Post by Simon Adams: MyMusicSuccess.ComSo you have delivered your track to the iTunes stores, and your music is on their virtual shelves. Are you happy with the revenue you are generating from your downloads? Want to know how to guarantee sales of your track atiTunes using just Twitter as a lead generation source? Then read on…
Putting your track into the iTunes store through an aggregator merely makes it available for sale. That is very different from ‘selling’ your track. In one of my previous articles I give some good advice that you have to treat your band as a ‘start up’ business to make sure that it generates some money to support your musical activities. Whether you like it or not, if you want to make money out of music, you’ll have to start developing a sales strategy for your music at some point.
There are three steps to successfully selling your music to music fans who actually want to buy your music from iTunes.
1) Identify a person who regularly buys tracks from the iTunes store
It’s no good asking someone to buy your track from iTunes if they are not in the habit of buying music, or if they don’t use the iTunes store. So the first thing we need to do is find lots of people who actually use the iTunes platform to discover and more importantly regularly purchase music there.
There is a really simple way of doing this, using a very clever keyword search on Twitter.
Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in any or all of the following phrases:
Bought from iTunes
Bought on iTunes
Purchased from iTunes
Purchased on iTunes
Downloaded from iTunes
With any of these searches you will immediately see a whole list of people who regularly buy their tracks from iTunes; they actually put their hand in their pocket and buy the music. They are not interested in going onto file sharing networks or trawling the web for a free MP3, these are people who buy their music from a legitimate download store…
2) Identify the buyer’s musical taste
At this point whatever you do, don’t just follow everyone who buys from the iTunes store, you’ll waste both your and their time and effort; you need to hone down which of these people will be interested in buying YOUR music.
OK, so now we have identified someone who is committed to buying music, now we need to find out whether our style of music would be something they’d be interested in buying too.
Read each of the posts that you find using the twitter search; most of the tweets will mention the band name in the tweet
Now go off to your favourite search engines and search for the artist they purchased. In the case of our example tweet, searching for Erika David on Google brings up herMySpace page where she is described as R&B / Soul / Pop.
Does your music fit that genre? It does? Then it is very highly likely that djstephie, is going to listen to your music, and buy it from iTunes too if she likes it...
3) Build a relationship with your buyer; get them as a long term fan
OK so now we have identified the ideal person who is most likely to buy your music, and we have identified that they buy their music from the very place you have your music for sale. Now we must build a relationship with that person, don’t ask for the sale right away.
Follow the person on Twitter, drop them a message, ask them about what they do, engage in a chat with them about your music genre. Mention you are producing music in a similar style to what they are currently listening to. They are guaranteed to ask you for a link to your music, and when they do, give them the direct link to your iTunes store.
Repeat the process on each tweet you identify as a match to your music.
Congratulations, you are now officially the top music salesperson in your very own music company!
As you can see from the above steps, you’ll make more sales every day from your music by being efficient and working smarter only on potential fans that are likely to be interested in purchasing your music. These are your ideal fans and if you nurture them, they’ll buy everything you release on iTunes and champion your music to others too.
You can also use the same method for other download stores, try searching twitter for this phrase too and use the same 3 steps:
bought from amazon mp3
If you want to automate the search for potential buyers of your music, use the free Tweetlater service from http://www.tweetlater.com. This web application allows you to enter phrases to look for on twitter such as the ones I mention in step 1, and it will send you an email digest on a regular basis of the tweets it has found matching these phrases.
However all that will do is identify your ideal music buyer, you must invest the time in steps 2 and 3 to make it personal, and when you do that, you really leverage the power of direct contact to ‘close the deal’ and secure a lifelong fan.
Putting your track into the iTunes store through an aggregator merely makes it available for sale. That is very different from ‘selling’ your track. In one of my previous articles I give some good advice that you have to treat your band as a ‘start up’ business to make sure that it generates some money to support your musical activities. Whether you like it or not, if you want to make money out of music, you’ll have to start developing a sales strategy for your music at some point.
There are three steps to successfully selling your music to music fans who actually want to buy your music from iTunes.
1) Identify a person who regularly buys tracks from the iTunes store
It’s no good asking someone to buy your track from iTunes if they are not in the habit of buying music, or if they don’t use the iTunes store. So the first thing we need to do is find lots of people who actually use the iTunes platform to discover and more importantly regularly purchase music there.
There is a really simple way of doing this, using a very clever keyword search on Twitter.
Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in any or all of the following phrases:
Bought from iTunes
Bought on iTunes
Purchased from iTunes
Purchased on iTunes
Downloaded from iTunes
With any of these searches you will immediately see a whole list of people who regularly buy their tracks from iTunes; they actually put their hand in their pocket and buy the music. They are not interested in going onto file sharing networks or trawling the web for a free MP3, these are people who buy their music from a legitimate download store…
2) Identify the buyer’s musical taste
At this point whatever you do, don’t just follow everyone who buys from the iTunes store, you’ll waste both your and their time and effort; you need to hone down which of these people will be interested in buying YOUR music.
OK, so now we have identified someone who is committed to buying music, now we need to find out whether our style of music would be something they’d be interested in buying too.
Read each of the posts that you find using the twitter search; most of the tweets will mention the band name in the tweet
Now go off to your favourite search engines and search for the artist they purchased. In the case of our example tweet, searching for Erika David on Google brings up herMySpace page where she is described as R&B / Soul / Pop.
Does your music fit that genre? It does? Then it is very highly likely that djstephie, is going to listen to your music, and buy it from iTunes too if she likes it...
3) Build a relationship with your buyer; get them as a long term fan
OK so now we have identified the ideal person who is most likely to buy your music, and we have identified that they buy their music from the very place you have your music for sale. Now we must build a relationship with that person, don’t ask for the sale right away.
Follow the person on Twitter, drop them a message, ask them about what they do, engage in a chat with them about your music genre. Mention you are producing music in a similar style to what they are currently listening to. They are guaranteed to ask you for a link to your music, and when they do, give them the direct link to your iTunes store.
Repeat the process on each tweet you identify as a match to your music.
Congratulations, you are now officially the top music salesperson in your very own music company!
As you can see from the above steps, you’ll make more sales every day from your music by being efficient and working smarter only on potential fans that are likely to be interested in purchasing your music. These are your ideal fans and if you nurture them, they’ll buy everything you release on iTunes and champion your music to others too.
You can also use the same method for other download stores, try searching twitter for this phrase too and use the same 3 steps:
bought from amazon mp3
If you want to automate the search for potential buyers of your music, use the free Tweetlater service from http://www.tweetlater.com. This web application allows you to enter phrases to look for on twitter such as the ones I mention in step 1, and it will send you an email digest on a regular basis of the tweets it has found matching these phrases.
However all that will do is identify your ideal music buyer, you must invest the time in steps 2 and 3 to make it personal, and when you do that, you really leverage the power of direct contact to ‘close the deal’ and secure a lifelong fan.
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