live your life out loud
Our friends at iStrategy Labs in Washington, DC created this very cool, eye opening video, on the growth of the mobile industry in 2012 for their friends at mobilefuture.org. Take a look…
We keep saying, mobile is the future. Clearly, mobile is the present!!
Careers in music are built on fans that are engaged with the music and feel connected to the artist. Fortunately there are dozens of services and tools to help artists. Yet if you’re an artist, where do you start? Do you need more than one service? If so, what’s the right combination for you? How do you make sense of it all?
With artists struggling to figure out what they need to do, we’ve developed a “Survival Guide for Engaging Fans and Building a Career in Music” to put shape around this increasingly confusing landscape. It illustrates the ‘tools-for-musicians’ ecosystem, some (but of course, not all) of the key players, their relationship to the whole, and how mobile plays into all of this.
Here’s how it works:
First, do whatever needs to be done to get discovered. This doesn’t mean getting discovered by millions of people, but rather, a core initial group of fans that you will build on.
Next, engage this core initial group of fans in an interactive and authentic way in order to convert them from casual fans into loyal fans. By doing so, fans will be much more likely to support you financially and spread the word.
Once a deep connection has been made, offer fans many ways to support you financially and make it easy for them to do so. This includes selling music and creative bundles directly from your website, offering unique merch, and giving fans the opportunity to invest in you through one of the many crowdfunding platforms out there, like PledgeMusic. Get creative and don’t assume the only way to get paid is to sell music in iTunes!
Finally, carefully analyze what has worked and what hasn’t, and adjust things accordingly. Then, repeat, repeat, repeat… and don’t forget about mobile!
In September, MobBase had the privilege of being a part of the 2012 Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. In its 15th year, IDF is the place for Intel Corporation, along with high-tech industry developers, executives, designers and engineers, to come together and share their latest innovations and vision for the future of technology.
MobBase was invited to demo its platform in front of thousands of people during the keynote (check out the demo here), as well as teach people who visited the MobBase booth in the expo hall how to build mobile apps.
Guided by the theme, “The Future of Innovation is Wide Open,” IDF 2012 demonstrated how developers can take advantage of the latest innovations in hardware, software and services to help enable the best user experiences from the cloud to devices.
Here are some pictures from the event…visit our Facebook page for more!
When we first launched MobBase a few years ago, our goal was to offer artists a cheap and easy way to create iPhone apps and connect with fans on-the-go. Well, times have changed and iOS is no longer the only game in town. With the undeniable rise of Android, Windows Phone and other mobile phones and tablets, artists now need a cross-platform mobile strategy in order to connect with all fans. The problem is, cross platform mobile app development has been time-consuming, expensive, and a general pain in the ass…until now.
In the above video, MobBase CEO, Charles Feinn, discusses how MobBase is helping artists build one mobile app that can be launched on all devices using the mobile web. MobBase mobile web apps are HTML5 based and can be built and launched for free here.
Time and time again we stress the importance of getting your fans involved with your music. Whether you host a remix contest, make an iPhone app or generally think out of the box when promoting your music. Here is a great example of a creative way that Canadian DJ, Kid Koala, released his music with his fans. He made the CD packaging for his recent record “12 Bit Blues” into a DIY mini record player with a mini record inside the CD box. Extremely creative, innovative, and a memorable event for any casual fan. Beyond this particular record, Kid Koala has made his past concert experiences interactive as well.
More power to you Kid Koala! Share your creative ways of interacting with your fans below!!
