I am writing a piece on my music blog www.myhotmusic.com about the so called new model and I want to cite examples of artists, labels or anyone else who is having some success with this new model or selling direct.

The main points of the article are the following:

Traditional marketing for independents v the new media marketing. How has Youtube brought hits to your site or sales. The tumbling costs of video production. Television and the plethora of new TV stations. I will be promoting this article heavily on the net so if you have any interesting stories or examples or anything really that you want. Big End especially how did you go with your in house marketing ?

The idea is to subvert all the DIY books who tell nothing but are just adverts for their book who rehash stuff you already know.

Visit my site and have a look. It will be coming with a new interface so check back regularly.

Linkie poos below:

the main success for me with the "in house" job is radio play. It is amazing how many stations pick you up once you have a toe hold on some of the smaller ones. Even had a couple of "record of the week" lately on drive time. However, it is absolute horse work...press releases, promo copies, emails, phone calls, blah blah.
I have someone who handles most of this, however, I still "muck in".

My next move is to hire someone on a part time basis for digital marketing/media. I need to exploit Youtube far more effectively...it's a great marketing tool.

Welcome to the wild frontier.

The problem with You Tube and the other online sites is converting views to sales.

I've seen tracks with literally millions of views (take the Chocolate Rain video mentioned in another thread) but I bet they have virtually no downloads - let alone sales.

The new mentality about entertainment - not just music but films, newspapers and other forms - is that, thanks to the world wide web, it's free.

A disturbing concept but one I believe it is necessary to admit before progress can be made.

All the more reason to push for royalty payments from YouTube, JK. I really can't see any other way to move forward. Besides, if it really is driving that much traffic for them, what's the issue?

Well royalty payments from Youtube is the next step. I think there are some sales from Youtube but you really have to appreciate that the conversion to sales would be small. There are a few people who are getting good conversion rates from Youtube into iTunes sales, I mentioned one person a while ago who had a lot of sales as a result of his Youtube video.

There are 2 ways to use Youtube, each working very differently.

1. As a tool for driving traffic to your website/online shop/iTunes. For this the idea is to tease and then direct them to your website or Myspace for the sucker punch.

2. As a PR exercise. The aim is to generate a lot of Youtube views to use as spin in your PR campaign.

With the former, short teasers with, visit our website for the full version should be the ploy. Similar to how all the 'ahem' x-rated videos use Youtube. You should get 0.1% to 3% traffic as a result.

With the latter, you really don't care too much other than a lot of views in as short a time as possible. The main thing here is to use the Youtube views as a spin for your offline campaign. (Watched over 100,000 times on Youtube in 3 weeks) is a good spin.

As far as monetising it well it boils down to understanding how Gootube is generating Advertising dollars and how you should do the same.

Normally you should get anything from 0.1% to 3% maximum visitors to your site. So a video with 70,000 views will get you 70 visits or 700 visits as a conservative maximum. The key thing depends on why you ask them to visit your site. If it is a case of Buy the download now, then you should get a high sales ratio from the visit.

Youtube is a fantastic tool but in the context of everything is for free mentality then without a doubt one has to tease them and get them to visit your site where you can have the video in full technicolor quality or a online single version with appropriate ads to monetise it. A sales button should also be employed.

Now i'm off to get a cuppa lol.

YouTube pays already royalties. But the big question is, if the artists/composers/small labels get a fair share.

At least here in Germany the money collected by GEMA (for composers and publishers) isn't distributed based on actual plays, but according to other factors like airplay/sales etc.

And will the majors (EMI has licensed its catalogue, the other three big record companies own YouTube-shares) pay their artists?

I hear every word of this...disturbing indeed. The debate continues...what's the answer guys?

Well I know Merlin have begun negotiating with Youtube for royalty payments and also they are building a case against them for copyright infringement as well. It is time to join Merlin methinks.

"Chuck from Pop Labs raps about how making the right choices in your online marketing campaigns can increase not only the traffic and the conversions you get, but how you close those conversions."

much appreciated DJones...I need this guy on the team!