It’s no surprise that bands and musicians are trying to harness the viral power of Twitter. Music is a big part of Twitter’s content, as we’ve written about in the past. But recently the Bay Area band Moonalice, whose lead guitarist is well-known venture capitalist and Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee, staged several concerts on Twitter and has seen some impressive results using Twitter as a platform.
On April 3, Moonalice, which also includes ex-Saturday Night Live guitarist G.E. Smith, held its first live Twitter-integrated concert at a venue in San Francisco. Immediately following each song during the show, Moonalice’s sound team took the song’s audio, digitized it, uploaded it and then “Tweeted” about its availability — all before the group finished playing the next song at the live concert. The sound team used TinyURL to Tweet a link to a site where users could listen and download the song. Moonalice saw such a resounding response from followers on Twitter and fans that the band decided to do the same thing for the next two concerts. Because of the live Twitter integration, Moonalice says that its seen 3000 downloads of its music in the past week and a half (from just the tweets and retweeting).
Moonalice got 3,000 downloads and nobody outside of Silicon Valley has even heard of them. Imagine what would happen if a major band or performer did the same thing. It appears that some bands and artists are catching on to the buzz behind live music action on Twitter, including hip-hop artist Knaan. It’s only a matter of time before this trend becomes viral.
this is interesting. i wish they would upload it to umakeitcool and sell it through the links. at a $1 a pop or more if they wanted; that’d be 3k.
…but not all 3,000 people would have paid for the download, some would have walked away. The new music business is not about selling records, it’s often about giving it away and monetising in other areas.
very interesting.
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I’m following a french band as a lightning designer and I used to tweet during the show. This is the next step !
Once again, Twitter rises to the occasion. This is another excellent use of the service that provides measurable results. This technique combine what Moe Arora did last year (http://tinyurl.com/6d6abp) can generate a lot of awareness using Twitter.
What an awesome idea! I will be passing this on to my friends who are in bands.
thanks for the article!
This is just a great example of people who are using social media as a tool to market themselves. This is something that we all can achieve in our own niches in one way or another. I’ve done it myself, not on this level, but nonetheless it works. Not only for people who have even minor notoriety, but those who are obscure as well. I’m eager to see what happens now, the ball is rolling, how many will hop on for the ride? What do you guys think?
what a great use of twitter! many of my connections at http://www.affluence.org have said they use twitter successfully for marketing in their business
Independent artists are so fortunate to have today’s technology to use as a tool for exposure. Much success to them!
I am amazed at how people are realizing the power of twitter… thanks to DK for this awareness of this article. I checked out some software called hummingbird that allows fellow twits to get to the top of the follower food chain. It does not appear to be available for macs though.. still waiting on response. Check out…
http://bitly.com/2fnxxF
His name is Brian Kelly
Twitter is an amazing social and business tool. People are JUST beginning to realize the huge power of social media marketing to connect with each other and to build their businesses. The folks that really understand how powerful (and profitable) social marketing is, are building new social networking platforms all over the world. One of the most recent is My Music Ticket whose platform will serve musicians from all over the globe, as well as anyone else that wants to use the platform for socializing and business building. It will be interesting to see how quickly they will build their user base.
Twitter is a valuable tool for publicising free netlabel and/or Creative Commons albums. For example, @bradsucks has two albums out on Jamendo and has enjoyed nearly 40,000 downloads, and over 7,000 people have downloaded “Oh My” by @seanfournier. I even use it myself to announce new reviews of free albums at the net’s most amateurish blog about free music, Catching The Waves, which you’ll find at @catchingthewave – end of plug!