Get the latest activity of your Mobile Fan Club, in your inbox!

Many artists have been telling us that the reports on the artist portal are great, but a quick snapshot email of what happened on their mobile fan club recently is a big improvement.

We're introducing a new feature that will do exactly that: you can now get activity reports straight into your inbox. You can schedule those reports to come to you daily, weekly, monthly or never. Those emails will tell you:

• How many fans you got in your Mobile Fan Club, how many were added recently.
• New gigs you've added for which tickets for sale were added to that gig.
• New merchandise items you've put for sale.
• New Paypal transactions generated by your fans.
• New articles you've created or automatically imported from external sources (like ArtistData)
• And finally, new SMS blasts you've scheduled or executed.

Here's an example report:

The weekly reports come out every Thursday afternoon, the monthly ones will come out on the 1st of every month.

Log into the artist portal and under Profile->Change my password and email, you can set the frequency you'd like to recieve those emails. If no preference has been set, we will send you those email weekly.

If you have any comments or more great ideas like this one, write to us.

Thanks and rock your stage!!

On Stage: Eleventyseven

Eleventyseven
Genre: Pop / Punk / Electro / Rock
Hometown: Greenville, South Carolina
Fans on Mobile Club:177
Keyword: Text eleventyseven to GETME (43863)


Eleventyseven has a large mobile following and are active on the summer Festival scene, with regular shotouts that attract new mobile fans. Their new CD "Adventures in Eville” is up for sale on their mobile site, and they are especially active on Twitter, promoting their fan club – these posts show up on their mobile pages also.

As for fan relationships, Eleventyseven “get it”. Phillip Peters from True Artist Management: ”They want fans and listeners to know that they can be part of something so much greater than just a fan base. They want their music to be a direct vehicle for friendships to form, for stories and experiences to be shared, and for fun to be had.” And mobile helps them!

More than Music Artists – Music Festivals!

Mobile fan clubs for music artists offer great promise for connecting fans to music, but mobile marketing can be a new way for music festivals to engage fans before, during and after the event, reaching them on their "always-with-them" mobile phones.

Before the Festival, fans can be notified of new Artists to the lineup, changes in times, and news from sponsors. At the festival, fans can get up to date lineup changes, directions, maps to bathrooms, stages, parking, the medical tent, etc. Merchandise can be ordered and paid for on phones and picked up at the event, reducing lines at the merch table. After the event the festival can follow up with video and audio for sale, fan comments, press coverage about the event, and other messages to start marketing for next year’s event.

Adva mobile is pleased to announce our first music festival using mobile marketing to engage fans. Providence RI’s SoundSession ‘09, New England's premier summer music festival in Rhode Island's capital city. A multi-stage, genre-defying event, the festival is produced by the Providence Black Repertory Company in collaboration with the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism.

Adva Mobile developed a custom designed mobile experience for fans and attendees of SoundSession ’09, including a unique search function where fans can find music by Artist, Date, and Venue. Check it out: Text soundsession to 43863.

The Adva Mobile Business Model

“Free to the Fan, free to the Band”. How do we do it? It’s an important question, because without understanding our business model, and how we make money, you won’t be able to continue using the service for free. So, let us tell you about our "Great Experiment".

For some time now, outside the US people use their phones to do many things, including paying for goods. Some link their phones to bank accounts, others don’t even have bank accounts, and their phone is sort of a “top up card”. The point is, they don’t use credit cards nearly as much as their phones.

You can buy music from your phone today. It’s not so hard. Buy a ringtone, for example. Here at Adva Mobile, we believe fans will support music artists with ticket and merchandise purchases and they will make these purchases, when practical from your phones.

Our Great Experiment is that fans will purchase music, merchandise and tickets from their phones, and that you (the artist) will promote these sales because you can reach fans immediately on their phones, and that they are motivated to buy from you when you tell them. We’ll take a small service fee. If the Great Experiment works, we can continue to offer a great mobile marketing service that includes messaging, rich media, commerce, and sharing, Free to the Fan, Free to the Band.

The Time is Right for Direct-To-Fan Marketing of Music

By Jason Feinberg, June 24, 2009

As the music industry continues to evolve and search for a sustainable and profitable business model, the direct-to-fan (D2F) approach is making great advances, from artists just starting their career up to superstars with massive fan bases.

Artists marketing and selling directly to their audience is not necessarily a new or revolutionary concept -- one can find examples of artists offering their products to customers directly in every generation of music. For established artists, it is used as a way to inexpensively leverage all the awareness they have amassed. For evolving artists, it is often a necessity. Without a label and distributor, the usual options for new artists have been selling music at live shows, selling through fan clubs or sympathetic indie record stores -- or sometimes just selling out of the trunk of a car (which is how N.W.A. got started). But today, advances in technology have opened up exciting new avenues for direct-to-fan sales.

SUCCESSES IN THE DIRECT-TO-FAN MARKET

Direct-to-fan sales and marketing have seen a significant spike in recent years thanks to a number of factors. First, technology has given artists at all levels the opportunity to sell and market to their fans in a clear, inexpensive, engaging fashion online. Second, many emerging artists see less value in signing to a label and instead choose to steer clear of entangling contractual obligations. Finally, established artists are choosing not to renew their label contracts at a record pace, realizing that the brand they have developed can be leveraged without a label. All of these situations benefit greatly from direct-to-fan initiatives.

Read More...

This article originally appeared in MediaShift , a blog by Jason Feinberg

Get your Merchandise/tickets sales money into your PayPal account

Many artists have been asking us where do the funds from their ticket or merchise sales end up? And more importantly, how to make those funds end up in their existing Paypal account?

After a sale has been made to a fan, on the next round hour we will contact Paypal (automatically, we don't call them =)), and tell them to transfer the funds to the artist. We do that by giving Paypal the email address we have for that artist. Until now, we used the email address you gave us when you signed up.

We've just introduced a new feature that allows you to enter your existing Paypal account email, to be used to transfer those funds, on the artist portal under Profile->Paypal Profile. This email address will only be used for the Paypal transactions; we still use your primary email address for all other communications with you.
If we don't have a Paypal email for you, we still would use your primary email address for the Paypal transactions.

Also on the profile->Paypal profile page is where you can add email addresses for an affiliate service charge (for settlement through Paypal) as well as fulfillment entity email. That's a topic for a separate post;-)

To learn more log into the artist portal on Adva Mobile.

Thanks for reading and rock the stage!