There’ll be a separate post with the basic facts, but Tim Walker of The Leading Question is presenting a survey carried out by that firm and us (Music Ally) on how music fans want to experience digital music. So I’m going to give some notes from Tim’s speech here as a companion to that.How are fans keeping informed about fave artists? 68% artist websites and 64% artist email updates. 51% MySpace, almost double Facebook’s 28%. 40% use Google to find info about their favourite artists.”Often when we talk to music fans, when you get beyond iTunes ecosystem, people get their music from Google – they use Google to search then go through to retailers to buy that track, but the brand they associate it is Google,” says Tim, saying AdWords is thus a very effective advertising medium, even for smaller music firms.YouTube is 39%, artist blogs are 10%, ‘via my mobile phone’ is 5% and Bebo is 4%, with Others at 15% (obviously, people could say more than one answer.More background – females are more ardent fans than males in general – they use more of these channels. Paying downloaders are more willing to sign up for updates. And these results were fairly standard across all three markets covered – the UK, US and France.Next slide: what artist merchandise do fans buy? The most popular are t-shirts/clothing – 14% buy them regularly, but 55% buy the occasionally. Also buying live tour DVDs – 15% regularly and 51% occasionally. The challenge is to convert that occasional behaviour into regular behaviour.Mobile content is 4% regular and 20% occasionally. Mufs and posters are 7% and 41% respectively, and virtual items (e.g on virtual worlds) are 2% and 6%. I’m trying to get the figures all down, but I think we’re releasing the report at some point on here with all the charts. Possibly.What about fans’ interest in artist-based subscription models – subscribing to get cool content and offers. 30% said yes, 56% said it depends on the cost, and 13% said no. So how much? 51% said they’d only use it if it was free, but would accept ads. Those who would pay said they would pay
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…