sam bush television - a webcasting success story

Yesterday I gave a talk at the chaotic and slightly surreal but hospitable Broadway club Cadillac Ranch during a session at PodCamp, an annual free gathering of digital content creators and facilitators. The title, as above: Sam Bush Television - A Webcasting Success Story. It was a great experience, and a lot of fun to have the Sam Bush Band playing live over the AV system as people gathered. I was streaming "Blue Mountain," the 19th webisode in 19 weeks since Sam released his album "Circles Around Me." My purpose was to describe a fairly unique media and marketing experiment that's made everyone involved pretty happy. It's a story of musical adventure, gonzo filmmaking and ROI. The essentials of the presentation follow the jump.

The challenge was to spark awareness of, conversation about and sales of the Circles album, a CD that was being released in the fall of 2009. Sam was going to be almost entirely off the road for three months. The festival season was a long way off, and Sam was planning foot surgery. The album would get reviewed, and then what? How could we keep Sam and his music in the media after the media was done doing its usual thing? To quote from the presentation overview: 

The answer was Sam Bush Television, a branded weekly drop of high-value video exclusively at SamBush.com, promoted by concerted efforts across social media. The webisodes included live in-studio performances, with song-by-song commentary from Sam, plus a multi-part biographical interview, a tour of Sam's extensive LP collection and his life's collection of instruments, plus more. Sugar Hill Records retained Lotos Nile Media to format and promote each Wednesday upload. String Theory Media was hired to produce the video. The results were regular surges of web site traffic on Wednesdays that held into the weekend and higher-than-usual album sales for a release from that season. 

Essential to getting the word out was a player widget designed by Lotos Nile. At the SBTV page, visitors were invited to click to a page where they could easily copy embed code. When pasted on their blog or social media page, it looked like this:

The widget was hosted by many of our "visibility partners," sites with affinity for Sam's music that were essential in spreading the word about SBTV. And even if they didn't publish the player, we got tons of traffic from dozens of sites that Lotos would alert about each week's new webisode. A partial list includes The Bluegrass Blog, Jambase, PopMatters, Digital Rodeo, Mandolin Cafe and Fuse.tv. And of course Sam's Facebook and MySpace pages were updated every week to remind fans that new content awaited.

Lotos Nile was able to watch each week as the SBTV content drove traffic to the site. The peaks in the five-week sample below are Wednesdays:

Overall, weekly traffic to SB.com has been 68% higher during the SBTV campaign than before. The percentage of visitors who were new rose from 29% to 38%, which feels like great validation of the fresh, episodic content to me. One third of those new visitors arrived at the site via Google searches for "Sam Bush TV," suggesting that word of mouth was working.

The decision was made early on NOT to post the videos individually on YouTube or other sharing sites. The idea was A) we wanted viewers to see that this was a series and make playing any episode easy and B) give them the easiest possible way to click through to Sam's website or, even more important, his online store. Sam chose Nimbit as his online sales solution. Sales via Nimbit generated more money for the artist than sales via iTunes or Amazon, and even more valuably collected zip code data that is even now being shared very usefully with talent buyers as Sam puts together his 2010 calendar.

As for sales, I don't have actual numbers, but the label and the Bush operation are both quite pleased. "Damn good for not getting out of the house for months," reported Lynn Bush, Sam's awesome wife and manager. Most of all, Sam has a story to tell heading into the spring touring and festival season. The content at SBTV will be revisited all year and we have much more footage in the can that can be used in any number of ways. The best stat Lotos share with me validating the SBTV concept was that sales on Wed/Thurs/Fri were three times higher than the other days of the week. 

I hope people will see SBTV as a proof of concept. Creating original documentary and performance content to support either a release or an artist's general development is a far better investment than a traditional music video or merely banging away on social networks without new content to share. Every documentary program should be tailored to the artist. Some will be more based on viral sharing than SBTV. You don't need a widget or proprietary player with YouTube and Vimeo around. And each episide require methodical follow-up by the new media marketing team or person to keep inviting people back to the home page. But in a world where labels and artists keep spending resources trying to get coverage from a fragmenting media world that only seems to want to cover album releases, smart fresh and revealing content is probably more likely to get you written or talked about than that magic street date that happens once every year, two or three. Audiences want INSIDE the artist's world, and we're all about trying to come up with creative ways to make that comfortable for the artist and their fans, new and old. We'd love to hear from you with comments, questions or certainly artist development challenges where we could help. 

Comments

[marko]

craig; nicely done, well documented, ROI in the music biz??! and a great case study for how do use all the important elements of old and new media to create impact...

congrats!

[lynn bush]

nice job craig. i'm even more impressed, and we lived it!!!