Do you have a mailing list signup form in your gigs? Add mobile signup to it!

Hi Everyone,

As promised , 300 bands make us very happy and in return we want to make you happy, by pumping more helpful features you asked for!

This one has been asked for a while back, and we've been waiting for approvals from the operators to do it, now we can!!!

So, if you have a mailing list signup form on the merch table, for example, now you can add to it "Join my Mobile Fan Club". You need to get your fans 10-digit phone number, and their carrier (we don't support all of them, but we support many!). Here's an example for a ready form for you.

Once you have those phone numbers and carriers, email them to fansignupform@advamobile.com or fax it to us (the fax number is on the Promote page on the artist portal.

Next, tell your fans to expect an invitation to your mobile fan club to come on their phones as an SMS, which we will send in the next 14 days (just to give you a little time to tell your fans).

Once your fans receive the SMS, all they have to do it to reply YES or Y (case insensitive), and that's it! they'll get another SMS with a link to your site and they're done!

We will send you a report that will tell you how many SMSs went out and you'll be able to see on the portal how many new fans you have!

To learn more, or see other promotional tools, check out the Promotion page on the artist portal.

Celebrating the 300th band to join!

In the world of entrepreneurship, every small reason for celebration counts. This one is a big reason for celebration: We've passed the 300 bands mark this weekend with Vertigo, Wonder Bars and others to join our service. We now have little over 600 fans, with an uneven distribution between bands that have hundreds of fans, and some that have less.

In the months since launching, we've been privileged with increasing attention from the bands who joined, specifically with suggestions for improvement, new features and picking on the bugs we've managed to produce along the way. For everyone who emailed us with comments, suggestions, and frustrated bug issues, a BIG THANK YOU!

One learning that's worth sharing, was that sometimes, things just have their natural course of action, specifically, timing. When we started, musicians barely signed up for the service and that was it. Since then, musicians have been adding videos and downloads to their home page, adding exclusive content for download, added gigs, blogs, have taken advantage of our Artist Data integrations, and more recently, have started SMS-blasting their fans with news and alerts.
It's all happening!

The next step for musicians, we hope, is to discover how simple and effective it is to sell tickets and merchandise to fans right on their mobile phone (perhaps at the show), using our PayPal integration.

But we're not settling down...We've been hard at work on new features that allow you to better promote your mobile fan club to your fans, sell tickets and merchandise and much more. We'll share it all in the coming days!

Until then...thank-you, from the Adva Mobile team!

Quarter Inch Holes

I could wax poetic for years about Ted Leavitt, marketing professor at Harvard. The hundreds of business books written over the last 25 years, in my opinion, merely restate the insights he provided in the 50's and 60's. While musing about people's buying habits, he famously said. "People don't want quarter inch drill bits. They want quarter inch holes."

Hard man, there, Mr. Leavitt. The movement of money from one pocket to another is reduced to understanding and fulfilling a need.

It's worth the effort to think about what job people are trying to get done when they hire out your 3:30 song. I recently read of a market researcher who was seeking to understand the jobs that customers were trying to get done when they hired a milk shake, so it's not a foolish effort. Music fans don't want recordings, they want the experience of feeling the way they do when they're moved by your music. And that experience is wrapped up into much more than your music (although that's where it starts). The totality of their relationship with you drives them to choose your sound when they want that experience. Wrap your music around an artist - fan relationship and the impact of your music will grow stronger.

EleventySeven makes a huge splash!

We're very happy to have Eleventyseven get their own Mobile Fan Club yesterday! Text Eleventyseven to 43863 (spells GETME on your phone) or click here to join for music downloads, alerts and much more.

We're even happier because Eleventyseven, with some Facebook promotions and more, now have a couple hundred fans opted into their service! and they just sent their first SMS alert this morning.

You guys at Eleventyseven: YOU ROCK!!!

There's a new look to the Adva Mobile Website!

Those of you who visited Adva Mobile's site last week noticed a new website image for Adva Mobile. Sleek, with grey tones, a little "flash", and more functional, we've become very "Web 2.0". 

We'll add a few more features in the coming weeks based on requests we've recived from musicians, promoters and labels. For those of you who haven't visited, check us out and have fun exploring the world of Adva Mobile and mobile marketing services for music artists.

Investing in artists - the human part of the capital attraction equation...

Bruce Warila | Mon, November 10, 2008

More and more artists are seeking advice on how to obtain a substantial investment ($50,000 to $250,000), and artists around the globe are structuring their organizations as small businesses that will generate a return on investment for investors (for fans and for brands that invest in artists).
Prior to writing more about the legal or business things you need to do to obtain an investment, I wanted to touch on the human part of the capital attraction equation.

After reading this list you may say to yourself "WTF, do I have to be a saint to raise money?" The answer is no, maybe you don't. This is my investment checklist, and I believe it's necessary to keep every business option open, especially in the music industry. When an investor is investing in more than a single song (a person or a band), he or she is probably looking for someone that MOST consumer-facing brands would also be comfortable promoting.

More...


This article originally appeared in Unsprung Media, a blog by Bruce Warilla.

Highlight: Kingsfall

Kingsfall
Genre:Rock / Alternative / Pop
Hometown: Dallas/Ft.Worth, Texas
Fans on Mobile Club:34 (in 3 weeks!)
Keyword: Text Kingsfall to GETME (43863)

Check out their mobile fan club, click here.

Kim Jones, publicist for Kingsfall, has been actively taking advantage of the Kingsfall mobile fan club. Concert dates, news, and a YouTube video are now posted on a mobile webpage. Kingsfall merchandise can also be purchased straight from the phone. They are building their fan club through onstage shoutouts and the Signup Widget on their MySpace, Facebook Fan and Personal pages.

According to Kim Jones, more mobile-based promotions are on the way. "Mobile fan clubs are truly the wave of the future and are an excellent way to keep fans in the loop while allowing them to get great content. I've been approached by a few companies offering mobile services for bands but no one has been able to touch Adva on ease of use, customization options and customer service."

Selling Merchandise to your Mobile Fan Club

You have all heard the term leaving money on the table. Sometimes this refers to a negotiated business deal that you might have done better. But it can also refer to money that's there for the taking if only you ask for it. Your fans are incredibly motivated when they see you at a concert, and merchandise sales remain a powerful money-making opportunity for most music artists. When was the last time you were at a concert that did not have a merch table, no matter what size venue? And at the large music festivals, the merchandising is so important that it's typically removed from the artist to the benefit of the festival organizers.

We all know that convenience and availability are one of the prime motivators for making purchases. It's not just impulse buying, but often merchandise presented to us in a moment when we are ready to buy results in a sale. Selling your merchandise to your fans on their mobile phones is a perfect opportunity to capture this dynamic. The Adva Mobile platform provides three terrific opportunities for you to make money from selling merchandise to your fans.

First, you can sell physical goods like posters, T-shirts, pins and other items on your mobile fan club site. It's easy to set up on the Merchandise setup page on the Artist Portal. Fans pay through PayPal -- a trusted source -- and once the sale is made, the money is transferred to you almost immediately and we send you a notification for you to complete the fulfillment, by shipping out the goods or delivering the goods at the concert.

You don't have to sell goods via PayPal: You can also setup a merchandise item on your mobile fan club, that would hold a link to wherever you want to sell your goods, like iTunes, Napster, and Amazon. Your fans are brought from your mobile website to those storefronts to complete the purchase.

You can experiment and play with it, and present a simple introductory experience to your fans. Tell them that whoever comes to your merch table at the gig and shows their phone with some evidence (SMS or site) that they are aware, or joined your mobile fan club, gets some discount off your merch. Just for fun: nothing big that will upset people, something that would motivate fans to try it out. Eventually they'll discover the gigs and merch page themselves and start buying stuff from you.

 
Coming soon -- ring tones and other small dollar items that fans can pay for on their wireless phone bill. Stay tuned for this new capability to earn money in the next few months.

Everyone who is using the Adva Mobile service to engage their fans should have merchandise for sale on their mobile website.Login NOW to your artist dashboard and put merchandise up for sale. Send an SMS blast out to your fans telling them of its availability, and watch the dollars roll in.