Diversification is a business and investment term meant to broaden your offerings and mitigate risk.  In your music marketing efforts, diversification will allow you to test new ideas and see what is working, and find new fans from different sources.

So, which different avenues have you tested out lately?

We all have different goals – maybe someone lives in Alaska and wants to find 15 live fans to play to in the dead of winter over the Internet.   Others want to sell more albums; others want to tour; some want it all – to make a living and more out of playing music.

Ultimately for most, though, it is about connecting and finding more fans to justify the time you put into to your music.  It could be fans or money or general community interest that is the payback.

However, no matter your exact goal, you should be on the lookout for some basic criteria in the services you elect to use that will provide the maximum long term benefits for your time and energy spent in signing up and learning to use such services.

For example, when ringtones were just starting to become popular, I was able to get Seconds On End listed as a Ringtone of the Day on Myxer.com for their upbeat number, Go Go Boots.  SOE had 4500+ downloads in one day, which was quite exciting.  It was certainly fun to see the numbers go up, and nice to get that sort of exposure.

However, we had no way to follow up with these people after the download.  The settings on Myxer did not automatically add someone to our Myxer fan page.  Moreover, we did not get emails directly from those folks.  The band got some web traffic, and a few emails submitted that way, but otherwise little long term benefit was gained because we could not directly follow up with folks.  That part was certainly disappointing.

We all want to try new products and services, and find a potentially easier path to getting new fans.  Yet, we all need to push to make sure we are getting something in return for the free music we may be distributing, and a reason to think that the time we put in to learning a new platform or service will pay off.

This led me to think about what every service should have if they want to attract and add value to independent musicians.

(1)  Information needs to be given to the musicians in exchange for anything they give away for free.  Usually this is an email for free songs, or the like.  Do not use a product if it does not allow this functionality.  These services don’t have to give away email addresses of their users, but if there is a fan page on their site that allows for ways to contact them within that site’s functionality (like Myspace or Facebook does), then that is fine too.  The point of this is to make sure musicians don’t waste time on efforts that are not going to allow for future contact with new fans, once they are initially contacted and given something of value.

In the ringtone example, all that service had to do was automatically make someone a fan on their platform once they downloaded a ringtone and/or have a box defaulted to say that you want to be contacted by this band for future events, etc.  Someone always could uncheck the box or later opt out.

(2)  Look for “pay what you want” options in selling your music.  Since the incremental price of what you pay is zero for future downloaded songs, just accept that and try and get the music out to folks.  Personally, I think it is okay to make a very low minimum price, or limit how many songs can be sold for zero.  This functionality should preferably be done on your website directly to cut down on any fees owed to third parties.  Bandcamp is one example of a service with “pay what you want” functionality embedded into its platform.

(3)  Get fans involved.  Today’s street team is more online than anything else.  Offer incentives for folks who recommend their friends to your band’s email list.  Perhaps give new fans a limited number of links to offer free downloads to X number of people, so this way they could at least benefit from this effort by taking credit for getting their friends new music.  This is somewhat reminiscent of how gmail grew by allowing other gmail users a limited number of accounts to offer to their friends.

(4)  Allow direct interaction with fans, and allow fans to very obviously provide comments on the music and the band in general.  Myspace is a good example of this, although seemingly a tad overwhelming when there are so many comments.  Comments on specific songs are good.  Bandcamp is doing this well right now.

As new music business blogger Kevin Ryan stated:  “The question now is: will artists make the shift and tap into their true creativity in order to exploit all of these free services? Everywhere we look there are opportunities. For artists such as myself, this is an exciting time….and I understand that in order to have a music career, now more than ever you must be willing to put in the work, continue to create quality content, and communicate with fans in new, innovative ways.”

Justin.tv and other video /chat platforms are the next wave of new products and services that musicians are going to be looking towards to help them grow.  After all, they foster a connection between musician and fan that is just about as close as possible to seeing someone live.

However, these and other new products still must be focused on musicians and musicians’ specific needs in order to develop and maintain the functionality needed to be useful for independent musicians in the long run.

Other platforms and ideas will be discussed at the panel titled “Getting to Popular” at the upcoming 5th San Francisco Music & Technology Summit on Monday, December 7, 2009.  I look forward to hearing from you all there.