Official.fm’s team includes all kinds of people. Many of the folks involved in building the tools and features are artists, musicians or even scientists. There are people who’ve been around in the start-up business for a while, but also music biz veterans. I myself spent chunks of the last two years on my thesis researching models for successfully marketing music while fully acknowledging the reality of the digital age.

Sharing is caring, whether it’s candy or ideas, so here are some quick music marketing tips! Hope you’ll find some time to start applying them  this weekend.

1. Treat your first followers like royalty. Really. The most cost-efficient way to spread your music is via word of mouth (nowadays ‘word of mouse’). Since my background is in marketing, I’ll go even further than that and say that one friend recommending something else to another friend is a hundred times more powerful than an ad. Whether you have just a handful of fans or maybe a few hundred; treat them very well. Spoil them. Let them know how happy you are with them. Not by sucking up to them, but by interacting with them, knowing what they want and giving it to them. This does not mean compromising your creative choices; if you’re pizza is delicious it’s delicious, but a free dessert as a thank you to one of your first guests will get people enthusiastic (and talking!) about you.
2. Check your social networks daily. Obviously you can update your Facebook page less frequently than your Twitter profile, but you need to update them regularly if you want to start connecting with your fans. For as long as you can, reply to everyone’s comments (not just the questions). People appreciate it if they know that their comments are being read.
3. Share in achievements. When you hit 1,000 plays of a new song on official.fm and if such a number means a lot to you; share the joy with your fans. This not only gives them a sense of feeling united with you and each other, but it also helps rally them behind you. Don’t be scared to share your goals or dreams with them. Instead of saying “please click like” or “please go vote for this song”, turn it into a mission for you all to achieve. “I have a new track on official.fm; let’s see how fast we can push it to 100 downloads! Check out the instructions on the page to see how you can share the song with friends.”
4. Remove the artist-fanbase concept from your mind. It’s 2011. The concept of artist-fanbase is so last century. The issue I have with this concepts is that it suggests a distance between the artist and the fanbase. We all live part of our lives in the digital realm now, so get rid of this mental distance. You’re the center of the party. Sure, you don’t have time to talk to everybody when the party gets crowded, but it helps if you’ve connected your visitors to each other so that you won’t have to. Create an ecosystem that both you and your fans are a part of. Grow together.
5. Inbox. It’s easy to lose overview of the information stream we witness every day. Having a key to the inbox of some of your most dedicated fans is a useful tool to make sure that they get the most essential news about you. Very important however, is the fact that if your mail is considered as spam, you lose your key, forever – so be careful. I have two favourite ways to get these keys. Firstly, if you’re releasing a new song/video, create a virtual event for it on Facebook. Prior to the release, get people to RSVP and tell them that they’ll be informed about the new song (include an exact date and time). This gives you a good traffic-bomb for your new track, but as long as people don’t remove themselves from the event afterwards (and hardly anybody ever does) you will have a key to their Facebook inbox forever via this event page (so bookmark it). Sneaky, isn’t it? Secondly, the (preferred) cleaner way is to use official.fm’s email catcher tool: you offer a free download of your song, but before people can download they have to unlock it by entering their email address (example).

Get busy and let us know how this works out for you! We’d love to start seeing and publishing some success stories!

The official.fm crew wishes you a great weekend!

P.S. Always Be Connecting (ABC).