Podsafe Musicians – Mobilize Your Fan Reviews!
Are you a podsafe musician with rabid fans? Getting your fans to review your albums in iTunes is now more important than ever with the release of My iTunes from Apple. My iTunes is an Apple-branded widget that provides one click access to albums and reviews and can be put on social networks, web pages, and any place that accepts Flash embedded content. Here’s my reviews in iTunes so far:
My iTunes supports fan purchases, fan favorites, and fan reviews – and I would argue that fan reviews are probably going to be the strongest of the three in terms of converting visitors to buyers, so you may want to encourage your fans to review your albums and then put up the widgets on their sites.What does this mean for you? In addition to getting fans to review your albums, these widgets can potentially multiply the number of people who click on buy-ready links to your albums in iTunes, bringing extra buyers to the digital content. Because it’s Flash-based, there’s no search engine optimization benefit, but having a nice looking widget that’s ready to go and ties into the world’s largest online music store is a sure win for podsafe artists. Most importantly, because it’ll be displayed primarily by fans of your music (as opposed to you), there’s more credibility in recommendations from a third party, which goes a long way.
What To Do Next
- Hit up your mailing lists and ask fans to write reviews of your album(s).
- Once you see reviews appearing, ping those fans who respond and ask them about widgetizing their reviews.
- Potentially offer them something in exchange for widget placement.
If you’re not in iTunes, get there. Services like CD Baby and IODA Promonet will get you there, and while you’ll probably net between 59 and 79 cents on the dollar, it’s better than not getting those sales at all.
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