Following on from our piece about the Topspin presentation on direct to fan I checked their blog yesterday and found this interview with a digital marketing guy at a major management firm.
In the piece he talks about his experiences with Topspin but also covers a huge amount of stuff that amounts to a ‘best practice’ guide in direct to fan music marketing.
I think there’s been a major shift in the last few years from website as an extension of the creative project to website as a functional business tool. You’ll still see the occasional site that’s a crazy experiential art piece but it seems a lot of people are really thinking about keeping it minimal and highly functional, or at least I am. My favorite sites are the ones that make getting the information I need clear and easy.
I also see a lot of indie bands using platforms like Blogger and Tumblr as their sites which is an approach I think is great. It costs nothing and maximizes artist participation. If your whole site is a blog and you don’t post anything interesting, no one is reading your site, so artists have to stay on it with the updates. It seems really up front and honest to me. What I also like about this is it allows you to easily mix in marketing messages with more interesting personal content, which seems to work much better than having an all marketing copy all the time approach. Again, not for everyone, but I like this approach.
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