A while ago I posted a case-study about The Ugly Dance on here as an excerpt of my thesis about marketing music in the digital age. After I published the case-study, the band replied to an email of mine, so I decided to write an expanded version of the case-study for Techdirt.
You can read the full version over there.
Here are some excerpts from the band’s email:
TheUglyDance.com was actually not a result of some great promotional master plan. It just happened.
On May 17 we released fuldans.se and sent the link to some friends. When I checked the stats a couple of days later a few thousand people had made their own dancers. I could feel something was about to happen. Just the day after someone shared a link on a Swedish blog, and it generated a tsunami of visitors. 30 000 people rushed in in just a few hours. The week after we hade a few hundred thousand hits, and it was a continous struggle to keep the server alive. Two weeks after the release, and 700 000 visitors later, I thought everything was under control. Then the Americans came.
TheUglyDance.com have had 7 milllion completely unique visitors. A few very kind people have donated, but they are very few. If we should have done anything differently, we should probably have sold T-shirts or something. Something real for the massive amount of visitors to buy.
They did a spectacular and exemplary job at getting people’s attention and making the initial connection, but there appears to be no focus at all on retention. There appears to be no link to the band’s MySpace, which they were trying to promote. Due to the fact that most people are on Facebook and Twitter now, I think it would have been a better idea to put those links in the foreground, but most importantly; there has to be a way for people to connect. A simple Facebook ‘Like’ button below the Flash application would have gone a long way.
From a marketing perspective, asking for a donation or getting people to buy your music out of sympathy is a bad business model. As Mike always says, it’s about giving fans a reason to buy. A good thought experiment is to imagine a totally selfish consumer and to see what you could offer them so that they spend money on you. They should spend it for themselves, not for you.
This means making sure you retain as much of the original traffic as you can without getting obtrusive. This means shining a light on the early followers and encouraging them in what they do, because they’re helping you amplify your message and are providing social proof. At the same time you should connect these people to each other, forming an ecosystem.
The business models simply come from listening to the ecosystem and playing into their desires (just like Younger Brother did)..In the end, giving fans a great reason to buy is the ultimate way of connecting with them.
But seriously, just head over to Techdirt and check out the full version. While you’re at it, let’s connect: Twitter | Quora | LinkedIn (be sure to include the fact that you found me via my blog when adding me on LinkedIn).
