Zero to 1,000 Fans in Under Two Months
This post is a re-post from April 22nd, 2010. These first few posts are just to populate the new blog with some relevant past content.
My not-so-secret passion has always been helping emerging artists grow their fan bases and make a living making music. A few months ago, I was presented with a fantastic opportunity to do just that. My friend Steve invited me to his office at Different Fur Studio to listen to some new tracks a young band he manages just recorded.
That band was A B & The Sea, and I was sold immediately. They write insatiably catchy songs in the vein of The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and The Shins, replete with multi-part harmonies, oohs, ahhs, and topics that rarely stray far from cute girls. On top of that, they were originally from my home state of Wisconsin. What’s not to love?
The challenge presented was to grow their fan base using Topspin tools and no budget. Normally that’s a task that’s nearly impossible, but two key elements made me believe it was possible:
- The music is awesome.
- The guys were willing to work hard and do their own outreach.
I went home that night humming the tunes and racking my brain for the best way to approach this challenge. I decided there needed to be a game-like element involved in order to maximize the viral spread — every (smart) small band is giving away their music free, but few have any sustained relationship with the fans who download (at best an email address). Why not prolong the engagement period by building anticipation, while at the same time incentivizing fans to keep the conversation going around the music.
What I came up with was an “unlocking” campaign — the more fans to download the tracks, the more tracks that are unlocked for everyone.
I set 2,000 emails as a relatively arbitrary (but realistic) goal, figuring 2,000 direct connections is enough to start building a legitimate business on top of. In order to get to that goal of 2,000, I set milestones — the first song is free for anyone who enters their email, the second is unlocked after 500 emails, third after 1,000, fourth after 1,500, and fifth at 2,000.
We set up a very simple page at http://abandthesea.net/ outlining the idea of the campaign and asking fans to enter their e-mails in exchange for the available tracks. To get the few existing fans excited for the promotion, we set up a listening party on MixApp to kick things off — we streamed all five songs online a few times through while the fans chatted with each other. While the listening party went down, we launched the website and told fans to enter their emails to download “Bone Dry” and tell their friends to do the same.
In the first day we collected 81 emails, and 75 the second. Certainly a good start, but would it keep up or were we just converting MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter fans (aka - the guys’ moms, girlfriends, and friends) to email list subscribers? Luckily the game element kicked in and fans started to tell their friends. We unlocked the second track, “Yellow Haired Girl,” in just 8 days.
Just after unlocking the second song, the band played their biggest show to date, opening for Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros at Bimbo’s as part of Noise Pop Festival. We set up two laptops with signs saying “Free MP3s,” but despite a large crowd that grew and moved closer to the stage as the set went on (ending with many folks dancing along), only 9 people entered their email addresses that night.
The next week, the band set up office hours, where they all came into Steve’s office for a few hours a day and emailed blogs who had posted similar artists (using HypeMachine to track down the most relevant blogs), introducing them to the music and asking them to post the email for media widget. This resulted in a few very nice mentions, and a few widget placements, but nothing major.
Emails Collected vs Time:
The biggest spike of the campaign came from an unexpected place: Mashable. In the tradition of a trend that started on Twitter, Mashable posts their favorite free music every Monday. A B & The Sea was featured on March 8th and wound up collecting 159 emails directly from that post (and probably a few more who clicked through from the post to listen before downloading).
After a few weeks of little action, averaging just under 10 new emails a day due to relative inactivity on the band’s part (travel and spending time in the studio with Jim Fairchild (Modest Mouse/Grandaddy) to record a couple new songs for future release), we decided to see if the game element had really worked by introducing a share campaign — if shares were high, the existing game element hadn’t worked, but if shares were low, the game element had indeed worked and fans had already exhausted their networks.
Shares vs Time:
It turned out the latter was true. Despite offering premium prints of the artwork in exchange for shares, the share campaign didn’t even produce 30 shares in the two weeks it ran (though those few shares did increase the new email numbers). Again, this is in no way a failure as it merely proved the success of the original model.
The band also received some coverage you might traditionally expect to drive a large number of signups, but didn’t. First, they received a tweet from my friend DA (in the band Chester French), who has nearly a million followers on Twitter. I can count on one hand the number of signups that drove, due largely to the messaging (“Great marketing effort” rather than “Great free music”) and timing (1am PST). Second, they received spins on the big rock station in town, Live 105. While it’s impossible to track just how many signups came as a result of those spins, there was no increase whatsoever in the daily averages as a result of the spins.
Plays vs Time:
Finally, the 1,000 mark was nearly reached. In anticipation, the band’s friend and videographer Gairo put together a montage of scenes from writing, recording, and debuting the next track, “Down and Around,” live, set to a demo recording of lead singer Koley playing the song on a piano. That video hit nearly 300 plays in the first day it was out, and also drove a small spike in sign-ups, enough to cross the 1,000 threshold.
On March 12th, just under two months after the campaign started, fans received “Down and Around” via email. Since then, coupled with some increased coverage around upcoming shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles, email signups have continued to grow. We’re hoping to hit the next unlocking level within another month, if all goes well. So what are the takeaways thus far?
- Quality is hyperefficient — if you have a product people want, it’s far more likely to spread
- Game mechanics can help growth (particularly when financial resources are tighter than content resources) even more than additional incentives
- Relevance is more important than sheer number of eyes and ears when it comes to exposure
I should also note that the emphasis on email is not just for tracking purposes, as email connections are far more valuable than those made on social networks — email tends to account for about 1/3 of direct-to-fan sales, whereas even the most disproportionately large social network followings rarely sniff 20%, generally falling below 10%. These are lasting connections that a long-term artist business can be build on top of. Those extra 1,300 Facebook Fans the band picked up along the way are just icing on the cake.
Stay tuned for more details on the campaign — we have a few more tricks up our sleeves yet :)
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