Music is one of the most popular forms of entertainment and one of the
most traded digital assets on the planet. Ever since Napster's debut in
1999 musicians, record labels and the RIAA have all singled out file
sharing as the overwhelming source for loss of revenue in record sales. I
have always wondered why they get to point all of these crazy fingers
without highlighting how absolutely awful they are at marketing their
products on the Internet – not to mention how little they seem to care
about the revenue they lose to their own horribleness.
Lyrics
A massive volume of searches related to music are for song lyrics. For
you kids, back in the old days, records, cassette tapes and CD’s came
with lyrics to each song included on the album’s liner notes. So, when
you finally scraped together $10-$20 to buy an album, you also got some
great artwork and the lyrics to every song. You could confidently sing
along to your favorites while in the shower, in your car, or just to
annoy your coworkers.
After the explosion of MP3 files, web users turned to the Internet to
find lyrics. However, today it is still rare for an artist’s official
website to contain
any lyrics to
any of their own songs. As perplexing as that might sound to the savvy folks reading this, it gets much worse.
Fig. 1 - example of a search for lyrics on Google.
A web user searching for lyrics will find them on one of many websites.
Since these websites are not official, they gain revenue and profit
from the plethora of advertising with which they surround the lyrics.
These ads can often be misleading and take users to websites purporting
to give away the song for free, perpetuating the very problem the record
industry claims is killing them.
Fig. 2 - a lyrics website displays an advertisement for free music downloads above an artist's lyrics
To highlight this issue I looked at one of my current favorite bands,
The Black Keys. The first thing I did was picked out their top three
most recognized songs and looked up their exact-match search volume with
Google Adwords Keyword tool. To get a better idea of the search volume I
looked at three variations of a likely search to find the lyrics for
each song: Howling for You, Lonely Boy and Tighten Up. What I found was
that, according to Google's tool, each month these variations get 31,960
exact searches.
That's 11,460 more people than the capacity of FC Dallas Stadium in
Frisco, Texas, where The Black Keys will be headlining a concert in
April. For just three songs and nine search phrases, that comes out to
383,520 searches per year (likely declining the older the song gets), or
1/3 of a million chances to engage fans with concert dates, merchandise
and other music.
Fig. 3 - exact match searches for the lyrics of "lonely boy", "tighten up" and "howlin for you"
Music Videos and Music Streaming
I remember reading a news article once that stated just how much an
artist had to pay to create a music video and then get it slotted in
prime viewing time on MTV. This was, of course, before MTV turned
teenagers into pregnant-whining-Snooki impersonators. Music videos allow
artist to engage music lovers with a visually appealing representation
of their music, which helps spread the word and win record sales, both
digital and physical. The videos also help get music fans to part with
their cash (and routines) and go out to concerts.
Music labels and artists are terrible at marketing with their videos on
the Internet. The DMCA states that web streams, like web radio, are an
“interactive service,” and therefore they cannot play music upon a
listener’s demand. Think about that. If you went to Shoutcast, picked a
station, and requested a song, you would have to wait one hour for it to
play. The DMCA also states that you can only play the same song from an
album after an hour gap – and no more than three songs from the same
artist or box set in a row. This is a chief complaint among internet
radio users. These rules
came directly from record labels' lobbying efforts concerned that
Internet users would simply record the album from an Internet radio
station and never buy it.
If you just rolled your eyes, then you are one of the millions of
people who go to YouTube and listen to a song by an artist, only to be
shown the entire catalog of that artist's works when the video is done
playing. You may have even seen official playlists – created by a music
label, sometimes! – containing nothing but videos of one artist or
album. You can listen to as many songs as you want, on demand, in a row.
As long as the label doesn't complain to YouTube, these stay up.
It's the record labels’ way of giving us free music.
Fig. 4 - a screen capture of keepvid.com downloading videos and music for free from YouTube
The most astute web users know they can usually record a music video or
find it in their temp files. But it doesn't take a lot of computer
know-how to get an MP3, or even the entire HD version of your favorite
song, for free from YouTube. Services like Keepvid.com and SnipMP3.com
allow access to all of the versions of a video converted on YouTube.
Typically that means 240p, 360p and 480p FLV, 480p, 720p, 1080p HD MP4,
and 360p, 480p and 720p WebM – and also extracting a standard quality
MP3 audio file from the video.
So, to put this in perspective, recording artists and record labels
attack online streaming radio stations where a listener is interested in
a broad category of music like rock, dub step or hip-hop, but allow and
encourage the free downloading of their creative works via YouTube/Vevo
where the fan has specific intent on just one artist and/or song.
Fig. 5 - shoutcast radio stations and pandora encourage music buying and don't allow music to be downloaded.
Oh, just wait, record labels get even worse. Just like with lyrics,
recording artists are not taking full advantage of the power of their
music videos. Most artists, just like The Black Keys, are content to
upload their videos to YouTube/Vevo and a few other major websites,
letting their music entice people to share it around and these sites
promote it. When a web user performs a search for the video, then, they
land on YouTube or Vevo – not on the artist’s website. Again, this
decreases opportunities to engage fans, who are seeking your content;
with tour, merchandise, and music information.
Fig. 6 - universal video search appearing at p1 and leaving out the artist's website.
An artist or label, like The Black Keys, might have a videos page on
their website, or even a separate page for each video with correct title
tag, search engine friendly URL structure, and some content. However,
as you can see in the SERPs image above, The Black Keys’ own website
doesn't show up in top rankings for a search for their music video
“Lonely Boy.” That’s because a query with ‘video’ (singular only) seems
to pull Google’s Universal Video results in at position #1 in a large
majority of searches.
The Black Keys website doesn't have a video sitemap or use any markup
like Facebook Open Graph or Schema.org to help tell engines and social
websites that this is a video page. The result is that, when their site
finally shows up in SERPs for a song, it shows up with the main videos
page and not the specific page for that song.
Finally, we have the issue of encouraging and utilizing user generated
content (UGC) to promote your musical brand. The Black Keys, along with
artists like Tech N9ne and Blink 182, do a great job of allowing their fans to create videos using their music. However, we have yet to see UGC utilized in music video production on a large scale. There are multiple
types
of music videos created by fans to help promote an artist’s music
including anime music videos, game music videos, fan animation videos,
lyric videos, cover loop videos, sing along videos, etc. Find
communities and encourage your fans to create their own versions of your
music videos, like this one – a close-up of The Black Keys ‘Lonely Boy’ playing on a vinyl record player.
Your Own Website
The last thing that musicians and labels do that completely drives me
insane is mishandling and under-utilizing their own websites. Aside from
the issues above – a lack of content that fans want, directing users to
other websites, and doing a terrible job of search optimizing their own
content – there are several other often repeated problems.
The first is the “song preview.” Back to my Black Keys example, the
band published their video on MTV, Vimeo and YouTube (kudos for not just
using YouTube). The same video appears embedded from YouTube on their
website. It’s full length, however, if you land on their Discography
page, you can only listen to a short sample of the song. Really? I am
not making this up, go look for yourself.
Even more perplexing is how hard it is to purchase a song or album
after sampling it. I can listen, then find the navigation link to the
store, then navigate to music, then I can … OK, I can't buy the song.
Thanks for the teaser. Even more confusing, Tour pages typically have a
link straight to the “buy tickets” page.
Musician websites most often overuse Flash, Quicktime, Silverlight or
other proprietary plugins to display content. This limits the ability
for users on iPhones, or browsers without plugins installed, to view the
content. While this can keep some users from enjoying content, there
are other ways that once on a musicians website users can get
distracted. The most prominent being the over usage of social media
pushing. I get it, you want to engage with users in social media. If I
really like you I might follow you on Twitter when I see the follow
button, Like you on Facebook, + you on Google+ or hug you on
superintenselyfriendlysocialnetwork.com, but when your users are on your
website - THEY ARE ALREADY ENGAGING WITH YOU. Your website should
engage back.
Finally – you were waiting for finally, I know – artist's websites,
including The Black Keys, violate several other SEO best practices like
good, flat internal linking structures, publishing sitemaps, and
providing descriptive alt and image title tags on all images.
Fig. 7 - an example of how alt tags are being used on the artist "the black keys" website.
Bands, solo artists and record labels – the Internet is what you make
of it, and you make it wonderful with your music, but terrible with your
SEO and marketing practices. Before you keep blaming mythical huge
losses on internet sharing, please fix your own online marketing
efforts. You stand to make billions.
The Free Marketing Tips
Lyrics
-
Put them on your own website.
-
You can try putting them on your Facebook page.
-
Surround them with sales info for tours, songs, albums and merchandise.
Music Videos and Music Streaming
-
Embrace all video platforms, not just one or two.
-
Promote your music through streaming web radio stations.
-
Encourage and utilize user generated music videos, unleash the creativity of your fans.
-
Place videos on your website, using a new page for each song.
-
Create a video sitemap.
Your Website
-
Stop using song previews on sales pages when your song is free to listen to on other websites.
-
Provide ability to purchase or links to purchase location for songs and albums.
-
Stop overusing Flash, Silverlight and other plugin content display
software. Instead make a visually stunning site that all browsers / web
users can see and interface with that has text based links and text
content.
-
Publish a sitemap.xml file.
-
Create a flat internal linking structure with anchor text.
-
Use correct Title tags on your pages.
-
Use descriptive alt and title tags on your images.
-
Don't over push your social networks.