musicmarketing

The cost-per-click (CPC) for Facebook ads has risen by 40% in the first quarter of this year, according to a report from digital marketing company Efficient Frontier. The company says the price hike is the result of marketers catching onto the “tremendous value” of advertising on the social network – value that’s seemingly worth ever-more premium prices. Mashable points out that even before the upswing, Facebook was reportedly making $1.86 billion in advertising revenues in 2010, based on serving up more than 50 billion display ads every month. Music marketers have been experimenting widely with Facebook ads to drive traffic and Likes to their artist pages, but news that prices are going up could be bad for smaller artists without big budgets to scale accordingly.

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Britney Spears is the latest artist to adopt blogging platform Tumblr, with an introductory post reading thus: ‘The Official Britney Spears Tumblr Debut. Spread the word, bitches…’ Which is nice. Britney’s Tumblr blog joins her existing Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace and SoundCloud presences – those are the five highlighted on her Tumblr blog, which is a good sign for SoundCloud. Early indications are that the new site will be used for promotional purposes in the main, such as new videos, track availability and ticket on-sales. It’s part of a wider trend for artists to use Tumblr for their blogs, with the Beastie Boys debuting their latest track on their own Tumblr blog.

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Audio startup SoundCloud has a new feature aimed at artists and celebrities, called Takes Questions. Described as ‘experimental’, it lets people take questions submitted via a website, and answer them in audio form. Artists already using Takes Questions include Imogen Heap, Diana Vickers, The Blackout and All Time Low. “To know your questions are actually being heard and answered by the people you admire is far more meaningful and exciting than simply using the written word,” says SoundCloud CEO Alexander Ljung. “At SoundCloud we want to enable the sound creator in everyone, and we intend to continue innovating on our API, as we have with Takes Questions, to make that happen.” Artists can answer questions from a browser, iPhone or Android handset, with tweets automatically sent out to tell the questioner that they’ve been answered. The new service started life as a hack created by SoundCloud’s developers and Heap at the Midem Hack Day in January.

Link – http://takesquestions.com/

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Digital music marketing firm ReverbNation has revamped its Facebook page creator, renaming it from My Band to Band Profile. The service lets artists customise the look and feel of their Facebook pages, adding music players, unlimited videos and photos, promotional banners and links, and features offering access to content in return for fans liking, sharing and entering their email addresses. Band Profile isn’t the only service of its type, though: ReverbNation is competing against startups like FanBridge (with its DamnTheRadio service) and RootMusic.

$1.25 million may seem like small beans next to Beyond Oblivion’s recent monster funding round, but Nimbit is playing in a different space: the more down-to-earth yet vitally important area of D2C digital marketing tools. The company has announced its new round, with participation from existing investors. “The music industry is now turning the corner and direct-to-fan has emerged as the new model,” says CEO Bob Cramer. “We’re fortunate to be in the right place, at the right time, leading this direct-to-fan revolution. This money will be used to accelerate our vision of a whole new level in artist/fan connection.” Exact details of the company’s plans are, as yet, unannounced.

Used Flipboard yet? It’s one of the more hyped iPad apps, turning social and RSS feeds into flippable magazine-style pages. It’s also been used by MC Hammer to unveil a new single. Now another artist is using Flipboard: Duran Duran. From this Friday, the app will offer a customised Duran Duran section, pulling in tweets and pictures from the band’s tour. “Flipboard turns Duran Duran’s, Simon Le Bon’s and John Taylor’s Twitter feeds into a digital flip-able magazine available only on Flipboard,” explains Rachel Masters, from partner agency Red Magnet Media. “Their section will be constantly updated by new tweets. We view this as a digital concert program for the modern era that documents Duran Duran’s time on the road that is always-on and very easy to update with new content.”

We wrote about UK band Noah And The Whale back in December, when their label Mercury launched an ‘interactive tape player’ to stream their new single online (Bulletin, 6-Dec-10). Now the embeddable widget has been bumped up to stream the band’s entire new album from today, ahead of its release next Monday. As before, fans can customise the virtual cassette design before embedding the player on their blogs and social profiles. We’re particularly impressed by Mercury’s decision to make it available in both Flash and HTML5 – the latter version can thus play on iPhone and iPads.

Link – http://www.noahandthewhale.com/

Not content with an innovative iPhone app that ties into her online fan community, artist Lykke Li is now playing a gig on the Moon. Virtually, of course. It’s part of a very swizzy web app based around her new album Wounded Rhymes. It mashes up Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View, allowing fans to track the virtual Lykke around the world, and up onto the Moon – yes, Google has mapped that too. UK web agency Pretty Good built the site for Atlantic Records UK, which pulls in videos, music and lyrics as fans explore it. They can also plot their own ‘locations of emotional significance’, while sharing details on Facebook and Twitter.

Spotify has announced a European exclusive on REM’s new album Collapse Into Now, which will be available to stream on the service from today, a week before its release. The exclusive is tied into a contest to win a signed guitar, Soos S5 wireless hi-fi and signed photos. Meanwhile, REM have compiled a playlist on Spotify which will be automatically added to Spotify users’ Premium accounts. “We want to give Spotify Premium users the very best exclusives and they don’t get much bigger than R.E.M.,” says Spotify’s label relations director Will Hope.

UK dance label Southern Fried Records has released its latest compilation in a third format. Joining the CD and digital version of Southern Fried & Tested Volume 3 is a Universal app for iPhone and iPad. It includes two DJ mixes, covering more than two hours of music from the label’s artists, including Armand Van Helden and Fatboy Slim. The price is £5.99, which compares to £10.99 for the CD on Amazon, and £7.99 for the download on iTunes – meaning that the app is the cheapest way to get the music, although by its nature, it can only be played on iOS devices.