Last.fm, an internet radio/concert listing/social networking site based out of the UK, launched an artist royalty program this morning. According to Wired‘s Listening Post blog, a percentage of the advertisement dollars (err, pounds) will be given to artists when ads appear next to their streaming music, regardless of an artist’s position in the industry (signed, unsigned, managed, unmanaged).
By virtue of having to track the numbers for payment purposes, it seems artists will gain useful marketing data from this initiative as well. From an earlier Wired interview with Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel:
Stiksel told us about two tools launched concurrently with
the Artist Royalty Program that show artists “how many scrobbles, now
many streams, how many on-demand plays (they’ve had) and so on – all of
these things will be broken down, because it’s a prerequisite for
transparency as far as the accounting of all of the royalties is
concerned.”
I took a gander at Carnegie Hall’s page this morning:
“Care to help?” I’m like, yes, Last.fm, I am trying.
Let’s see if Carnegie Hall fixes this. That invokes something you might want to talk about here. (Though it’s not my business to tell you what to blog about! You’re doing a fabulous job.)
But this is something that you and I, and many other people have talked about. Do large performing arts institutions really know what to do with their web presence? Is Carnegie Hall monitoring web references to itself, especially in obvious places (arts blogs, Last.fm)? They need to be, so that when something like this Last.fm thing shows up, they step in and put exactly the description of themselves that they’d like to see.
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Hey, get your own blog Sandow!! Actually, something I’ve been thinking a lot about is the Google Alerts generated from this blog. I have Google Alerts – also known as the best thing to happen to publicists since I suppose the phone (I wonder who was considered The First Publicist and what he or she had to do to pitch stories) – anyway, I have Google Alerts set up for all my artists, so I know that every time I write an artist or organization’s name on this blog it will pop up on THEIR alerts. “Yikes, Carnegie Hall is going to get a Google Alert about my yammering,” I thought. And then, “Wait, I wonder if Carnegie Hall even has a Google Alert set up for itself.” I’m sure they do, but maybe some organizations don’t? It’s really the best way to find out every time your organization (or name, if you’re an individual artist) is mentioned. Most importantly, you learn about blogs and publications that you never knew existed and can add them to your press list. -AA