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There's been a lot of talk about crowdsourcing over the last few months, particularly as it pertains to bands and artists. Although these conversations have been varied in scope, here are a few main themes that keep cropping up: 1. Using a global music contest/promotion site to validate an artist or band to increase awareness and sales The idea being that by using sites that allow anyone in the world to vote on their music likes and dislikes one can prove the potential of an artist and increase their value. Slice The Pie and OurStage fall into this category, as does to some extent Amie Street. 2. Using an existing fan base to help promote a band or artist using street teams across the Internet The idea of using your current fans to get new fans not just by traditional word of mouth, but by using all kinds of Internet and viral strategies, banners, playlists etc. ReverbNation has good tools to do this in the form of widgets, emails lists and street team management. Of course the original and most famous website to facilitate this is Myspace, although it tends to be more of a band to promoter tool nowadays. It could be argued that this is only real crowdsourcing if you do actually have enough fans. 3. Crowdsourcing investment The idea of getting fans and others to invest in your act, however small an amount, as a way of getting where you're going. This bucks the trend of traditionally relying on a record label to fund absolutely everything, and can help strengthen bonds with existing fans whilst also collecting new ones. Sellaband was the first site to tie in it's $50k goal in with bands, but unfortunately it also ties them into a lot more than just receiving the money to do what they like with. Other sites like Fundable exist where you can raise money for anything in return for anything, and Fundability which is a higher end investment model for when you want to go for something a bit more business like, with the potential to find some heavyweight angels. 4. Using a service to help promote a band or artist using street teams across the Internet The idea of paying premade networks to promote your music. There are services that will boost your YouTube plays, Myspace hits, friend adds and all sorts - for a fee. Majors and smaller labels alike realised the importance to get coverage across the Internet social sites as a means of promotion, and for breaking a new band just as in traditional media, a lot of people need to be made aware of a lots of acts very quickly. When you have several accounts on social music sites, it becomes quickly apparent which bands and labels are outsourcing their crowdsourcing - suddenly a band you have never heard of is asking to 'befriend' you across all networks at the same time. This costs time and money. Now these are all very valid and salient ideas about crowdsourcing, but on the whole the people who are talking about these things are people in bands with absolutely no public face whatsoever. Unheard of bands, hearing about all this stuff, wondering how they can make use of it. They are going to be at point one. I have put these crowdsourcing ideas in this order as you can't really do one until you've done the previous one. If you started a new band tomorrow, and had just put a myspace page up and were looking ONLY to use the Internet as a means of making yourself known then this is pretty much it. If you (1) put your music on some contest style sites you could get known to new audiences which would (2) help you generate a fan base which could (3) allow you to ask them to invest in you, the money which you could use to create MORE investment from 'real' investors meaning you could (4) start spending the money on growing your fanbase faster. Of course it's not anything like as cut and dry as this, but you get the idea. Crowdsourcing is a term to describe something that we already do, already happens and is the nature of the social landscape. This is all very interesting, but in actual fact has nothing to do with why I am writing this article. Although I think it is good to know about all this stuff, I think that the FEEDBACK one can get from the whole process is even more valuable. Let's start thinking about crowdsourcing as the biggest focus group in the world. When you put your music on any site which allows people to vote for your music, either against other people's or in it's own right, you have access to opinion. On some sites this could be as much as a written appraisal of your track, on others it could simply be the fact that once the voting was done, you came 25th out of 1000 other tracks. This information is extremely valuable as it lets you break the crowds down into SMALLER crowds. And if you can do that, you can find the crowds that are going to be useful to you. No one can please all the people all the time, but we can use a crowd to find a community, and use a community to find our potential true fans. With each site that you can use, you should at least be aware of its: Geographical bias (crowds on a mostly american site are going to vote differently to a UK site) Average age per site Average age per genre (if the site has genres) This will at least help you get a handle on what the feedback actually MEANS from one of these sites. Let's imagine you put the same song into a contest on a US site and a UK site which were more or less identical in terms of active users, age etc - at the very least you would come out of it with some data which showed you which country liked the song the most. If you put the same song in again, you would have a more accurate reading. What if you put the song on a French or German site? Could that teach you something about this one song? Let's take another song and put it on a site which has a plethora of categories to put the song in. You enter the song into the 'Acoustic' category and after a month it gets into the top 50 Acoustic songs that month. You change the category to 'Folk', and it comes in the top 20. You try some more related categories but still it always seems to strike a nerve and get higher up in the Folk chart. In these two examples we are using crowdsourcing to discover who actually likes what we do, who reacts to it the best, and in what genre, in what country. It has cost us nothing, and we can do it per song. Being able to use these crowds as a focus group on a song per song basis leaves you with a very clear picture of where your song is going to be well received. It can help you target your PR, come up with angles for stories. It can let you discover the cross over points of one genre to another, and help you find niches that you didn't even know you were a part of. It can show you where to spend your time, and where to spend it less. If you are looking for licencing on certain songs, it can show you which territories may be more receptive to certain songs. So although people say you've got to be in it to win it, I beg to differ. You've got to be in it to learn how to win it, which is entirely different. Use the crowds to show you where you belong, and to discover smaller and more niche networks of potential fans. Fire your songs into the crowd, study where they land, and then alter your aim accordingly. Listen to the mob and target those calling your name. You may end up with a club instead of a crowd, but at least they're all yours.
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