Why the Urban Indie Marketing Plan Is Interrupting the Music Business

Quite a title right?  I will put that out later.  I usually type about all the problems and never the solutions.  That’s because “the game is to be sold and not told.”  But since you only know the problem side of me, I decided to show you a different side of me using a series of “What if’s…”

What if…

1. You decided to push 1 song instead of 18 songs.  If you look at the way labels are making any money these days, it’s a digital singles market.  And while you are on promo disc #3 with no buzz, a record label else has taken a single and made a cool 350K.  Makes you wish you had just put that song out through tune core in addition to giving it away instead of signing that single deal huh?
2. When that single came out, you decided to make some money off of “merch” because you had to give the song away and maybe all you saw was show money (which comes to an end at some point) and none off of product.  But if you took that REALLY popular song, made a t-shirt, some panties, or a hoodie for it and advertised it on all those social networks you spend most of your day on; plus posted it for sell on your ning.com site, you could make a few extra bucks to invest in something else
3. You had 13,000 twitter followers, and you just happened to drop your latest mixtape (that got 50,000 views on that free mixtape website) on your own website?  Then you could drive all the traffic that you send to that site to your own and capitalize off of your traffic like that free mixtape website does??? (think THIS IS 50 on a smaller but still lucrative scale)
4. you thought of yourself as more than just an artist and thought of yourself as a business that could make money because you are actually more than music, you, with this hot single have created a brand, that can be sold in many different ways through many different products. I mean if you had the hottest song on the radio and 45,000 followers on twitter how many independent brands would want to advertise on your site?  Is this about making money as many different ways as you can?
5. You actually took the time to think about where your target audience was and stopped promoting to every Tom, Dick, & Harry that you saw walking down the street.  What if you could go straight to those people and promote to them because you know who your demographic is
6. You knew about the words DIRECT TO FAN PLATFORM & PERMISSION MARKETING.  Then all the people in the music industry would not get so many garbage emails and you would actually be sending music updates via email, twitter, facebook, & Myspace to people that really wanted to receive it.

What if all you needed was a little bit of structure, some market research, a great marketing plan, and someone to manage all of these things so you did not waste so much time & money doing the wrong thing. 

What if you had just emailed “That Retail Chick”?

I’M JUST SAYING…WHAT IF?