Susannah Greenwood

Questions of Musical Engagement

Posted by Susannah Greenwood, Oct 05, 2010 2 comments


Susannah Greenwood

Artsopolis.com has a somewhat unique charge in their local community that involves two very distinct groups of folks; Arts Organizations and Audiences. Collaboration and technology are key parts of our mission and we’re always looking for ways to creatively bring artists together with other artists as well as lead audiences to artists/arts organizations. We are constantly asking ourselves “Is there any group or groups of artists that we aren’t reaching?”

Susannah Greenwood

Due to their large numbers, the short “shelf-life” of a gig (as opposed to say a four week run for a theatre) and the one-man-show-type setup of their marketing efforts, local independent musicians are where we saw a consistent gap in our communication and representation.  So, then we asked “what would a musician want that they don’t already have, that could help them to market themselves appropriately within this community?” The answer came back as… another question, “what if we had a vehicle for listening to mp3’s from local bands and linked that “player” directly to the existing events calendar? What if I could listen to a bunch of bands and when I heard one I liked, I could see who it was and search immediately when they were playing? And what if it was free to post the songs and free to listen to them? How awesome would that be? (We ask a lot of questions over here.)

And out of this desire to help the independent musician and link them to the music-seeking audience member, our radio widget or Artsopolis Radio Channel was born. With the help of a local developer who already had a simple version of an mp3 player on a local music festival website, we had a cool radio player customized for Artsopolis. While this may not seem totally revolutionary (places like Amazon and Myspace have had ways to “sample” music for ages)  having music by local, non-produced bands linked directly to a searchable arts calendar is certainly an innovative way to get the music out there and get the audiences to the shows. And, of course “if you build it, they will come.”

By providing a free tool for bands to post their songs for mass consumption AND allowing them (nay, requiring them) to post their local gigs on the calendar, it helps to populate our website with more of the events we’ve had a harder time finding without knowing exactly what we are looking for. It’s like walking into a gourmet chocolate shop. I know I like chocolate, but what am I missing. If only I could easily sample all of them to find out which type of chocolate I like best, I’d buy a whole lot of those kinds.  All of a sudden we found new venues, new artist profile pages, and new event listings cropping up from a segment that had traditionally been hard for us to reach. While we still have a way to go with promoting this tool and reaching deep into the local music scene, the technology is now in place and that is a significant step in the right direction!

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2 responses for Questions of Musical Engagement

Comments

October 05, 2010 at 12:07 pm

Thanks for this post, Susannah. Artsopolis Radio Channel sounds like a great way to entice local, unsigned music acts to promote their performances through the listings.

Question: Will you be tracking the response of local site users to the increased presence of these types of listings on Artsopolis? If so, how will you track that?

Thanks,

David

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October 05, 2010 at 9:23 pm

David!

The playe itself can be tracked on google analytics in terms of how much "play" it gets for sure, but we are a bit old school in our strategy for exact measurement for artist profiles and proactive event listings on an ongoing basis. The good news is every song we ad to the play list HAS an artist attached to it, and when we have the staff capacity and/or immediate need to make stats available, we can simple sit down and do some searches in our database and with analytics to tally participation. A lot of our current "new" idea launches come with the built in abilty to get stats one way or another, whether we are compiling metrics on them on a regular basis

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