A tough week for the music industry. A quick Death Toll:

THE KING

With Michael, an era is gone. The ‘golden’ era of Super-Stars who can (could) move millions of hearts and dollars…

Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age has an entire chapter dedicated to Thriller, the album that saved record labels from crashing, back in 1982, when sales were drying out in the post-disco age.

The dialogue that follows is between the then-chairman of  CBS Records (then morphed into the now Sony Music Entertainment) and Michael Jackson.

So Yetnikoff pressured his biggest star. With just months left in 1982, he gave Jackson and producer Quincy Jones a deadline: Finish a new album, and make it a blockbuster, by Christmas. They weren’t happy about having to rush, but they obeyed and finished the final Thriller mixes in a month. They turned them in to Epic Records, for release just before Thanksgiving…

“I told you I’d do it,” Jackson told Yetnikoff.“I told you I’d outdo Off the Wall.”

Yetnikoff responded: “You delivered. You delivered like a motherfucker.”

Jackson: “Please don’t use that word, Walter.”

Yetnikoff: “You delivered like an angel. Archangel Michael.”

Jackson: “That’s better. Now will you promote it?”

Yetnikoff:”Like a motherfucker”

It was the right album at the right time: All seven of its singles landed in the Top 10, the album lasted a ridiculous thirty-seven weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and it went on to sell more than 51 million copies—the best-selling album in the world until the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits surpassed it (in the United States, anyway) in 2000. Thriller singlehandedly rescued CBS from its late ’70s doldrums—the company’s net income jumped 26 percent in 1983, to $187 million—pushing fans back into record stores and propping up the industry.

So be it. The King is dead…but to put things in  perspective, of what kingdom are we talking about?

Umair Haque chimes in the post-mourning debate about how rich Michael Jackson and his heirs (potentially) was:

If the world’s biggest pop star only made $25 million a year in total, something’s very, very wrong. Where’s the rest of the money? Why can’t a resource as scarce as the King of Pop capture more value?

After all, that’s not even mega-rich.

The world’s top hedge fund “managers” regularly pull in hundreds of millions. That’s an order of magnitude difference.

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THE STORY-TELLER

Another day, another magazine folding. After Blender, today’s the turn of Vibe, the urban glossy founded in 1992 by legendary producer Quincy Jones.

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THE PIRATES

The Pirate Bay isn’t dead yet, but the boat is sinking. Today Variety reported that Swedish video game company Global Gaming Factory X agreed to pay about $7.7 million to buy TPB.
Can a reformed PirateBay survive?

Some good points on how to use Twitter to promote your music, engage and reward your fans.
Enjoy the full interview, very entertaining!

Last week, TRVSDJAM, the combined force of Travis Barker and DJ-AM, released their newest mixtape via Twitter, offering a free download of their newest mixtape in exchange for a tweet.

By tweeting “Download the new #trvsdjam mixtape ‘Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella 09′ in exchange for one tweet! http://twitter.trvsdjam.com/”, tweeters receive a free download via an application built by Culture Jam Labs.

As you can see in the pre-populated tweet, a special hashtag – #trvsdjam – is included in the twit, with the goal of making it a top trending topic on Twitter.

A brilliant and innovative use of Twitter as a Marketing Platform.

How did the campaign go?

Travis Barker and DJ AM have a combined 230k+ followers on Twitter.

By looking at TweetMeme it appears that so far 12,350 have retweeted the message. That translates into a 5% conversion rate.

The Twist chart shows the trends over the last few days. Clearly there was a peak as soon as the twit was broadcast, then the buzz quickly dried out.

So how do you measure the success of such a campaign?

-Buzz: the story definitely picked the interest of the music community and the social media one. The coverage includes big names as Hypebot,  MusicAlly, ProHipHop, TechCrunch, Mashable, and the list could go on…just try googling it.

-TwitterBuzz: the initial twit reached an audience of 230,000, the combined followers of Travis and DJ AM. It was re-twitted roughly 12,500 times. Assuming the average number of followers is still 70 as stated in a January poll,that translates into a reach of close to 900k users! Not trivial for an operation that probably costed the two musicians less than $5k (the development of the app).  According to Twitterholic, a Twitter tool that keeps tracks of your followers, both Travis and DJ AM kept growing their “followership” but at a rate that is pretty much in their average for the last few weeks. So this doesn’t seem to be a secondary byproduct of the initiative, but probably it wasn’t in the plans either.

-Conversions/Sales: as stated before, conversions could be measured against the total number of followers at a 5% rate or against the total reach, at a about 1.5%. How many of those downloaders were already followers? How many non-followers? How many were real fans? How many of those downloads will translate into new fans that attend live performance and buy the artist’s music? Will they be able to keep messaging to those users? Send them a follow-up?

These seem to be legitimate questions, and it’s up to each musician to gauge the success of his own initiative based on his goals.

Early Twitter conversations were tagged as life-casting and mind-casting, because early adopters were mainly geeks. But always more and more musicians are jumping on board, embracing the potential of Twitter as a marketing tool and new medium, what I would rather call a “FanCasting” because it is not really about sharing your personal life neither your knowledge. It is more about building and nurturing the Tribe of your True Fans, as brillinatly explained by Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin.

There are plenty of examples of musicians who use Twitter to connect with their fans and engage them, offer free music,  twitt a live show.  And many examples of companies supporting and educating artists in this new effort: TopSpin, ArtistsHouse and Plugola are just the first who come to mind.

To conclude heres An inspirational video from a few months back: Steve Lawson interviewed by Andrew Dubber

Steve Lawson from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

A BLANK CD

Producer Danger Mouse and rocker Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse have decided to go against EMI legal threats and release their new CD, Dark Night of the Souls, as a blank CD  reading, “For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.” The CD comes with a book of photos provided by film-maker David Lynch.

The album, which has been one of the most hotly anticipated albums of 2009, features Iggy Pop, Black Francis (of the Pixies), the Flaming Lips, Jason Lytle, James Mercer (of the Shins), and Julian Casablancas (of the Strokes) and others all contributing original material.

It is available for free streaming on NPR

WILCO

Wilco on Wednesday began streaming its new album, “Wilco (The Album),” in its entirety from its Web site.

The band believes that hardcore fans will pre-order the new album
regardless, or attend its live show later this
year. Wilco also asked users who have downloaded the record illegally to
donate to Chicago-area charity the Inspiration Corporation as penance.