The Hip-Hop Symposium expert panelists. Photo credit: Phil Farnsworth.

By William Kiendl

Berklee College of Music’s Business/Management Department hosted its Sixth Annual Business of Hip-Hop/Urban Music Symposium last month celebrating its 20^th anniversary of the major.  The event featured the best music execs in the business, including a live interview with guest speaker Kevin Liles, profound entertainment executive and entrepreneur (Trey Songz, Young Jeezy, Big Sean, D’Angelo). Following the Q&A segment, the event transitioned into a “Show Me What You Got” talent showcase, where Berklee students and members of the Boston community were picked at random to perform and receive feedback from the expert panel. The panelist members included:

Noah “40” Shebib: Canadian hip-hop producer of Drake, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Alicia Keys, Jamie Foxx and JoJo as well as ASCAP Rhythm and Soul Songwriter of the Year.

Kevin Liles. Photo credit: Phil Farnsworth.

Rob Lewis ’94: American music director for Diddy’s VH1 show, “Making the Band.” Lewis’s studio experience also credits artists such as Mary J. Blige, Dr. Dre, Christina Aguilera, Diddy and Kelly Rowland.

Miss Courtney Harrell ’01: Berklee Alumni and GRAMMY® Award-winning songwriter and vocalist whose credits include Chris Brown, John Legend, Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, Claude Kelly ’02, KeKe Palmer and JoJo.

Darcie Nicole  ’01: Vocalist/songwriter, founder of “…Ask Darcie” and The Boston Hip-Hop Alliance. Credits include: Jojo Brim, Master P, Medusa, GrandMixer DXT, Dre Robinson, Jesse Jaeo Tolbert ’90 (Ms. Lauryn Hill, Ying Yang Twins), Cheo Coker (Vibe), DMX, Chip Fu, Tony Crush, Digable Planets, David Balfour ’00 (Anthony Hamilton).

The conversation between John Kellogg and Kevin Liles offered students a keen look into the drastically changing music industry. Various topics were discussed including executive development, best management practices, and the challenges artists face in the music business today. Kevin emulated professionalism and wisdom beyond his years while speaking eye-to-eye effectively with young and aspiring musicians. The highlights of the discussion can be broken down into four essential talking points:

• Build a Team. Not everyone in this industry can be a superstar. You need to find the right people to work with and do it together. Every major artist has a number of supporting figures at their back; be good at what you do and search for compatible partners to fill the areas you can’t cover.
• Individuality. In today’s music industry, maintaining individuality has proven to be one of the biggest challenges artists face. With mainstream music today promoting electronic-heavy tracks, the human element is almost taken out of modern mainstream music. Be confident in who you are and what music you are creating.
• Quality. “The business is blurry right now, and as it continues to blur you need to get close to the real talent.” With the creation of the Internet, endless material is at our fingertips. With so much content readily available, true talent is hard to come by. Artists today need to be distinct. When you’re different in the industry, you gain respect and loyalty. Different is hard, but different sells shows.
• Longevity. “Find your passion; find the thing you want to do for free and be the best at it.” If you want to pursue longevity in the music business today, musicians need to believe in and stand behind their music stronger than ever. Don’t take yourself so seriously – have love for what you do and stay humble.

The Hip-Hop Symposium fills a need for urban music education at Berklee, engaging the entire department campus wide. It also opens open a window of professional opportunities for students to engage with guests, leading to potential internships or jobs.

If you’d like to learn more about the Hip-Hop/Urban Music Symposium or give your feedback on the event, please email Darcie Nicole at dnicole@berklee.edu.

Related Posts:

• Top 5 Takeaways from Berklee’s 20th Annual Zafris Lecture, Featuring Pitchfork’s Chris Kaskie
• This Thursday: The Berklee A&R Showcase
• Who I Am: An Evening with The Who’s Pete Townshend [REVIEW]
• Berklee Startup Initiative Now Accepting Applications
• Sam Sparro Spills: Which Cover of His Song ‘Black & Gold’ He Likes Better, Adele’s or Katy’s; Plus, His Advice on Co-Writing Songs

Mike King presenting at the 2012 Rethink Music Conference.

By: Lisa Occhino

Mike King, the Director of Marketing at Berkleemusic (as well as an author and instructor), made a compelling presentation at the 2012 Rethink Music Conference in Boston. His topic, “Musicians’ Toolbox: Creative Chaos,” was aimed to help musicians make sense of all the opportunities surrounding the direct-to-fan approach to marketing. The workshop looked at best practices for sorting press, third party retail, radio, live events and more into a campaign.

I caught up with Mike after the conference to delve a little deeper into his thoughts and opinions on the effectiveness of direct-to-fan campaigns, how the new Facebook layout affects DIY musicians, and search engine optimization.

Berklee Groove: What are the pros and cons of going direct-to-fan?
Mike King: My opinion is that it’s gotta be integrated [with traditional marketing]… It’s important to have a physical thing too, not just online marketing… I think a con of direct-to-fan is thinking that direct-to-fan is all you need to succeed. It’s not. Every band is different. There isn’t one way to do it, but I think direct-to-fan as a concept – the idea of connecting with people and giving them more than they can get at traditional retail… the two-way communication is really valuable. Pros are many, many, many. A major pro is the personalization that comes with marketing and sales. There’s more stuff, but I’ll just leave it at that.

A slide from Mike King's Rethink Music presentation.

BG: What are some of the most effective direct-to-fan tools or techniques that you’ve seen work well time and time again?
MK: I’ll just say this: I keep seeing a lot of people having good results with YouTube as a direct-to-fan option… What I think works is low budget things where you’re showing the personality of your band. But it’s very dependent on where your strengths are; what works for [other bands] might not work for you… Overall, what works is creating your own website so you don’t get screwed when Facebook moves to Timeline and takes away the ability to have a default landing page. There are very basic foundational things that work for everybody… But you have to understand that whatever you do, it takes a long time… In my mind, what works is a stepped approach. Be sure you can play live fantastically, make sure your content is great, make sure people outside of your family and friends say your music is good, make sure that you are growing a fanbase. Understand you’re not going to be able to sell right away. People differ with me, but I’m of the opinion that you want to have a pretty significant base before you start selling. I think you want to engage and make aware, and then drive people back to your website to sell.

BG: You started talking about the new Facebook layout, and you discussed it a lot in your Rethink Music presentation as well. What do you find to be most valuable about the switch to Timeline?
MK: I like that you can personalize your banner… and I like the idea of pinning. Metric has a new record coming out, and they’re releasing the lyrics to the record. Every time they do that, they pin it to Facebook so it appears at the top of their wall, and it’s a link back to their own site – that’s a best practice. I also like the milestones – nobody uses it, but I think it’s compelling. It’s almost a way to have a press kit on Facebook; you can follow people back through time… I’ve only seen Coldplay do it well. The other thing that’s cool is the four tabs [at the top of fan pages] – you can choose the artwork for the tabs, and I think they’re more effective. They’re in a better spot than the links were prior to Timeline… A lot of people were upset with the change to Timeline mainly due to the loss of the default landing page… so it’s a challenging time for companies like [RootMusic’s] BandPage… I understand why people could be upset, but I do think there’s some opportunity there. Facebook is kind of forcing people to be more content-minded because they want to sell ads and they want to be more targeted… but I kind of like that when I am glancing over these ads, it’s something that I’m interested in versus something totally random. So overall, I think it’s positive that if you post great content, you appear in people’s feeds.

BG: A common question I hear from artists and bands is: How much is too much fan communication? How do you know where to draw the line?
MK: I would say use data to check that… I think there are different approaches to it, but what I look at is Facebook Insight [analytics]. I think it’s personal to your own community. Use data to see how people are responding to what you’re doing. I don’t necessarily think it’s the same for everybody… Overall, post when you have something to say – that’s important. When you’ve got something going on, you should let people know about it. Aside from that, it’s just looking at the data to see what works for you… I would just experiment with it.

BG: I recently read an article that among social media marketers, SEO [search engine optimization] is more valuable than PPC [pay per click]. What’s your take on this?
MK: I think that’s true. If you look conversion methods, you can see how people are getting to your site. Traditionally, it’s direct traffic, search traffic, then email – those are high converting things. We have the same thing here at BerkleeMusic; PPC works, but organic is awesome. For musicians, organic SEO is super, super important.

BG: What other forms of media besides songs are effective for an artist or band to offer in return for an email address?
MK: When you’re trying to make people aware of what you do, it makes sense to put a song out there. But I talk a lot about niche marketing and identifying your core psychographic and demographic, and trying to identify these themes that people all share. Somebody that did this really well was Jónsi [Birgisson, the lead singer of Sigur Ros]. He has a band [called Jónsi and Alex] with his partner Alex [Somers], and they offered a free download of a vegan cookbook. I love that… So yeah, you can give away a lot of different things. Jónsi and Alex didn’t collect email addresses for that cookbook, but they could have. And we do this all the time at BerkleeMusic – we give away free video lessons, handbooks, open houses – all sorts of things. It just depends on your creativity.

For more on Mike King, visit the links below:
Website
Blog
Twitter

Related Posts:

• Alum Profile: Jonathan Screnci (General Manager, Blue Man Group)
• Q&A with Family of the Year
• Bonobo on The North Borders [Interview with Simon Green]
• Q&A with Jamie N Commons
• Boston Calling: Boston’s First Major Music Festival (Q&A With Co-Founder Brian Appel)

By: Ethan Schiff

So you finished your single/EP/album. The music is amazing. Production is amazing. Artwork is amazing. You’ve put countless hours into this. It’s uploaded to Bandcamp and ready to be released. Next, you go to Facebook, post the link, and sit back and wait for the downloads to roll in. And then… yeah… pretty rough results. Why?

Every artist or band continually goes through what I call the AAR Cycle, a three-part cycle of Awareness, Anticipation, and Release.

AAR Cycle

Let’s work backwards. If you want successful results from your single/EP/album, your fans and friends need to know in advance when your music is being Released, how they will get it, and an idea of what to expect, to pique interest. You can’t just surprise people with this stuff.

You get this information to your fans through the Anticipation process. There absolutely MUST be Anticipation to build some element of suspense or “hype” about whatever you’re about to drop. Promo videos, behind-the-scenes footage, posters, contests, singles, and exclusive content for those on your mailing list are all possible vehicles for this. Make your content engaging, and give your followers a good amount of time before the Release to let their curiosity grow.

The absolute most critical part of the AAR Cycle, though, is the initial Awareness stage. It all MUST start with Awareness (i.e. making sure people know you exist). Otherwise, the rest is useless. In your personal life, your closest friendships grow from developing trust and loyalty over a gradual period of time. Similarly, Awareness comes from gradually developing this same trust and loyalty between your band and your fans. The best way to build this trust is to avoid the all-too-common happening of only get in touch with fans when you want something from them (“Come to this show!” … “Download this track!” … “Buy this shirt!”) Instead, be genuine and transparent about why you’re doing what you’re doing, your entire creation process, and what you hope to achieve from your project.

To summarize:

1. Use the Awareness stage to develop an emotional connection with people.

2. Once this connection is built, these initial followers will serve as the foundation for you to build Anticipation from. The people you initially connected with during the Awareness stage will not only get excited during the Anticipation stage, but they will share this excitement with like-minded friends.

3. After both of these steps have happened successfully, your Release will be much stronger, and I promise you will be more satisfied with the results.

If your music is released and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound.

–

Twitter: @ethanschiff
Website: www.ethan-schiff.com
Blog: www.schiffblog.com
Email: ethan@ethan-schiff.com

Related Posts:

• James Blake Captivated All Ages at House of Blues (Live Show Review)
• Girl Talk: The Stylistic Retrogression of Kate Nash
• Debut EP Review: Melanie Lynx – Naked Heart
• Album Review: Woman by Rhye
• Artist of the Month: Dominic Florio