We first wrote about startup Community in early 2019, when it emerged as a rival to marketing firm SuperPhone, helping celebrities (musicians included) to create text-messaging communities for their fans. It […]
Tag: messaging
Posted inNews
Eminem taps Community platform for messaging with fans
“Dear Stan, I meant to write you sooner, but I just been busy,” wrote Eminem on Instagram yesterday. “text me, ill hit you back” – with an accompanying phone number.
And no, of course Eminem isn’t giving out his cellphone number to 30.1 million people on Instagram: it’s part of a marketing campaign involving one of the messaging-focused fan engagement platforms.
The link in his bio takes fans to a landing page on the website my.community.com, which is the startup we wrote about back in January 2019 when it relaunched as a competitor to another platform called SuperPhone – Community had previously been called Shimmur, and was one of the first cohort of Techstars Music startups in 2017.
Posted inNews
Drum’n’bass artist Turno used messaging to grow his mailing list
British drum’n’bass artist Turno is the latest musician to explore messaging-based marketing with startup I Am Pop’s platform – and it has published a case study of his campaign with more details. […]
Posted inNews
RIAA targets Telegram in latest ‘notorious markets’ piracy list
US music-industry body the RIAA has submitted its latest list of sites and apps raising piracy concerns, for consideration for the next ‘notorious markets’ list produced by the US Trade […]
Posted inSandbox
Sandbox Issue 233: Shopping Around: Making Online Stores Add Up
Lead: Working with D2C experts is one part of the business, but changes in how social media sites are structuring themselves can offer acts new ways to sell products to fans of all stripes. We look at where social platforms are being best used to sell merchandise, how casual fans (and not just superfans) can […]
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Posted inMarketing
Social media newsfeeds are dying. What’s the future of sharing? (guest column)
This guest column comes from Tim Heineke, founder and CEO of I AM POP.
Social media, the poster child of the internet revolution, is losing its influence to such an extent that even Mark Zuckerberg has accepted the decline of the newsfeed.
Is this, as Zuckerberg suggests, simply an issue of users becoming wary of giving data to social platforms or are there wider reasons for social’s decline? Even before his announcement, the newsfeed had long been too crowded to deliver a meaningful and interactive experience and an unreliable means for artists and businesses to reach their audiences.
As platforms get more popular, their newsfeeds become overloaded with content, requiring algorithms to regulate what is displayed to users. This creates a ‘negative network effect’ where an increasing number of users sees the algorithm prioritise friends’ posts over other content, to ensure people feel that their time on Facebook is well spent.
Posted inNews
TikTok parent Bytedance launches Feiliao messaging app
TikTok may be taking over the western world (in terms of downloads at least, as we reported last week) but its parent company Bytedance has just launched a new app […]
Posted inNews
WeChat users can now add songs to the videos they post
Chinese messaging app WeChat has a new feature that allows people to add songs to the videos they are sharing with friends. The feature is drawing these background tracks from […]
Posted inNews
Project Wave app aims to blend private messaging with music
Music Ally cooled on the idea of ‘music messaging’ startups some time ago: there were a bunch of them, and sustainable business models/consumer interest was thin on the ground. But […]
Posted inNews
Fan-messaging startup I Am Pop raises €2m in funding
I Am Pop is one of the startups trying to help musicians and music brands make better use of messaging apps in their marketing. It’s already working with artists signed to […]
Posted inNews
Facebook: the future of sharing may be about stories and messaging
Big technology firms are enduring choppy waters on the stock markets, and Facebook in particular is having a 2018 best described as ‘difficult’. There was plenty of attention, then, on […]
Posted inNews
Record Bird shuts down its apps and site in Sendmate pivot
Music discovery service Record Bird is shutting down its apps and website, as the company pivots to focus on its Sendmate messaging-marketing B2B tool.
We liked Record Bird as a service: a feed of everything new from the artists you liked, even if turning that into a sustainable business model was clearly going to be tough. So it proved.
“Over time, we witnessed that it became more and more expensive for us, but also for artists to get fans to download an app. Yet scale was the only way to create a sustainable and economically profitable model,” explained the founders in an email to users yesterday.