ReverbNation Street Teams
Yesterday I wrote about ReverbNation’s approach to helping bands spread themselves across the internet by providing an easy means to create distributable resources and track how those resources were employed and with what success. Jed Carlson, CMO, gave me a guided tour of the site recently, and in this second part, I want to discuss their view of fans, Street Teams, and the business model on which they’re banking.
They view fans as a funnel. At the widest end are the people who listen to the music. Then there are those likely to buy (converting ‘fans’ to ‘customers’ is one of their missions). Then there are the “promoters,” those who place widgets around the net and spread your music on your behalf. ReverbNation gives the bands easy ways to give fans what they need to be promoters and to track which fans are doing the most and the most successful promoting.
They see Street Teams as the narrowest end of the funnel. Fans can sign up to be on a Street Team. Band can launch ‘missions’ (spreading the music, promoting shows, recruiting new fans, driving traffic, and spreading the word offline are the five mission types built into the interface). Bands can build in rewards (e.g. backstage passes for the five team members who bring the most hits). Street Team members can choose whether they want to join a mission or not, and on their site, the mission and those who have been most active in accomplishing it are displayed. In contrast to a site like FanCorps, they have very limited means for Team members to talk to one another – no chat rooms or forums. Instead, the focus is on the bands.
Right now the Street Team piece is in Beta. Four bands are testing it, and it is set to go live no later than mid-June.
I asked where the money is to be found for them in all of this since all of these services are free for the bands and the fans. They have three primary revenue streams. First, the pages have ads (which I think are rather discreetly tucked into the corner) and artists share 50% of the revenue that views of their pages generate (in other words, the more page hits a band gets, the larger their share of ad revenue will be). Second, the artists can sell their music on the site using SnoCap and ReverbNation takes a modest cut. Finally, they offer bands some “premium services” for a prices. These include what they call “Fan Reach” which allows bands to do highly targetted fan contacts (like: send an email to all the fans in Ohio), and the ability to have the ReverbNation resources appear without ReverbNation branding.
What I like about this scheme is that there are no built-in motivations to screw either the bands or the fans. The more money the bands make, the more they make, and the less the bands make, the less they make. If they don’t put the bands and their needs first, they won’t make money. That’s a powerful incentive to remember their own mission.
Update: Fan Reach is free, not a premium service.
Robin wrote:
I’d be very curious to see if they have any success with this, especially considering they’re not giving the fans a way to communicate with the band or each other.
I’ve found that usually things like chats and forums are generally what keep a fan interested in wanting to promote an act - that need to feel like they know the other fans, as well as the band or act. That each one of them is an important part of the community.
We’ll all be watching, I suppose!
Posted on 17-May-07 at 10:51 am | Permalink
Nancy Baym wrote:
You raise an important point Robin, since sites like FanCorps are built to encourage fans to communicate with one another. Reverbnation does offer messaging, so that fans can communicate with each other and with bands on site, but that is very different from having a group communication space.
On the other hand, they already have a big base of bands, and they’re free, so it might be a logical and easier extension of what the bands are already doing on there than setting up a new street team system on another site.
Reverbnation also lets fans take things from the bands (pix, songs, etc) and put them in forums elsewhere, so in theory fan community building could happen somewhere other than Reverbnation yet still rely on the resources they provide.
But I do wonder also about the consequences of not having a way for fans to interact in groups.
Posted on 17-May-07 at 11:31 am | Permalink
brian wrote:
what does the Hits & Exposure counters actually mean? does the Exposure mean that the visitors liked it and wants to recommend it? and Hits is just how many people looked at your profile?
Posted on 28-Dec-07 at 2:03 pm | Permalink
Kathy wrote:
I know I’m coming at this long after the original blog post but well into the establishment of Reverbnation. I use the street team option on The Dreaming’s site as an additional source. I have a Myspace, Facebook and dedicated site for the team. Our websited contains a message forum that I got free from dhbb where the teamers can communicate and do. Myspace is really just a one-way street and it’s the devil that all of us in the music biz are stuck with. I use it mainly for recruiting. Facebook? enhh! It’s just coming into it’s own. It does offer more two-way communication but for the music industry is still not taken seriously. Reverbnation provides THE BEST email interface out there. It is so easy for myself or the band to do mass mailings and filtering the mailing list is a breeze. I demand all my teamers at least sign up for FanReach. I also love the missions interface. From building the mission to tracking activity…duck soup. I just need to get my band to use the gig results option. I want to see how good the metrics are with that because all the other tools are incredibly powerful and FREE! Both my band and I have access to their site so that works well for us too. They are completely DIY and technically unsigned…they are private labeled. Reverbnation has been such a success for them that they earned Spotlight Song of the Week within their third month on the site. They’ve posted all the widgets on their homepage and between them and the team have garned over a quarter of a million widget hits, 3000 song plays and 1700 site visits in 4 months. Reverbnation wins hands down for us.
Posted on 31-Aug-08 at 1:51 pm | Permalink