The Music Analyst

Our Sr. Executive Producer has embarked on another career as a music Analyst. Her site jamilleluney.com offers free consultation to independent recording artists and bands. She's drawing over 10,000 hits a day and a radio talk show is in the works.

Jamille's site features interviews with Timbaland, Kanye West, Scott Storch, and the Neptunes. She tells artists how to increase their sales and online music plays. Her new marketing approaches are excellent. She spends time explaining new information technology and how to use it to market. One subject she emphasizes is Search Engine Optimization, often overlooked by artists and bands.

At heart she is a computer nerd, we know Jamille very well. However, a computer nerd makes the best marketer in today's economy. Everything is online and people spend countless hours searching the web. Jamille explains new and future technology to her readers and how they can use it to maximize their sales.

The best part about her information is that is completely free to the public. For more information visit Jamilleluney.com.

Giving Away Free Music Pays Off

Giving away a couple songs is great marketing and publicity. Recent research shows that giving away a song helps increase sales. Just ask hit band Coldplay.

"To drum up publicity for its new single, Violet Hill, which was released last week, the band decided to give it away for a week on its Web site as a free download. On the first day it was available, the song was downloaded more than 600,000 times, according to Billboard magazine. In 2005, Speed of Sound, the lead single from Coldplay's previous album, X&Y, sold [only] about 53,000 copies digitally in the United States and the United Kingdom" Houston Chronicle May 16, 2008

Billboard, Nielsen SoundScan, and major record labels not only tracks music sales, but online plays as well. The free download generated a lot of plays and web traffic to the Coldplay's website. Here are a few numbers below.

"According to the music social network last.fm, Violet Hill set a record among its 15 million members, who played the track about 33,000 times the first day, or once every two seconds." Houston Chronicle May 16, 2008

"the Coldplay Web site jumped 1,800 percent the day of the release over its traffic two days earlier. It moved from No. 305 to No. 1 on the company's chart of musician Web sites, with more than 2.5 percent of all the U.S. traffic to the sites they monitor." Houston Chronicle May 16, 2008

If anything, Coldplay may have set a new standard for online music marketing.