Industry Shift: What The Armada Music Label Can Teach Us About New Media Marketing
You may not know this about me (unless you follow me on Twitter where I tweet music video clips from time to time), but I’m a huge fan of the progressive and vocal trance scene. That’s dance music for the uninitiated, although the genre of dance is massive in terms of all the categories and sub-categories, which includes genres like techno and rave music, which you might be familiar with.
In the case of trance music, the leading DJ, at least in terms of a popular vote run by DJ Mag, is Armin Van Buuren. Armin has been number one for three years running and as DJs and trance producers go, he’s about as prolific and talented as they come. I’m a fan, that’s for sure.
One of the things I enjoy often late at night when I’m in the mood for music is to trawl around YouTube watching video clips of the latest and classic trance tracks. There’s an absolute library of great music in YouTube, and of course it’s all free.
Armin Van Buuren is not only the number one DJ, he is also co-founder of a music label called Armada Music. One of the very smart things I’ve noticed Armada is doing is making heavy use of YouTube as a marketing channel.
At least 50% of the tracks I listen to on YouTube come from Armada, especially if I follow a music trail going from one track to the next following the “similar video” recommendations provided by the YouTube algorithm.
Watching Armada use YouTube is interesting, because the music is free, but obviously the company makes money. I believe Armada, and labels like them, are pioneers in adopting new media, rather than fighting it. There’s a lesson in this case study for any of us who want to leverage the web for exposure of creative output, even if their is a profit motivation behind it.
The Profit Model For Music Has Changed
How Can You Make Passive Income Online?
I had a meeting with a friend and his business partner last week. The request was to “pick my brain” on the best way to move forward to generate some passive income streams online.
These two particular people are like a lot of people I know. They’ve got tech skills, they know the Internet well and they have lots of ideas for cool Internet business applications and websites.
Unfortunately they’ve managed to dig themselves into a situation where they spend all their time working on client jobs, running what you might call a “consulting” tech firm, completing various programming and web development projects for other people’s businesses. The money in this business model can be good, but it has some serious downsides too, namely -
- You have to deal with clients, usually one-on-one, a very low leverage interaction and often just painful as you have to work you way through lots of annoying clients to find the good ones
- You work very long hours, which my two friends could certainly testament to
- You know a lot about a lot, yet have difficulty specializing in anything
- You’re in competition with every other jack-of-all trades web development firm out there, which means you unfortunately end up competing on price, and it’s certainly not nice to have to undercut yourself simply to work with bad clients
Those points aren’t necessarily true across the board, but I’m pretty sure any person who has ever consulted or done any kind of web development work for clients will know what I’m talking about.
My friends are smart enough to realize the path they are on is not going to lead them to where they want to go, so they’re looking to make some changes.
The goal is to develop some form of income stream, or several, that could replace the need to take on client work. As always, the relationship between time, money and freedom of choice is heavily integrated here, as my friends are looking to make more money without drastically increasing their workload and eventually freeing up their time so they can do what they want to, rather than what they have to.
Let’s Not Be Strict About Passive Definitions
I’m about to reveal what I talked about during our meeting with my two friends. In terms of what I suggest you do if you are looking to make some passive income online, I don’t want people to get too caught up on the idea of “pure” passive income.
The methods I’m about to talk about are not pure passive income sources, however they have the potential to be low work, high return income sources that can potentially become very close to pure passive longer term. The fact is, it takes time to develop these income streams, but we all love the phrase passive income so I’ve decided to use it here in the title of my post.
So to clarify, what we are looking to do is start up completely new projects that have the potential to become good sources of near-passive and possibly pure passive income, it just might take some time to get there.
First, Understand Your Unique Opportunities
One of the first things I discussed with my friends was taking their present situation and turning it into something that’s less work for them. Sometimes the “lowest hanging fruit” is just a simple adjustment to the business model you are following now, transforming your core skill from labor intensive, to hands-off delivery, or at least much less work.
Here’s some examples of how you might do this -
How Well Do You Know Your Customer?
I’m not 100% sure, but I believe the very first email list I subscribed to was David DeAngelo’s Double Your Dating free newsletter. At the time I didn’t realize David D. was a nom de plume (fake name) and that the real person behind the newsletter was Eben Pagan, who I would later come to know as a leading Internet marketer.
In more recent years I’ve studied Eben’s work extensively, however it was my experience on his alter ego’s email newsletter all those years ago that I count as one of the most beneficial in my own career as an Internet marketer.
The reason why the Double Your Dating email newsletter was so valuable to me was because it was the only time I can remember studying an email list from the frame of two very important perception points in a completely “raw” state of mind -
- As a customer who was suffering the pain that the newsletter purported to help cure
- As a newbie Internet marketer studying how to make money online
When I first subscribed to Double Your Dating I was a young single guy struggling to figure out how to meet and date girls. I subscribed because the sales copy “spoke” to me. The benefits struck an emotional cord with my own desires. It was as if this person understood where I was coming from and where I wanted to go.
Like many young men at the same time as I was looking to gain experience with women, I was also looking for ways to make money and establish myself as a business man. In this case, the Internet was my chosen landscape to build my fortunes and I was studying what those who already had made money online did to build their wealth.
Given Eben Pagan created one of the most effective (and substantial – each email was MASSIVE) email marketing sequences in existence today, the foundation for a twenty million dollar dating empire, I had happened upon one of the best resources to study, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
Unfortunately in some ways, from that point forward as I became more familiar with Internet marketing, I found it increasingly difficult to fully engage with any online studying materials because I was constantly analyzing the “how” of what they did (the meta-analysis), rather than engaging with the “what” of what was being taught.
The Customer Avatar
I’ve been going through the recordings of Eben Pagan’s Get Altitude training, a high level coaching program for entrepreneurs who want to take their business to greater success.
One of the fundamentals that Eben teaches is to truly understand where your customer is coming from. This is not just knowing the needs and wants of your ideal customer, but understanding who they are, how they live, who they associate with, what their general attitude to life is – AND, more importantly, what are the underlying emotional conditions driving the actions they take.
To facilitate a deeper understanding of your customer, Eben teaches a concept known as the Customer Avatar.
Can Your Business Make You Rich?
Many years ago I wrote a blog post that looked at the reality of how much money you actually make when you run your own business.
You can read the article here – Do You Want to Run Your Own Business? Read this First!
My premise back then was that most business owners don’t make a whole lot of money until they sell their business.
This situation is very similar to what an employee, who stays with the one company for many years, goes through. A business owner can make a salary level income year after year, and then one day, likely at retirement age, the business is sold and a nice lump sum of cash is returned, much like a superannuation or retirement settlement an employee receives at the end of a long career.
Obviously this situation isn’t ideal if you are an entrepreneur looking to create freedom in your life, both time and financial freedom. If you spend all day, possibly beyond normal working hours, in your business, and you’re taking home an income pretty much equivalent to a salary (plus you have many more responsibilities than an employee), you are not in a great situation.
Turning Cash Into Assets
If I look back over the last five years of my business life, there have been a handful of significant “spikes” in my income.
The spikes have occurred because of either of these events -
What Motivates A Purchase?
Over the last week I attended three very different live events, although they all focused on the same thing – making money.
The first one was Roger Hamilton’s introduction night, a free event he puts on as a feeder to his 3-day workshop and breakfast pitch.
I’ve heard of Roger before, but I had some misconceptions. I thought he was one of the older crowd of “legacy” business folk still doing the speaking circuit. I was surprised when he turned out to be a younger fellow, with a unique accent (he is a strange combination of Hong Kong plus Scotland).
On Friday I attended the Andrew and Daryl Grant Sydney workshop and did my usual two presentations, one on website flipping and the other on blogging. The Grants put on a four day show that is unlike any other event I’ve been to, and is definitely more suited to my style (I’ll explain why in a moment).
On Saturday I popped into a Christopher Howard managed event, that brought together some well known Internet marketers, both locals and overseas speakers, including John Carlton, Brad Fallon, James Schramko and Ari Galper. This event is your typical pitch fest, with two hour sessions for each speaker ending with a sale for a $2,000+ product.
The Psychology Behind The Sale
I’ve been to many business events, some that were free, some I paid money for as part of coaching programs. It’s very interesting to observe the different psychology behind each event, especially when it comes to how they go about making sales.
All three events I attended during the last week were technically free to attend. Although there are pricing structures, in most cases you can score yourself a free ticket in some way. The organizers of these events do not profit from the seminar entry fees, rather it comes from money made when a person orders a product sold at the event.
I noticed three key elements were used as selling tools at each event, however they were applied in different ways. Here is how I observed each of the selling psychologies at the events…
