Dear Bands: This Is How You Get Me To Listen To Your Music
Music freak that I am… I also hate change, so I clung to my CD > iTunes import routine for quite some time.
But now that I am in full Rdio mode (yes, I much-much-much prefer Rdio to Spotify, for reasons that I could go on-and-on about and I will share in some other post)… the point being, I have changed my music discovery methods.
1. Open Rdio on Tuesdays. New music is released on Tuesdays.
2. Click New Releases.
3. Look for familiar artists.
4. Look at the album art.
Yes. I am a bit biased as a graphic designer, and a graphic designer that is in the middle of an CD art project for Bop Skizzum, but I have ALWAYS sorted through music by album cover – going back to my high-school-working in-the-record-store days.
5. Click the big PLAY icon on the albums that attract me, which will play the first song on the album.
Yes. The FIRST song. In our ADD world, you have about 15 seconds or so to impress us. Whatever your style is, that means put your BEST song first and pull us in FAST.
6. Look to see what my friends are listening to.
You get to know whose taste matches yours, so it is easier to sift through all the album covers and quickly click ones that you probably will like.
7. Add the albums that sound good to my collection for later shuffle-style listening.
Which gets shared to my Facebook profile, which makes other people check out the music, which gets shared to their profiles and so on, and so on.
BONUS POINTS: We also like it when bands interact with us on Twitter, especially when we say we like your album, or share photos of your shows.
In a nutshell:
1. Make good music.
2. Think about how people are finding you these days.
3. Get social.
Any questions?
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I love album art. Remember when it was actually that? Album art?
It used to be a multi-sensual experience to buy albums – something we don’t get anymore now with MP3 and digital.
GET OFF MY LAWN, DAMN KIDS.
haha! so true. 😉
I’d love to hear your thoughts about Rdio and Spotify. I was always under the impression that they’re similar. I’m a huge supporter of Rdio and in full disclosure, I’ve never tried Spotify.
Regardless, the amount of change in the way we discover music now vs 10 years ago is crazy. Cool to see how others use Rdio.
I am so much like this too! And LOVE Rdio!
exactly.
It seems that music was a little more, I don’t want to say personal, it wasn’t, but more something (connection)? You held the album sleeve (and notes) in your hands while listening to the music. Putting the licorice pizza on the turntable and turning it over. (Oh, an I dating myself!)
I remember going to the record store (remember those?) and buying albums like The Rolling Stones ‘Sticky Fingers,’ with the zipper. Oh, and I just heard the song this morning on the way to work, the title track from the ‘The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys’ by Traffic. Not only was the music great, but so were the albums.