the dotmatrix project

(originally uploaded by Living Juicy)

The DNA of our internet is fascinating — specified as a flat, open and relational network, so that only the limits of our imagination could obstruct its evolution (except for the omnipresent power brokers of industry who try to control anything disruptive, I suppose).

What’s becoming obvious is that as more domains decide to make their APIs available in the public arena — to both independent developers and to the very same domains they compete with — our internet rapidly progresses from a linearly connective space to a multi-layered, inter-connected environment — more akin to a network — ripe with exposed hooks to latch onto and build upon.

The most powerful part of this equation? How about the fact that a great number of internet services — across numerous industries — have evolved to a point where Joe Layman can now leverage our internet’s many to many power of connectivity and discovery, yet never have to bust out one line of code in the process of doing so.

Consider Me Joe Layman

I’ve a few close friends who are talented musicians; all of whom are trying to catch their big break during the off hours of their daily grind. Being the curious guy that I am, I told both Universal Mathematics and Molly McGinn that I’d dive into the online music and event promotion space to see if I could craft an approach for promoting their gigs and sound.

I figured that with all of the free services online — from social networks to event services to video communities — I’d be able to figure out an optimized approach to:

• promote their recently booked gigs
• expose the various media artifacts of their events
• increase their online findability when people run contextual searches
• both give away and sell their music online

After about a month of reviewing practically every service under the sun (feel free to suggest ones I’ve missed in the comments), I’ve come up with a particular approach for:

1. enhancing the community currently building around Molly and Clement’s personalities and music
2. tapping into the guts of the internet to expose their talents to potential fans

Like I said, it’s only one approach of what I’m sure could be many. That being said, let’s break down the thinking behind it.

If You Don’t Promote The Event, Who Will?

If an act has a gig, but doesn’t promote the event online, will the audience make a sound?

Of course they will.

We’ve not quite evolved as a species to all internet beings (well, those of us outside of Silicon Valley at least), but to disregard the power of the internet in building community and enhancing reputation is a mistake, as the only cost to harnessing the web is time.

The key to this approach is recognizing that it needs to augment an off-line promotion plan. Without fliers, listings in weeklies, real world word of mouth, real friends and family support, etc., the online plan can’t guarantee results.

So, understanding that time is money and precious — particularly for independent musicians — I came up with a simple plan for online event promotion, utilizing four web services to get the word out: Eventful, Last.fm, Facebook and MySpace.

Most indie artists already maintain a Facebook and MySpace profile, which in turn has prepped musicians to become accustom to interacting with their communities on a somewhat daily basis; adding a couple additional event spots to their periphery shouldn’t be too much for them to manage.

The benefits of these two particular spots?

• Last.fm has a global audience and event info can be found contextually throughout the site
• Last.fm allows artists to list not only their bios, but upload their music and videos for the community to check out
• Eventful has a nice footprint in Google and Yahoo! search results
• Eventful allows you to create a rich event listing, with links back to the artist’s sites and any number of videos, songs or photographs
• Eventful broadcasts the event listing to multiple event services, greatly impacting the chance of discovery

All of this is free.

What I’ve stressed to my artist buds is that as soon as they book a gig, they need to update these four services with richly crafted and tagged event submissions. Once they do so, their Facebook friends will automatically catch the new event in their stream of friend updates. With MySpace, artists can send out a single bulletin to their people and make them aware of the gig. And while Last.fm and Eventful have their own degree of community built-in, the purpose of including them in this approach is to work the information retrieval mechanisms of the web itself, not to add layers of complexity and management for the artists.

Curate your communities and provide findable metadata for the rest of the world to discover you.

Not too crazy of a concept, eh?

All Recording Devices Are Welcome At Our Gigs!

Jerry Garcia was quite possibly the most brilliant marketer the music industry has ever known.

Way before the internet came into play, Garcia was giving his fans the pass to record and distribute his music between themselves, which obviously spilled out to potential fans at parties, cookouts, late night bake sessions, etc. While the RIAA would argue today that such an approach would be taking money out of the artist’s pocket, go ahead name me one artist who wouldn’t kill for the degree of popularity and recognition such a decision helped foster.

Of course, in order to have Universal “Heads” or Molly “Heads” as a fanatical, viral, media creation fan base, the artist has to bring it to each performance, just like Jerry and the boys did. But it’s not like that has to be explained to an artist; that motivation to excel live is already built into the deal.

So with an open media policy — actually promoting the concept of audiences recording live performances, whether it be photography, video or audio — an artist can tap into the myriad of free media communities and services found online and stack the deck for discovery and the potential for viral exposure.

In my above approach, I outlined the services that an artist could leverage with a mixture of planned performance coverage and audience participation. Again, any number of services could be used, but I wanted to keep the list somewhat manageable. Here’s my rationale for including the diagramed services:

• flickr has an extremely rich online community, with tons of topical photography groups that have strong followings
• flickr images are well represented in Yahoo! image search results (not as much with Google)
• Blip.tv allows an artist to create a customized channel and offers advertising plans to monetize media
• Blip.tv also cross-posts elements of the video submission to multiple sources — iTunes, del.icio.us, The Wayback Machine and flickr
• Veoh allows high-quality video posts and cross-posts to a handful of popular video communities — YouTube, Google Video and MySpace
• Last.fm empowers the artist to upload videos, new music (albums or live tracks) and photographs

As long as media is uploaded with a rich description and tagged well enough (names, places, genre, etc.), it really doesn’t matter if it comes from a representative of the band or an enthusiastic fan — in either case, search engines will index the additions and place the media within search results.

The benefit of artist’s hiring a media generator is that they have the extra incentive to spend the time and effort in cross-posting within each community. For example, a concert photo uploaded to flickr with a decent description and tag set is valuable, but one assigned to eight related groups as well will greatly increase the chance of community interaction.

The more that people talk about a great shot of a band or a great video clip, the greater the chance that the band name sticks in their head.

Well, at least that’s the idea.

Sell, Sell, Sell! And Give Away!

The last part of the online equation is music distribution, where most businesses ratchet down their open policies a notch or two, falling in lock step behind the traditional distribution behavior of the music industry.

It’s a lot harder to get a spot on Amazon or iTunes for an independent artist than it is for a label-backed act. That being the case, I decided to focus on two music communities with rather liberal policies for uploading original music: Last.fm and AmieStreet.

I’m going to save the insight I’ve gained from using those services for my next post, but I’ll leave you with a hint of what I’ve discovered…

AmieStreet rocks!