Music Ally

Hal Ritson from the Young Punx gave a punchy assessment of how artists should be using social media to connect with their fans at MidemNet today. The key lesson: they have to truly embrace it.

“You have to do it passionately and personally,” he said. “People are interested in the artists, not in somebody from the marketing department.”

For Young Punx, this includes podcasts that regularly get 10,000 listeners, and which have become one of the key ways the band’s music gets discovered around the world.

Ritson also talked about the band’s work with a German beer brand, which distributed their music there, helping the country to become the third biggest for the Young Punx in terms of Facebook fans.

“They were giving away our music, they were paying us to be associated with their brand – the revenue was coming from them, and everyone was happy.”

Ritson was joined by former Dresden Dolls (and now solo) artist Amanda Palmer, who talked about how she uses Twitter, her blog and her forum to connect with her fans.

“My fanbase has always been very connected and community-minded from day one,” she said, although she warned that artists shouldn’t “over-strategise” their social media activities – and instead just dive right in.

For more from the session, check the live post on the Midem(Net) blog.

Tags: amanda palmer, hal ritson, young punx

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 11:34 am and is filed under Digital Music Strategy, midemnet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.