Promotions and the music business in Second Life

Music is a business?  It is to people who want to make a living at it.  An important part of that business is promotion.  I have been developing some ideas about how musicians can promote their acts in Second Life.   When I get the ideas well developed, I will put them into the Hobo Starter Kit, but I think I have enough useful material to share some of it here. 

Musical acts in SL might want to promote to these four target markets:

• Venues and event managers  (get a gig)
• Inworld audience (fill the house)
• Out-there audience (Sell your music for now.  Future: sell your performances.)
• Advertisers/ Sponsors (Get paid for ad placements and commercials)

How musical acts are promoting to venues and event managers in Second Life

I run a venue, Saturdays Wild.  So I have manager experience on that.   How do musical acts promote to venue owners?  A few performers and talent agents have contacted me about bookings.  That seems to be a growing trend, probably the leading edge of enterprise in the Second Life music business.

Kat Vargas, an enterprising talent agent, has been running a weekly event called Kats Konnection.  She invites venue managers to her place and invites new talent to perform.  That is a good way to develop connections between venue managers and new talent.  

I attended those events a few times.  They were useful, but presented two problems:  Participating took up a group slot that I could not spare.  And I did'nt really have time to attend the performances.  These problems will apply to many venue managers.  What we managers really need is a more efficient way to find and evaluate talent. 

In running Saturdays WIld, I have been building up a web page listing musicians who are potential performers there:

The web page gives (where available)  names of performers, some idea about genre and instrument,  a bio blurb for promotion, a picture, and web links.  Many of the performers have pages on Facebook or elsewhere.  Those pages may include free mp3 tracks.  Some also have videos on YouTube. 

In the near future we will have interview files on Voices from the Virtual Village..

I am seeking to get more information to go on my musicians web page.  Here is what I am hoping to get:

• Examples from performer's playlist, with indication of genre for examples that are not generally familiar.  The indication of genre could be explicit (Bluegrass, Comedy), by familiar category (Music of Broadway), or by performer (a Bette Midler song).  For originals, an indication of what it is like might be appropriate 
• indication of whether performer will take requests at the performance.  Performers generally read the local text chat and some performers explicitly pick up on requests that appear there.  Recently, I have seen some performers give out notecards with the songs they are prepared to play and invite the audience to put requests in local chat.
• Offer to customize if applicable.  Example: "I can insert a person’s name or venue name into a song or 2 if desired."   A number of performers already do things like that that.  It would be of particular interest to event managers who are setting up private parties or commercially sponsored events. 
• Commercial Sponsor if applicable.  I don’t know of any performers with commercial sponsors yet.   But that is one of the developments I expect in the near future.    

What musical acts in SL are doing to build audience

Fan clubs.  (SL groups)  Many musical acts recruit members to SL groups that act as fan clubs.  The performer or agent can send notices and instant messages to alert club members of current and upcoming performances.  These groups cost the performer practically nothing.  On the other hand, people who are active in SL have used up all their group slots and are not likely to spend one on a fan club. 

Notice lists.  (Not SL groups)   These are independent services offered by merchants in SL.  They don’t take up a group slot and so accommodate people who are in lots of groups.  Subscribing to a notice list can be easy, but the owner of the list system has to be able to leave objects (terminals) where the potential joiners are.  The system is likely to work better for a venue than for a performer.  Maybe that is a reason to for a performer to have a regular venue where a notice subscription panel could stay out. 

Performer/venue affiliated groups and notice lists.The SecondLife Hobos allows performers to join and send notices and IMs of performances (within reason).   This group is also affiliated with two venues: Saturdays Wild and  the newly opened Vagabond Theater on Hobo Island.  Performances at these venues are promoted to the SecondLife Hobos group.

The SecondLife Hobos has about a thousand members, but the notices and IMs probably get to far fewer than that because of limitations in SL servers.   Aggregating multiple performers lets a person join one group and  get notices from multiple performers on only one group slot.  But the number of notices can easily get so large that people leave the group to avoid the notice load.  There may also be fan groups for particular genres.  I know of several groups that show interest in Bluegrass, but I don’t know how active they are.   

Out-there audience (Sell your music for now.  Future: sell your performances.)  I described some future possibilities in a previous article.  As to the current status of selling music, see Crap Mariner's list of iTunes/Amazons musicians in SL

Advertisers/ Sponsors (Get paid for ad placements and commercials)  As far as I know, this is all TBD.  I hope I can get back to you with more news  later.

Meet an Author Special -- Jilly Kidd

Jilly Kidd tells me that bestselling author Neil Strauss is coming to SL with a game about how to survive in a dangerous world.  Can you survive an earthquake? You'll have 10 questions with 3 choices. The wrong ones lose you life points.  The winners will get signed copies of Neil's latest book Emergency.  Somebody will get cash. Everyone gets to meet Neil. This event will have earthquake effects and will be broadcast on online TV.
Time: Friday 3rd April at 2pm SL time
Place: London School of Journalism (slurl -- click to go there)