this book, I hope you will be able to utilize the great concepts from classical marketing and throw in some new ones as well.
This is where other marketing techniques, such as guerilla marketing, viral marketing, and social marketing come in. Guerilla marketing relies less on big budgets and more on human psychology. It is unconventional marketing that focuses more on creating buzz, referrals, and inexpensive publicity. It advocates using new technologies as a tool to empower your business and promote your product.
Viral marketing is the reliance on word-of-mouth marketing, enhanced by personal and business networks, to increase brand awareness and other marketing objectives. This is where you will see promotions that utilize video clips, Flash media, and animation to increase the likelihood of spreading the word. Like guerilla marketing, it is unconventional and often very effective.
Social marketing has a variety of definitions, but in the context of this book, it refers to the utilization of social networks to convey the marketing message. These networks include well-known sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Blogger, and a host of sites that focus on music or entertainment, such as iMeem and Bebo. At one time, these networks were the sole territory of cutting edge, new age, modern, hip geeks. Today, you will find major corporations (from the “old school”) relying on social networks for unconventional marketing campaigns.
All of these marketing and promotion techniques have a place in the world of music and music videos, and they will be explored further in the discussion of posting your music video on the Internet.
If you’ve read this far, you’re likely a good candidate for reading the rest of this book. If the idea of making your own music video and marketing it on the Internet gives you hope, goose bumps, and the thought that maybe there are other roads to the top of the mountain, you probably should read this book.
In terms of level of expertise, this book is designed for beginners or newcomers on one hand, but also should appeal to anyone who hasn’t looked at the three main ingredients—namely, music creation, video production, and Internet marketing—as an integrated whole. There are concepts covered in this book in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You may have experience in one or two of these areas, but all three taken together can make for a very successful marketing and promotional campaign and may spark ideas you haven’t considered before.
You should also have some fundamental understanding of music creation and video production, and you need to know your way around the web. I will cover these topics, but not with the assumption that you’ve never used a computer or a sequencer or a video-editing program of some type. You are likely a songwriter or composer who has a sequencer and some virtual and/or real instruments and who knows how to create a song from writing to mixing. Now you’re ready for the next step—making a music video and posting it on the Internet.
Don’t read this book if you are planning to start from nothing and end up producing a broadcast-ready music video for VH1 or MTV. You probably should not read this book if you don’t have some inherent talent, drive, or obsession with one or more of the three main ingredients (music creation, video production, or Internet marketing). But whatever the case, do what your inner voice tells you. And if that means you want to read it no matter what I say about the target audience, then go right ahead…and enjoy.
This book will help you realize the extent to which, regardless of budget, you can produce a high-quality music video with a high-production value. You will discover more than the techniques involved—you will understand the strategy behind those techniques. You will not only become a better prepared creative director of your project, but also a savvier marketer—one who knows old school as well as the latest, cutting edge new school techniques for presenting yourself in the best possible way.
You will also find out how you can let the world know about your music video through the Internet. So, how does one approach the topic of making a music video and putting it on the Internet? If you think about it, there are really three main components of this endeavor: the music, the video, and the Internet.
Although they can be thought of independently—and in fact in many circumstances, they are completely independent of each other—you will find that the interrelatedness of these three pieces is the key to making a good music video and posting it on the Internet. As such, the book is organized into three easy parts—Part I, The Music; Part II, The Video; and Part III, The Internet.