Sandbox Issue 199: Carry on Bandcamping
March 7, 2018
This week’s lead feature looks at Bandcamp, the platform that paid out $70m to independent artists and labels in 2017. We’ve talked to the company and some labels doing well on it, to get practical tips for making the...
Sandbox Issue 198: The Analytic Trick
February 21, 2018
Lead: Apple Music is slowly rolling out its analytics tools for artists and Saavn is following suit. YouTube, SoundCloud and Spotify have been offering such tools for years – but as streaming grows, the nature and detail...
Sandbox Issue 197: FAN BASIS subcontracting marketing to your audience
February 17, 2018
Lead: Since the 1950s, fans were there to buy records, tickets and whatever bits of merchandise acts could pump out into the market. Three decades ago, they were turned into evangelists as street teams came to the fore. Today...
Sandbox Issue 196: Try Switching it online and offline again
January 24, 2018
Lead: Reports of the death of offline marketing spend are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated. TV spend is hanging in there and billboard spend is now a key part of “statement” campaigns – counterintuitively...
Sandbox Issue 195: Tools’ Gold
January 10, 2018
Lead: New year, new start. Setting out our stall for 2018, we go through the essential marketing tools that we expect to see being used in more (and more creative) ways this year. From Facebook Frame Studio to Tunespeak –...
Read our Sandbox Best Music Marketing Campaigns of 2017 report
December 21, 2017
Here it is – Sandbox’s massive run down of the best, most innovative and most exciting music marketing campaigns of the past 12 months. Download the report HERE.
As usual, all campaigns are listed in non-partisan alphabetical...
Sandbox 193: Playlisten without prejudice
December 7, 2017
Lead: Labels and artists spent 2017 getting their heads around how playlists have created a new centre of gravity for the record business. The old ways of promoting a record (discounting at retail, plugging at radio, pitching...
Sandbox Issue 192: Show and Tell
November 22, 2017
Lead: Both Spotify and Apple Music are going heavy on original video, using this as a new reason for people to subscribe as well as a means to generate unique (and exclusive) content at the precise moment acts and labels...
Sandbox Issue 191: Ad ons
November 15, 2017
Lead: With so much music now being ostensibly free at the point of consumption, advertising is expected to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the digital content industries. As such, the nature and forms of advertising have...
Sandbox Issue 190: Retarget practice
November 15, 2017
Lead: Have you ever been hounded around the internet by an ad for a gas boiler or cheap flights? Of course you have. It’s 2017, after all. That is, as you’ll know, symptomatic of bad retargeting. But don’t mock too...
Sandbox Issue 189: D2C gets cranked up
November 15, 2017
Lead: D2C started to flex its muscles just as the decline in the traditional CD market began to really bite. Now it is more important that ever as both a revenue driver and a means of ensuring ongoing fan engagement. We look...
Sandbox Issue 188: Wham, Bam, Instagram
September 29, 2017
Lead: Speak to any artist and ask them what social platform they prefer most and chances are they’ll say Instagram. Away from the trolling on Twitter and the sinkhole of posts on Facebook, Instagram offers a calmer place...
