Bigfoot’s Lookin’ for Bernie

A while back I wrote a blog entry titled “Can you get your song on someone else’s blog?”.  Obviously, having a YouTube video that has viral properties that get lots of links from friends on social media networks like Facebook could help do that.  That’s how I discovered the song  “Here comes another Bubble” by the Richter Scales in the first place. But probably even more important than getting on someone else’s blog would be to have a video that has viral properties.

What would make a music video viral?

1. Humor – everyone likes sharing a video that makes them laugh.

2. Outrageous – although sometimes distasteful (and hopefully faked or simulated) a headline like OZZY BITES HEAD OFF BAT! will grab a lot of attention.

3. High Tech/ Novelty – iPhone App by Smule: Ocarina [Stairway] video (YouTube) has over 500,000 plays and a 4 ½ star rating.

So if you are an unknown band or recording artist looking for new fans, how can you capitalize on ideas like these to get your YouTube video seen and heard?

Humor

Pick something topical and newsworthy and keep it short. If you have a gift for comedic writing and can turn around a song in 1 or 2 days, imagine the number of plays you could get if Jon Stewart played your song on The Daily Show. That should be your goal. How you will get your song noticed and chosen, I don’t know. Surely Jon Stewart has writers and producers. Check Wikipedia. However, even if your song is not picked to be featured on the Daily Show, if it really makes people laugh, surely it has the potential to spread virally as a YouTube video. Post it to YouTube and show it to some Facebook friends. If it’s funny, your friends will share it with other friends. They will share it with their friends… and so on. Keep in mind, producing a video is not easy. If you have a great song and shoddy video production, it will fall flat. Use stills. Use PowerPoint. Think “How would Ken Burns shoot this”? Look at the Video by the Richter Scales I featured in my post “Can you get your song on someone else’s blog?”

Notice the credits at the end ? The last thing you want is to create a truly viral video that you have to pull because of copyright infringement or legal issues.

Outrageous

The now defunct Weekly World News had a very long run as a supermarket tabloid and should be your inspiration if you need to create a headline grabbing song title. Buy Bat Boy Lives!: The WEEKLY WORLD NEWS Guide to Politics, Culture, Celebrities, Alien Abductions, and the Mutant Freaks that Shape Our World (Paperback) on Amazon as your resource. Nothing more needs to be said. Consider this your “bible” for outrageous headlines or, in this case, song titles.

High Tech/ Novelty

If you can associate your song with the latest high tech buzz related to Music, you could quite easily reach new fans with a YouTube video. Certainly Smule will be coming up with other instruments that will even surpass their success with the Ocarina  iPhone app. See if you can sign up be a Smule Beta tester (if you and your band mates own an iPhone or iPod touch). You can sign up for the Beta trial of “Leaf Trombone”. Read the agreement, though. You have to promise not to release your YouTube video until Smule releases the product. Would one of your songs benefit from a horn section? Maybe a “Leaf Trombone” horn section is your answer.

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Here is an idea for a song and YouTube video that combines all of the above…

Song title:”Bigfoot’s lookin’ for Bernie”

Storyboard: Bigfoot comes out of hiding to find Bernie Madoff after losing most of his savings. Bernie Madoff escapes to the woods and “Bernie Madoff sightings” become the stuff of legend and tabloid news for a few months. Bigfoot ends up managing a successful (and legitimately run) Hedge fund. Bernie eventually gets caught and goes to jail. Since Bigfoot makes a fortune as a hedge fund manager and no longer has hard feelings, Bigfoot visits Bernie in jail. The song ends with an iPhone Leaf Trombone duet played by Bigfoot and Bernie.

If you choose to write this song and create the YouTube video, please include me in your song credits. After all, I just came up with the idea. Don’t forget to show a link to your band’s website in your video. After all, that is the whole point of doing all this work … getting fame, new fans, and brand awareness for your band.  If it’s good, who knows, maybe you could get it played on The Daily Show.

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May 2, 2009 Update:

A friend advised me of this useful URL if anyone was seriously considering adding Bigfoot” to thier music video.  http://www.livingsasquatch.com/

Invites to Hippity to ‘be my friend’

I’m finding that the current viral marketing process that many bands/recording artists use today is to look at other bands/artists MySpace pages and invite their friends to “come check out our music” with a friend invite. My avatar, Hippity, is getting as many friend invites now as the Playlist Power app is getting new users. So now, when I get one of these invites, I accept and send this message:

Try the new app Playlist Power and let your friends do your viral marketing for you.
Install the Playlist Power app.
Share one of your playlists with randomly chosen friends/fans.
Encourage them to do the same.
Your songs just may reach friends of friends (and their friends)

OK, it’s Cute, but is it Viral?

Friday evening started with some excellent speakers before the teams began the application design phase. Dave Westwood was one of the featured speakers that evening. Dave created Buddy Poke, an OpenSocial application with over 30 million downloads.  If you look at Buddy Poke, it has several things going for it. For one, it is delightful and cute, instantly appealing to the MySpace demographic.  A second important feature is that it is social. You can send a virtual hug to a friend. If the friend had never seen Buddy Poke before, the 1st thing they’ll do is install the app and send a hug to one of their friends … and on… and on. Now you see how you get to 30 million users in less than a year. It spreads virally (in a good way).

Challenge (from previous post): Develop a product that will appeal to the target market. We picked our target market, the “Under 25″ demographic.

Action:  Develop something that is cute, fun to use, and that you share with friends.

Social Media Marketing in Music

Welcome. This is a blog for musicians, internet marketers, application developers and music industry professionals looking for insights, tips and tricks to leverage social media tools and web services to market your music and your brand more effectively. This blog intially started as a weblog of my social media marketing efforts for a MySpace application called Playlist Power launched on February 22, 2009 at WeekendApps-OpenSocial. Playlist Power was  a MySpace playlist sharing application allowing MySpace users to share Music playlists with friends.

In the 1st part of this blog (under the category “Marketing-Product“), I cover ideas I had and things I learned while executing elements of a marketing campaign for the ‘Playlist Power’ MySpace app.

Several weeks into this blog, I found that my blog interests became more about the larger topic of Social Media Marketing in Music, so on March 10th, I changed the title of this blog and expanded it’s scope.

Read More

Music Social Media

Social Media Music

MySpace and Music and Playlist and Viral and Social Media Marketing and MySpace and Facebook and LinkedIn, but especially MySpace or Music and Musicians and Bands and sometimes Record Labels would all be keywords to search for.