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For Music Fans: Alert about upgrade from Focus Groups to Fan Match

Posted by Mike McCready | July 25th, 2012 | 6 Responses

This is just a quick note to anyone who has an account as a Fan on Music Xray. That includes those with Artist accounts but who also participate as listeners in Focus Groups.

 

We’re introducing a major upgrade to our Focus Groups product.

In fact, it’s such  an upgrade that we’re changing its name to Fan Match.  I’ll tell you all about that below but first, I want to alert you to a change you’ll notice when you log in to your account.

 

The upgrade requires that you log in and connect your Music Xray account to your Facebook account and grant our application a few permissions.  (Click here if you have forgotten your password and need to reset it). The first obvious consequence of this is that in order to continue using your Music Xray Fan account, you must have a Facebook account. I know that will upset some of you. I’m really sorry about that. We are driven to make the best possible product and in this case, integrating some social features simply made the product better and more useful. That is to say, it generates better music discovery for fans and it delivers better fan acquisition data to musicians.

 

Here’s the thing, although Music Xray appears to be asking for a lot of permissions, these are pretty standard for any app that integreates with Facebook. We’re never going to post anything to your wall on your behalf unless you ask us to (direct posting to Facebook from within Music Xray, but you control the posting). In order for that to work properly, you give Music Xray permission to trigger that post if you request it.

 

Additionally, the new version of Focus Groups will target you much more precisely based upon your music tastes. We ask you to update your taste information on the following screen (after Facebook integration), but part of the Facebook integration enables our software to stay up to date on your taste trends and listening habits.  That way, when we have new music to send you, it will be something as closely related as possible to what you like.  Notice the tag line for Fan Match.

Also note, we do not collect any other kind of data nor do we share any data with anyone. The only observer of any of your data is a computer at Music Xray that uses the data to make correlations and connections between songs. It’s pretty cool. You can turn off these permissions at any time in the future if you don’t continue to love Music Xray.

 

 

 

Changes in compensation for listening

 

In the new version of this product, listeners will still be paid for their participation but we have to do a reset on compensation. With the launch of Fan Match, fans will all start receiving ten cents per listen. Opportunities for increases will be introduced in short succession of version 1 of the product, so stay tuned.  I also understand that this change will be upsetting to some of you who have reached the higher badge status and were being paid 45 cents or more per listen. The hard truth is that while useful and interesting for some, Focus Groups wasn’t a compelling product. It wasn’t providing musicians with the kind of valuable feedback we had intended. Focus Groups were performing as intended. It’s just that the feedback they were generating wasn’t earthshattering. Our Focus Groups product was not taking things to the next level for the digital music space. So, in order to correct that, we had to re-imagine the entire product. In so doing, we had to start from scratch and change the angle a bit.  To those of you who may feel disappointed, I am sorry. You can delete your account from the “settings” section if you feel you must.

I hope you’ll stick around.

Oh, and one last thing…, Music Xray is growing like crazy but we’re still small compared to where we’ll be soon, especially with all this fan engagement starting to occur on the site. You’ll see a couple buttons on your dashboard. If you like what we’re doing, please click on them! You can earn ongoing affiliate fees, as well as help build Fan Match as one of the best ways to discover new bands and music.

Please log in to connect your Facebook account now.

Mike McCready

Co-founder & CEO

Music Xray

 

 

How much time & effort do you spend acquiring new fans?

Posted by Mike McCready | July 17th, 2012 | 6 Responses

 

How much time and money do you spend trying to acquire new fans online?  Think about it. Remember, while you’re doing it, you have to feed yourself and you have to pay rent. Time is money.

 

Now ask yourself, do you enjoy the process? Do you ever get the feeling people aren’t just waiting around for you to tell them about a new song you’ve recorded? It can be hard to break through all the noise just to get the attention of potential fans, right?

 

Identifying, engaging, and monetizing new fans is one of the hardest tasks musicians face and it’s why we’ve built a new service within Music Xray called Fan Match.

 

In short, it matches you and your music with likely fans.

 

Be one of the first to try this new service. We’ve got 150 slots open.

 

Thousands upon thousands of music fans are already part of Music Xray. We initially opened Music Xray to fans a couple years ago when we needed random music lovers to participate in focus groups. We know all about their tastes and a lot of their demographic information.

 

 

So, here’s how Fan Match works:

 

  1. You choose a song you’d like people to hear.

    2.  

  2. For every dollar you pay us, we guarantee three potential fans will hear your track.

    3.  

  3. Upon hearing your track they can decide if they want to become a direct fan of yours (in which case you get their email address and can establish a direct relationship with them just like all your other fans).

    4.  

  4. Upon hearing your track, they can also decide to tip you.

    5.  

 

How do you know if this is a good service and if it’s worth it?

 

Let’s say you spend $100 today to acquire new fans (via any method you choose). Can you guarantee that 300 new people will hear your music? Not just any new people; but people who are into your style and genre and who are open to hearing and discovering new songs and bands.

 

Can you do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day? It takes a lot of work.

That’s why we thought someone should build a better way.

 

Look, if only 10% of the new people who hear your music decide they really like it enough to offer you their email address; well, that’s 30 new fans with whom you would then have a direct relationship. Divide that into $100 and it comes out to having cost you $3.33 per new fan.

If 20% decide to give you their email address, then it will have cost you only $1.66 per new fan.

So, logically, the more compelling your music is, the more fans you’ll convert from among the 300 we target for you. The more fans you acquire, the less it’s costing you per fan. Thus the correlation is that the better your music is, the more fans you’ll acquire for less money.

Plus, you might even inspire some of those fans to tell their friends and jump-start your own little organic unit. It’s a new product. We don’t want to oversell it. At the same time, we think itless it will cost you to acquire a new fan. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that some of those new fans will tell their friends and bring you even more fans, giving you more bang for your buck.

How much is each fan worth to you in the first year? What about over the lifetime of the relationship? How many CDs, downloads, t-shirts, and tickets to your gigs do you have to sell each one before you make back that $3.33 (assuming you only converted 10% of those who heard your music)? You would probably make that back plus a lot more fairly soon, wouldn’t you?  And some of those fans will last a lifetime and pay you again and again over the course of your career.

 

But then, let’s consider this… what if we can encourage one of every ten fans you acquire to give you a tip. Not much; maybe only a dollar.  So, for every 30 fans you acquire, you might make $3 in tips.  Lets do that math.

 

$100 cost to acquire 30 fans

minus $3 in tips

equals $97 (the true cost of acquiring the fans)

 

See how the tips offset your costs?  What if your music were so good it inspires fans to give you more than $100 in tips? Suddenly, your fan acquisition costs went down to nothing.

 

But, for the purposes of this exercise, let’s stick with a more probable reality and say it will cost $3 per each fan acquired. Remember, this will depend on how compelling your music is.

 

Can you do that for less anywhere else? If so, you should. If you can’t, it would be a bad decision not to use Fan Match and any other musicians who target the same audience as you would be getting an advantage over you by using Fan Match if you aren’t.

 

Here’s the kicker. If your music is really, really good you can acquire fans for less than other musicians. If it’s not as compelling as it could be, you won’t acquire as many fans per dollar spent. But you’ll never know your cost per fan until you try Fan Match and if you don’t know what it costs to acquire a fan, you don’t know if you can even make a living as a musician.

 

Fan Match can be an indicator of your viability as a business. It can predict your ability to make a living while at the same time helping you do so.

 

Be one of the first to try this new service. We’ve got 150 slots open.

 

See the video below for a succinct explanation of how Fan Match works.  And please help us get this information out there by clickingthe “like” button below the video or the “share” feature.