1. The Black Keys
2. The White Stripes
3. Lenny Kravitz
4. Spinnerette
5. “Buena Vista Social Club”

I’ll leave you with a great video from The Black Keys:

Modern Music Marketing

“The most important thing that an artist can do is to tour, absolutely.  Touring provides the spark that all the other marketing segments need to work off of.”

An interesting quote from Mike King, of the Berklee College of Music, in a video interview on modern music marketing. (via Hypebot)

Amanda Palmer & Twitter

There have also been a lot of articles/posts recently about Amanda Palmer’s monetary success on twitter… some good, some bad, and including a big comment debate on TechDirt.  One of the better posts is from Suzanne Lainson at Brands Plus Music, where she writes about success due to intimacy and the fostering of an “insiders club” to make fans feel special. A half-chewed postcard is not valuable in and of itself, but a memento and memory of a shared moment with a musician you adore… to some that’s priceless.

(btw, her tour manager also weighs in at Hypebot on Amanda’s path to independent success)

These techniques cannot scale the way selling a CD once did, but then I think musicians are reconciling themselves to the reality that no single revenue source will brings in all the dough anymore — they need to cultivate lots of revenue streams across physical and digital music, touring, merchandise, premium offerings, licensing, etc.

In general within the game/virtual world space, I prefer micro-transaction models to subscription because you enable your really enthusiastic fans to give you a larger share of their wallet, rather than capping their spend or expecting people to assign the same value to your service. That’s not how people work. Just look at eBay, which became huge because one person’s junk was another person’s gold. (There are times when subscriptions, or a hybrid, are the best approach, but I’m not going into that here)

Musicians are learning the same thing, innovating new ways (often using technology to make it work) to connect with fans and offering a broad range of value across the full spectrum of “fan type” from casual to intense.

Speaking of Amanda Palmer, I have a hard time getting Ampersand out of my head.

The Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting story on the strength (and growth) of live music and merchandise sales.

“A lot of acts are putting out records to promote their tours,” says Michael Gudinski, the managing director of the Frontier Touring Company. “In the old days you used to tour to promote your record.”

Article here