I met Daniel “Danny Dee” Aguayo when I took a class on the music industry at SF State. He was invited by my professor to give a guest lecture at one of our classes.

I was blown away by his presentation to the class called “The Age of Engage: An Urban Guide to the Social Music Evolution” which addressed the changing state of the music industry and how artists can succeed in today’s music industry.

I recently got a chance to interview him, and find out a little more about his career, his website, and his advice for making it as an independent musician.

Danny Dee has an interesting perspective on the current state of the music industry and how artists can best market themselves and succeed. I learned a lot talking to him and I think you will too.  

Since Danny had a lot to say, I’ve broken the interview up into two parts.  (Note: this interview was done over the phone, not in writing.)

Here is part 1. Stay tuned for part 2, coming soon. You can visit Danny Dee online at http://www.digipendent.com/ and http://dannydee.com/.

 

ON YOUR WEBSITE YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS A “STRATEGIST & ADVISOR FOR BOTH MAJOR/INDIE LABELS, ARTISTS, AND FORTUNE 500 BRANDS.”  WHAT DOES THAT JOB ENTAIL?

For artists the term is D to F, which is direct to fan and for consumer brands, and companies it D to C which is direct to consumers, so everything we do is a form of direct marketing rather than push marketing.

Rather than broadcast messaging to a blanket of people I focus on specifically targeting individual consumers,  or users/ fans.  So its  a highly targeted approach, rather than hey, we’re going to buy a billboard and everyone’s going to see it when they drive by it on the freeway.

Finding out who your key target  is or your ideal consumer, and then figuring out how to reach them, how they consume media, what their habits are and creating a strategy or tactical plan around how to best  reach  that user or fan. That’s kinda what I do.

It’s really analytics driven, digital marketing, social media optimization making sure everything is up to par with best practices. Just following the trajectory of new technologies every single day,  it’s a lot brand consulting brand management obviously with that, tactical stuff , the deployment, the ideation, the development of the web and the supporting assets  for those efforts.

 

CAN YOU TELL ME A LITTLE ABOUT HOW YOU GOT ON THAT CAREER PATH?

So I have a traditional marketing background.  I started in radio, I did radio for 9 years and in that I
worked my way up.  I interned, then worked in the promotions department, then I became street team coordinator,  then I became street team manager.  After leaving radio for a brief hiatus I started my own marketing firm doing much of the same as at the radio station, which is a lot of  event driven promotion.  

So lets say you go to like- in San Francisco they have this big thing called the Nike Marathon or whenever there’s a big event like you go to a fair or something, you’ll have Red Bull or Vitamin Water, doing what’s called brand trial.  So you’ll see the Red Bull van out there with a tent and you can taste the new flavor and all that. I was doing that. I was getting hired by a lot of brands mainly at the time.  Vitamin Water was brand new and for record labels I was doing it for 50 cent, who at the time had a movie, soundtrack, and a game.  I got well versed in that and learned all that from radio, from my experience there.  

And I remember in 2005, one of the clients for radio was Reebok- they told me they were going to pay me less. And I was like, well why,  if we are getting such great traction, surpassing  bench marks  milestones and expectations that they had. And they were like yea, we’re shifting our money online.  

That made go hmm, like what is this online stuff? At that time really Friendster was a thing, Myspace was new. It’s still to this day and its sad, but it was like no man’s land. No one really new how to leverage the tools.

And when I ended up going back to radio shortly after in 2006 when I got there the vibe was the same in radio.  When people would say- what is streaming? how do we optimize our website? or how do we do this or that? People would just throw their hands up and say I don’t know.

That’s digital stuff, that’s that geek stuff.  We don’t know it. I was seeing that there was a need for someone to understand that, so that just became kinda my role.

I’ve always been interested in technology, I grew up in an era there was more of a stigma attached to being on the computer.  It was nerdy to do that when I was growing up. I graduated high school in 2002 so it was the era of Napster.

It was cool to have a computer to download music or go on the internet for chat rooms but it wasn’t like you were on there you know what I mean?  It wasn’t the same as it is now.  There’s no more stigma like that.  Now nerds are kinda cool – less of a stigma and more of a hit factor.  

I got into that cause I saw a big opportunity in that traditional people didn’t know how to play.  And I was in a unique position in that I was young enough to recognize the disconnect and how I could straddle both sides. Cause when I was in high school that’s 1999 when Napster hit, I remember going from the old model to new model.  So that worked with both in marketing and my music experience.

 

WHAT ARE THE MOST VALUABLE INTERNET TOOLS FOR ARTISTS TODAY?

Google. And that’s like honest to god because,  I was just having this conversation a few days ago with my cousins, You can literally ask any question in google and based on keywords you get an answer.

You can click on a YouTube video and find a tutorial or a top 10 list or somewhere.  And before if I asked my mom or my cousins and they didn’t know the answer to something we just didn’t know.  If my high school guidance counselor didn’t know how to land an internship at a company or we didn’t have any connections, it just didn’t happen for you.

Now everything is out there. You’re lucky.  Right there, just the click of a button like you can just ask google whatever you want.  It’s a hive mind.

Other than the search capabilities and figuring out the information of the world,  they’ve made themselves indispensable for gmail, which  will be tied to a paypal account which you can get  free also. So if an artist wants to sell direct to fans his paypal account is tied to his gmail account. He’ll be notified every time there’s a transaction made.  

The artist can also use the google reader and google analytics.  Especially with everything I do is data driven. Just everything is based on hard facts.

That’s another reason I love digital and gravitated towards it more than radio.  Traditional advertising is based on BS. The way they sell newspapers, the way they sell ads, the way they sell billboards, TV, radio it’s all based on potential reach, they call it impression.  

If you do anything, if you’ve ever spent any money online with anybody, there’s always a black and white at the end of the day.  They can say look- This many people clicked on your ad.  This many people ignored it. This many people spent x amount of time, you know what I mean?  Its black and white transparent results.  

And with radio its like I just dumped 20 grand into radio, did it even work? You just don’t know. There’s no way to measure ROI. That’s why I like digital in general because its so black and white transparent.  

So using those transparent techniques is why google is indispensable.  Because in google you have something called Google analytics that an artist can use on their website to track everything so now you know where your traffic is coming from.

If pitchfork.com did a review, you see the spike in traffic. You can see it came from pitchfork and or you can see that pitchfork gave them a couple thousand people to the site.  But this little site that’s run by an unknown blogger in Seattle  also sent a link over and garnered more views than that, that gives you a clear indicator. Like, hey let me go message this Seattle blogger a little more I’m getting a lot of traction over there.  It’s the type and amount of data or information you can get from using google analytics.

Google also has google alerts. Lets say we were managing Jay Z.  We would set up a google alert for Jay Z at the end of the day every day we’d get a google alert with all the links to every single conversation on the Internet in the world that mentioned Jay Z’s name in that day.  

Little things like that help you keep tabs on what’s going on around your brand.

The artist is a brand now too so there’s not too much difference between Nabisco or Oreo cookies than there is 50 cent.  They’re a packaged item.

 

CAN YOU TELL OUR READERS ABOUT YOUR FORMULA FOR CONNECTION WITH FANS?

There’s a gentleman by the name of  Mike Masnick (www.techdirt.com), he coined this formula and I’m a big proponent of it.

CwF+RtB= $$$

Basically that’s connecting with your fans, and giving them a reason to buy turns into money in the bank.
People look at it  like well duh?  Problem is that a lot of artists never really give a reason to buy.

So a reason to buy can be different to anybody.  Specifically in music the song, the album itself has lost the majority of its value and so people want to own the brand in different ways.

There’s a group called Outkast that’s comprised of Andre 3000 and Big Boi and Big Boi just had an album come out and I was talking to the label Grand Hustle, which is the parent label, and they were saying yea we have the album coming out. Well it’s like what else?  Because I can google Big Boi plus torrent and find a link online right now and I could download it for free. That’s the reality.  

I don’t have to pay for your 99 cent download or your ten dollar download or go to Best Buy and buy a copy. Its easier for me to download it, you know less clicks. What is it they are selling that can’t be duplicated like that?  What gives cash value and relevance and is physical?

And then they come up with a collection like a limited edition vinyl, and Big Boi/ Outkast chain that’s limited. Things like that is really what fans crave, and its more important than ever.

 

WHEN YOU ARE CREATING A SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN, HOW DO YOU GET STARTED?  WHAT ARE THE FIRST STEPS? 

Social media, really  it’s a conversation.  That’s what it’s enabling everybody to do, it’s enabling everybody to talk to each other, share opinions, be creators and publishers.  

We are the people formerly known as the audience, now we are all contributors whether we realize it or not.  So the best way is normal conversation.  The social and the social media is really at this moment about sociology and not technology.  

That’s why I’m able to thrive in it. I’m not a tech guy like I don’t now code I don’t know html but I know how to speak to people in normal social dynamics and that’s really all it is. So people that are the best conversationalists are the best listeners.

So when you start a social media campaign its all starts with listening.  So the best thing to do is to listen to what is already being said about your brand, or if you are a brand new artist and no one knows who you are then listen about what’s going on in the scene so, you can tie into it.  

So if me and you were managing Kanye West and we wanted to start a social media program for him the first thing we would have done is use something like Twitter.  Twitter  is a really good thing cause its in real time.  Go to search.twitter.com and enter Kanye West’s name and see at this second who’s talking about him.  

So we’re gonna see that there’s a couple hundred results of people giving opinions or saying they’re listening to a song or whatever.  So we can  figure out where that place is.  It might or might not be Twitter – might be a conversation about Kayne West on last FM – so it would make more sense to cater to last FM crowd.  

So I would start with searching.  Keywords is the biggest thing when it comes to search. You can Search.twitter.com or you can use google blog search.

There’s a place called Alltop or Technorati.  There’s something that’s really good for artists that I tell everybody , there’s a website called hype machine (www.Hypem.com). You can go on there and type Kanye West. Lets say we are managing an artist that sounds like Kanye West, and everybody’s like- you know what he reminds me of Kanye West .

If we are branding an artist and want to know where to start, we can put Kanye wWest’s name into hype machine and it will give us a list of every single blog that’s ever blogged about him is currently blogging about Kanye West’s music or anything like that.  So now we know where to go.

Now we just take that list, break it down into manageable chucks and see how we can influence those people who are then broadcasting to an audience.  So its really ground level stuff and it takes a lot of time.

At the end of the day its very formulaic but it’s a lot of work. Especially because its hard to get traction initially.  A lot of it is – you can’t really market, it’s a form of unmarketing, it’s a lot of earned media.  It’s more of acting like a contributor than marketer adding value to a certain space or niche.  

It’s no longer a mass market. Those days are really over or they are few and far between. Instead of mass market its really mass niche and keeping to one target audience and owning the niche is your best bet to kind of make traction.

And building relationships that are one to one. That’s the biggest thing.

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Part 2 to follow soon….