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Thought it would be worth a discussion. Jonathan Coulton is the grand daddy of building a tribe and creating real value for his fans. His latest product? A cruise with him!

Yes, Jonathan Coulton is the poster child of Niche Marketing (the underlying concept I'll be teaching in my first class at the Rally - Multiple Streams of Music Income) and in fact he's the case study I'll be using in the second class - Internet Marketing and Social Media - waste of time or key to your success.

Bottom line, he knew who his target market was, he was a strong member of that community and served that community by doing more than saying - hey check out my music. But served as a curator of content, source of support, and otherwise knowledgeable guy. People from the community discovered his music because when he'd write guest articles for trade mags, or blog posts or whatever, he always had a link back to his music website. And one fan, discovered his song Code Monkey and then posted it up on one of these blog posts, the rest is history. But he wasn't discovered because he was posting everywhere - look at me, look at me. But because he was an active member of a community who became fans of his music, because of his generosity to the community.

He also massively used the youtube vehicle to make his music available and come up #1 on search engines. Just try googling his name and see how many pages it takes to get to something that's NOT him. Last time I looked it was around 17....

And as he said in his interview on All Things Considered's Planet Money (NPR), he's making $500K/year without a record label. Here's the interview:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/05/ ... t=1&f=1106

Hi,
I'm a newbie. I see how difficult at times to get started. i've been into songwriting for years now and did not have any idea how to market and find niche. i already made numerous mistakes from the past and had to a lot of research. any advise on how to get started to promote music as somebody venturing just now? man, it's the digital and indie age!

Beside's Artist's Edge (Debra above), I found Ariel Hyatt's books and seminars to be right on the money in terms of using social media/networking for promotion.

Awesome Share coachdebra! Thanks for the link to the planet money interview.

Thanks for the "nod" Vikki! Sorry I didn't see you at the Rally this year. I'd also add that Bob Baker's stuff is awesome.

Was looking for advice on marketing a song. It was written as a tribute to a race car driver. My target are motorsports broadcasters.
It could be used as the lead in/background music. Could also be used on their web sites. I think the first thing I need to do is find a good music lawyer. Beyond that I am not sure.

The key is to create relationships with your target market. I've found twitter to be incredibly useful to make connections with people who are otherwise hard to reach - but if you spam them with "check out my song" they will NEVER buy it.

So, engage with them, respond, RT, ask questions. Get into a conversation with them and then, after you've made a real connection, "oh, by the way - who is your music supervisor? I've got a song you might like for your program...."