Lessons

Lesson Info

Branding Q & A

We left some time because we know that there's going to be a lot of questions about this kind of stuff first of all about more ideas we have parts of the indie band survival guy that could talk about this about photos, graphic artists and actually a whole lot of other topics along these lines but let's, let's talk about some of the questions we left back in whatever else you want to talk about related to brand how often do you update photos question awesome so what? You get a couple of good photos like then we stick with him and then he have like each album seems to have its own brand as well and then we stuck with those as well. So they last a while when you when you have them on your website, you he's a lot of the bands that we've talked to, they have like the professional shot and that stays for a long time a long time just so hard to make a clear one I mean, if you've got a heck of a budget and a team behind you, you'll be updating it fairly hot. You don't need to change those all ...

that I know you don't, but if people leave the band and you get new people owe our, um your you released a new album and you want to change it so that it kind of mirrors your album flavor uh that's probably a good time to do it but it's not often not often good question I want to ask how do you copyright material from if he doesn't go over that way went over weight desperately trying not to go down the copyright rabbit hole however way talked about copyright of music yesterday uh copyright like photographer photography a graphic images and all that kind of stuff that you create uh it's copyrighted once you create it ok so it's already even if some sort of a fixed form you maybe maybe using a graphic program but you have it it's yours okay you don't the register it with the u s copyright office or you don't have to make do anything to make it copyrighted ok there's some statutory benefits you get if you do that but for images and stuff like that we've never really did anything like that now the flip side of that is about working with graphic artists and working with photographers and that's what we were talking about it's like when you engage a photographer when you engage a graphic artist to help you with this stuff uh the magic phrase that you want is work for hire and the magic phrase that they do not want is work for hire uh you know they would love to have a nice stream where you ok you can use it for you can use this photo for these purposes but now if you want to use it for your album marjorie, whatever come back to me and then I licenses back to u s o from a musician point of view you would want a work for hire so that you can get give me all the photos that you took giving all the, um the full graphic stuff the layered source files give me all the source files that you you've created let me have that and we'll pay you this x and then it's done that's how you would want to approach it let's get it done with yeah and know that they would want to do not that they would not want to do that I'm talking about kyoto uh so keep that in mind but I have a question how important is it to have a separate web site for yourself from social media? And how important is it to have your social media linked between all of the web site? Fantastic question your website is absolutely important uh for these reasons number one you control it, you completely control it and you have you can make it do whatever you wanted to do, you can sell stuff from it directly and all that stuff we talked about yesterday the second thing is you do not know what these social networks they're going to do if you only rely on facebook pages, for instance, they make changes to their rules on what you can do, and they make layout changes that might, and they've done it a couple times where I think, like all the reverb nations and cd babies make, like these aps that you could put on your page and then facebook comes in and says, now it looks like this, and then all those aps that you had our different. Now on your web site, you can control of it. Uh, we always give this story about myspace, which we warned about in the first edition of the indie van survivor did it's, like everybody was like, oh, I'll just use myspace! I don't need to have my own web site, and we were like, listen, you don't have total control of that, you don't know what's gonna hold it reminds to the time we visited national national nashville, and first of all, if you've never been in nashville's a musician it's like disneyland for musicians, it's in it's safe, it's, crazy there's music everywhere we were there on a tuesday afternoon and all the bars up and down head live music going on right, right then, but then the other thing is, we see this billboard for this band, and they spent all the money on the billboard as I can to check us out, go to myspace, slash whatever I'm like seriously, you're going to advertise my space on your billboard, and you got all the money for that, you're not going to do it! Wow! So we warned about that in the indie bands of elevated like just don't rely on a social network for although these type of reasons now everybody has lived through what happened then since the book was pollution, what happened with my space and it's, not the place to be, is not really the party, they've got great, some great stuff there, and you probably want to have a presence there, but you don't want to go all in on it, just like you don't want to go all in on twitter or facebook or any of that stuff now in the book in the second edition now way spent a lot of time, and we're not going to talk about it here because we're focused on making money with music. But there's three chapters about your website, your website figured out your website strategy there, start your web strategy, your social network strategy and your mobile strategy, which is another big piece of this whole thing on then we have a whole separate chapter on your website and howto actually develop that on control it and what you should do to maximize what you could do with it selling songs, all that kind stuff s oh, there's really good stuff in the book that talks about that. You need to have a a strategy on how you do this. So if I were just sum it up, have a website and definitely be present on all these social networks do you have to be president on every social network? The answer is no. Pick your battles. Go where the party's at like, technically, can you be president? All these web presences, social networks? Yeah, because then you don't know where your audience might come in and discover you could get you at last. If we remember maybe have a concert. We have a six, like a six point plan that anybody can follow for social media. One of the key ones is what jason is talking about. Now we call them outposts. You can put profiles all over the place so people can find you wherever they happen to be. But then to your point about linking them together. That's. Exactly what? You d'oh. So if you happen to have a blogger, most profiles will let you pull in the text of a blawg. We only have to put your news in one place, and then they'll all be refreshed with the latest. That's how you solve it that's just one part of the media strategy that we could spend well, it's talked about in the advances of a guy there's a recipe on how to do that so you only have two update once and then all these social networks khun b in tune so you don't have to go to each one of them and because that will affect your brand, which is what we're talking about so you want to make it is easy and convenient for yourself to manage all this stuff is possible and that's we definitely talk about that in the book it's a fantastic question uh, you do need both and this is why we are talking about the branding elements because we will need an avatar and you will want to have these any don't want to make up news things for like what it says it last if m about you should not be different than what it says on twitter or facebook. Good question I have a question here from twitter this is from at t t two k and he says is being a multi genre artist hurt your brand multi genre artist such a brand that I love your brand a little bit too much if you have too many different things going on, I don't think it necessarily does if they can work with each other, it actually it can work really well if if you can find a way to make it into a coherent message I guess that's the best way to say it it doesn't necessarily hurt you actually the thing we found is that artists that tend to do a lot of different things and find a way to weave it into a big platform for themselves do really well their products if they're very different will be separate websites and separate things entirely that will cross so it's like hey check out the the other you know site I have that does x y z over here way had a question coming from hannah whom I know we talked about changing and if you're going to be ever changing, you better do it and this kind of follows in the footsteps she says what if you change in phases based on albums you've recorded? She gives an example of art picasso's blue period yeah yeah yeah that works great yeah, you just have to stick with it you just have to I mean, look, now we're going to go back to I think what we talked about earlier this is driven by your artistic uh you know all of your antis tick inclinations probably the best way to put it and if it says, hey, I'm I'm in my blue period now than getting your blue period one of my favors favorite artists and most pure musicians I think I've ever seen is miles davis and he just kept changing and he never looked back and like everyone's like were so mad you doing this new thing and we don't like it and he's like I care I'm going to do my new thing you know he doesn't even worry about it so that that is it's authentic that's authentic now if you're just saying that your I'm going to change just to change then people catch that it's not genuine and then they're not going to come along with you for that right way also discussed the rebranding and we said we would come back to know so I thought I'd remind you guys yes so I mean like the reality of everything is, uh if you're already out there doing this, um he probably have some sort of a brand or maybe didn't concentrate on it like we did when we started off and it it is a brand new matter what what it is it could be a mishmash of stuff but then that's how you're presenting yourself to the world it's never too late to start tying all these pieces together all right that's what I would say right off the bat and he like like if you use the word rebrand I think like you're completely doing something completely different and I don't know if that's what the question really is about it might be more about like, well, I'm here right now, but I need to get okay now that we've talked about these things I'm like I see more work I can I can do to tighten these things up um that is how we've done it and just start doing it now it's never too late, but I'll take something onto that too, because it reminds me of something when I was with scott sigler okay, he talked about this a little bit who's a he's a new york times best selling author and he keeps doing these new projects all the time and he would spend out a new website sometimes for these things or a new pot use big podcast podcasting person he podcasts and all of his books just why he generated such a large audience and he'd start fresh and then he realized, wait a minute, why my rebuilding my audience each time I do something new, they don't know this new website they're not listening to this new feed, so they're not subscribed to it. I have to redo it. The whole thing about rebranding is it's based on your audience now, depending on the size of your audience, if restarting isn't going to really alienate, even if you don't have enough of a big enough audience that it matters may be an issue now if you're getting a constant income stream from a set of people and then changing it could be risky telecard business that you have that's where you start thinking about it otherwise, if you can't be worried about confusing people, if you've done it and you kind of had your run with a certain set of things, like now, I'm going to get into this kind of music and if you as long as you can find a way to pull the existing audience that you have in with you that they can see you're doing something new, it's actually just will usually refresh your audience is a oh cool you're getting into something totally interesting and different so he can work out very well. I'm curious you guys have had this band for a long time. Are there any examples along the way where maybe you did something where you felt like, oh, maybe we need to slightly change the branding of our band? Or maybe we need to approach a different market because of something that happened over the course of your longevity as a band. Yeah, no that's a very good question, and I think the thing that stands out for me is the share market yeah, we after we did the song of the day have writing three hundred sixty five original song. On getting it out to the public that did something like that. You probably have to bring yourself a little bit differently if you're putting out a song every day. Yes, true we did, we did, we did so was about we write songs scooters about the writing was about contraband one year, three hundred sixty five that was the tagline for son of the day, yeah, that was like, and then after that we didn't want to. We're like we didn't want to write original music, so they're so exhausted and it's like, ok? And then I had this other idea sit in the back burner. Now this is to go to your point, it's, sort of a change for us, and then we're like, ok, and I had this idea that well, there's these public domain songs there's these irish drinking songs and that's kind of fits our kind of jovial and fun, and if we could rock those up but it's completely a different market is a completely different genre that we did in our style, but we had to change up our thinking. How do we tackle that market or that demographic? We pulled our fans and audience with us, yeah, because you know, it's still us. I'm still like our style and everything, but we also get that we got more fans, but even tackling this, and we got more marketing and press out of it as well. But, yeah, this is not something that you set, and then, uh, leave. It is something that's, organic and it's, something that slowly will change. The idea, though, is to be as consistent as possible, be genuine, it's possible, repeated as possible. But the good news is, as we always like to say, it's, like musicians, are creative people. You do creativity very well, and this is yet another little palette of stuff. Tio have fun creating with and being yourself with and being original with, um, so that's way, so, yeah, good question.