Offline: Social Media IRL
Last year at Brisbane’s annual Music Conference Big Sound (Check out this year’s plans - the speaker lineup looks epic and it’s being programmed by friend of 
Musicadium, Graham Ashton), Musicadium partnered with Dr David Carter to produce a look into what promotional activities help to drive online and digital music sales. The findings were pretty awesome and they were presented to the entire conference. It was talked about at South by SouthWest and also featured on HypeBot and Billboard.
You can download the PDF file of the report and the findings from here: http://www.musicadium.com/promotions/107-online-marketing-research-paper
Part of those findings was that offline presence and promotion was still and always has been a vitally important part of the mix of publicising a band. Here’s what the report had to say:
Artists ‘Off-Line’ Profile
Artists profile within the Australian music industry was also considered as part of the documentation of their online activities. Each artists profile was assessed qualitatively based on a combination ‘off-line’ factors such as how many years they had been performing for; how regularly and at what venues they were currently performing; frequency and type of press / media coverage; radio and television airplay and; if they were touring nationally or internationally. An artists profile was described as either low (recently formed, infrequent performance, little or no identifiable media coverage and airplay); emerging (generally formed within the last three years, frequent performance in small to medium size venues, some media coverage in street press or national media, some radio airplay, some interstate touring) or; established (generally formed more than three years ago, regular performance in medium to large size venues, regular coverage in national media, prominent radio airplay, interstate and international touring commitments). Those artists with an established profile received proportionally higher royalties, than those with an emerging or low profile.
This morning, I read this article at HypeBot regarding the Portland, US band The Dirty Mittens and their offline promotions idea of having punch cards that they give away when handing out their demo EP. The card has an attractive design and the premise is that if you attend any 5 live gigs, you are entitled to a special reward (which they have said could be anything from a kiss from an eligible band member to a piece of merch).
As the HypeBot article states, this practice is actually so simple, it’s a wonder no-one had done it before (or at least got widespread notoriety from it.)
So what’s the lesson to be learned here? While digital and online marketing is so incredibly important in this environment, genuine interaction at shows with fans and offline promotions (posters, street press editorial, reviews etc) and also campaigns IRL “in real life” are vital to be a whole package.
Even more important, it’s still all about having great songs to put out into the world.
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2010/07/dont-forget-the-power-offline-promotion.html is the link to the original article.
