Using exclusivity to market your music
March 3rd, 2008 by Niklas Rämö // 5 Comments »
Offering exclusive content to a certain group of customers is an old and often used idea, and it can be a very effective way of doing business if you use it right. A recent successful example of this in the music industry is U2’s song Wave of Sorrow, which was exclusively released through online social music network iLike and accompanied with Bono’s interview. The result was a massive amount of new iLike users, who are now following U2’s latest news and events via iLike Music Feed, and a lot of free publicity for U2. In this article I try to explore how independent artists can use exclusivity to market their music and to keep their fan base more active.
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Marketing your music on 
Internet has changed the way we consume music and thus led to a situation where traditional copyright is violated quite often in the form of illegal file sharing and downloading. Creative Commons licenses offer an interesting alternative for the traditional copyright by providing more freedom to content creators and users. Before we go into any deeper analysis about the subject let’s first take a closer look at UK copyright law. 
I write music and record it in my home studio. However, this process takes quite a while usually and I finish only one song at a time. I have realized that making enough songs for an album will take ages, but I still want to get my songs out there. Most obvious option would of course be making an EP of three or two songs, put up a MySpace site and upload the songs there. However, that’s exactly what every other band does already. I have tried really hard to think of another approach and here is something that came into my mind. 
I’ve been thinking a lot about music player widgets and how to best utilize them to market your music. There are a lot of widgets that allow you only to share songs, but why settle for that when there is so much more you can do with them. Music player widgets are evolving and they can serve many purposes from being an mp3-player to promoting concerts, selling music and playing music videos - all in one sleek package that can be placed on websites, social networking websites and blogs. 
The “magic” that record companies in practice do is marketing and distributing your music with the help of their vast marketing and distribution networks. Getting your potential fans to listen to your music is a really big dilemma for many unsigned and independent musicians, but thanks to the Internet there are some really useful music marketing, distribution and licensing services that can help you with this big task.
A lot of artists use only a couple of social networking websites to promote their music on, and they usually choose the ones with most users such as MySpace and Facebook. This kind of strategy can be very effective if you are targeting the whole world. However, by adjusting your online music promotion approach regionally you can reach much more potential fans than with MySpace and Facebook alone. 
You might have already heard about the Luxembourg based online music store 
I have tried to encourage artists to use recorded music rather as a promotional tool than a revenue source. However, it can be a very expensive promotion tool since recording time in a professional studio is expensive. Although modern home recording equipment is affordable and provides good audio quality, you still have to know quite a lot about audio recording, mixing and mastering in order to get good results. If you want to stay unsigned and also get financial support to cover your album’s production costs, try appealing to fans. 
In the aftermath of Radiohead’s In Rainbows album first week downloads one very interesting phenomenon was noticed - even though the album was free to download through inrainbows.com, 