This week's New Music Seminar has gotten off to a fast start, and there's a lot of stuff we need to catch you up on, so let's get right to it:
The Ultimate Chart
Hypebot reported this morning on the launch of Big Champagne's Ultimate Chart, a kind of Soundscan 2.0 that will paint a much more holistic picture of which artists are really thriving from week to week. Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland made the formal announcement this morning, and while there, there were some additional insights into how the chart will work.
In addition to data about an artist's various revenue streams--sales of recordings (CDs, Mp3s, etc), tour revenue, and merch sales--the Ultimate Chart has also partnered with We Are Hunted to track blog chatter surrounding artists and their releases. “We take into account anything that can be independently measured," Garland said. As Garland rightly points out, getting a huge amount of love on blogs and Twitter is an important consideration for any artist, especially rising ones.
All of this data will be weighted in an unspecified way to create a weekly top 100 chart, but best of all, there'll be a DIY off-shoot of this chart too, so artists have both a new space to distinguish themselves in and a way to identify successful peers.
More On the Fans
There were some very illuminating pieces of information about artist-fan relationships. According to ReverbNation's Mike Doernberg, a series of in-house studies revealed that the fans you communicate with via e-mail are eight times more valuable than the ones you interact with primarily through Facebook and Twitter. They account for far more (eight times more, really) revenue generation than their counterparts.
We've said before that the social media side of your career is more than a numbers game. “You don't need huge reach if you have huge engagement," said Garland, who appeared on two panels today.
To really drive that point home, Garland and Hyatt cited two artists--David Garza and Ellis Paul--who don't have astronomical reach across various media channels. But Garza has supported himself for decades outside the confines of a major label, and Ellis Paul recently raised over $100,000 (!) towards an album from only 400 (!!!!!) fans.
And finally, if you're looking to grab new fans, know that you have to do it quickly. According to Jay Frank, over half of the top-selling songs on iTunes have intros that last under seven seconds. Plus, if they happen upon your music, you probably only get one chance to make your impression because of the sheer volume of music available out there; if you listened to music 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for the rest of your life, and you never listened to anything more than once, it would only be physically possible to hear 5% of the music that's released.
In such an outrageously crowded landscape, it's important that when you make the best of your first opportunities. There's no guarantee you'll get a second.
