Find who downloads your music the most, and go play for them

DrumEatDrum

Platinum Member
A while back, I wrote about bands taking a more global approach to music, and it's possible to be popular in a completely different part of the world than where you are.

I found this article, showing how Iron Maiden used analytic to find where they had the more internet traffic, and then booked shows there.

http://www.citeworld.com/consumerization/22803/iron-maiden-musicmetric
Click the link for the full article.

A few excepts:

U.K. company called Musicmetric, which specializes in analytics for the music industry by capturing everything from social media discussion to traffic on the BitTorrent network.

In the case of Iron Maiden, still a top-drawing band in the U.S. and Europe after thirty years, it noted a surge in traffic in South America. Also, it saw that Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Columbia, and Chile were among the top 10 countries with the most Iron Maiden Twitter followers. There was also a huge amount of BitTorrent traffic in South America, particularly in Brazil.

Rather than send in the lawyers, Maiden sent itself in. The band has focused extensively on South American tours in recent years, one of which was filmed for the documentary "Flight 666." After all, fans can't download a concert or t-shirts. The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone.

"Maiden have been rather successful in turning free file-sharing into fee-paying fans."

Of course, it helps in Maiden's case to be a veteran band with a significant track record, and the financial means to do huge shows in South America.

But it interesting that rather than sit and whine about illegal downloading, they said, "Fine, you want to download us for free? We'll be right over, have your wallet ready!"
 
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