May 30, 2009

ZO? KEATING



Followers: 412,916*



"A nice surprise? My music on NPR All Things Considered today. Uncredited..."
11:04 PM Feb 19th from web

"I would have liked to be asked so I could say 'yes, go ahead!' I'm all for free promotional use, but its not promo if no one knows it's me."
12:01 AM Feb 20th from web

"Water under the bridge . . . never mind. In more exciting news, I just transformed a pair of vintage WWI spats into a rather fetching corset."
12:30 AM Feb 20th from web

When indie cellist Zoë Keating posted these short bursts to Twitter late one night in February, she didn't have a viral marketing campaign in mind. Like thousands of independent, obscure artists, Keating was just expressing her frustration with the constant fight for exposure necessary to make a living in the music business.

Ironically, Keating's tweets led to some of that very recognition. Sympathetic celebrity Twitterers like actor Wil Wheaton and author Neil Gaiman publicized her plight on their own blogs and Twitter feeds; Keating, a regular user of the microblogging site, earned a spot on the Suggested Users list that Twitter's staff compiles to help members find interesting people to follow. By Feb. 26, she had 3,000 followers of her feed at twitter.com/zoecello, and NPR had added her to the credits on its "All Things" site.

At press time, she had more than 412,000 followers—an astonishing number when just last month, actor Ashton Kutcher was racing CNN to attract 1 million followers.

Keating says that the long-term effects of this rapid ascent in the Twitter-verse are yet to be determined, she did see an immediate jump in business. "Around the time that I went on the Suggested User list, my CD ["One Cello x 16: Natoma"] went to No. 1 on the iTunes classical chart, and it's stayed in the top 20 ever since," she says. "I've also gotten a lot more sales from my Web site, and I get lots of fan mail that says, 'I found out about you from Twitter.' "

A former member of the cello-rock trio Rasputina who has played with acts including the Dresden Dolls, Imogen Heap and DJ Shadow, Keating uses a cello and a Mac laptop to create technologically complex compositions.

For an artist with a niche audience and total sales of 16,000 for her 2005 solo album and a 2004 EP, according to Nielsen SoundScan, Keating's high profile on Twitter may be an important step in expanding her mainstream exposure. Early direct sales results are modest—in the week ending Feb. 22, Keating's "One Cello x 16" EP gained 282% in sales while "One Cello x 16: Natoma" gained 304% from the previous week. Combined, both albums still sold less than 1,000 copies. In total, she's sold about 2,500 albums since she exploded on Twitter.

But Keating believes that Twitter's real value to artists is its functionality within the growing universe of middleman-free communication tools. "I enjoy being able to quickly and directly interact with my fans—there's nobody in between," she says. "It's been going that way for a long time, but with Twitter I feel like we've finally arrived."

While the same has been said about e-mail, blogs, MySpace and Facebook, Keating finds Twitter's character-limited, running-feed platform to be the most fun and effective for sharing information. Keating says that since she started Twittering, she has stopped blogging for the most part. "It takes the pressure off—I used to save things up to put them in a blog and had to invest more time in writing, but with Twittering you can just do it at random times." She adds that time spent responding to fan e-mail is now spent replying to their tweets.

Keating continues to earn about 5,000 followers per day but has tried not to let it change the content of her tweets, which range from the status of a musical project to tour updates to descriptions of her mood or morning pancake recipe.

"It's really important to me to always be myself and to never be contrived, because as soon as I start using something just to sell records, then it starts feeling wrong to me," she says.

Keating also realized soon after joining the network in 2008 that Twittering was good for accountability. "If I said, 'I'm going to mix this song,' eventually someone would reply and say, 'Where is that song you said you were going to mix?' "

—Evie Nagy



RICHIE HAWTIN


Followers: 3,743

Followers of DJ Richie Hawtin don't get updates on his last meal or his thoughts on politics. They get tweets about what he's playing during his DJ sets.

Hawtin came up with a way to make sure he's not glued to his BlackBerry during his sets: an application known as Twitter DJ that sends updates to designated Twitter accounts, track by track, in real time.

While this is a great way to provide further insight on how a DJ builds a set from start to finish, it also gives instant credit to the lesser-known artists played during these sets. "The Twitter DJ application would not only drag the likes of collecting societies GEMA, PRS and SOCAN kicking and screaming into the 21st century," Hawtin says, "but make sure the real artists get paid instead of performance payments simply being carved up between the Madonnas and U2s of the world."

—Mariel Concepcion



JOHN MAYER
Followers: 1,097,651

On Jan. 29, John Mayer posted an entry to his blog at johnmayer.com titled "Twitter. Maybe." He gave a link to his new feed at twitter.com/johncmayer and said simply, "Still not convinced, but let's give the technology a go and see if/how we can make it organic . . . Heads up, I may drop it."

Less than four months later, Mayer's name has become synonymous with celebrity Twittering: He has more than 1 million followers and has posted almost 1,000 updates. He's so active on Twitter that when his relationship with actress Jennifer Aniston ended in March, rumors swirled that his addiction to the site was partly to blame.

Despite calling Twitter "inherently dumb" and telling E! Online that the application is "one step away from sending pictures of your poop," Mayer posts 140-character witticisms several times a day, sometimes minutes apart, interacting frequently with friends and followers with the site's reply function. Although Mayer's tweets support his image as a clever extrovert with a sly sense of humor, it's hard to imagine that his Twitter usage is part of a calculated multiplatform marketing strategy—he rarely posts anything that explicitly promotes his music, and the uncensored comments show no sign of handler oversight.

While Mayer's latest album, 2006's "Continuum," jumped from sales of 3,000 the week before he started Twittering to 6,000 two weeks later, according to Nielsen SoundScan, they've leveled to a weekly average of 2,000-3,000, and there's no indication that Twitter has had any effect. But after career sales of 11.4 million albums, perhaps Mayer is after a different kind of attention—the kind that makes him excited to type, as he did on May 7, "At 1 million followers I shall unleash the MEGA TWEET. A tweet so large the first 140 characters will be spent on asterisks."

—Evie Nagy



MIKE SKINNER / THE STREETS
Followers: 29,868

"I am going to Tweet three new songs this week," tweeted U.K. rapper Mike Skinner, aka the Streets. "I can't be bothered with all this trying to sell you music. It wastes valuable time."

During the next two weeks, Skinner tweeted links to nine free downloads, which he called "works in progress," from the file-hosting service zShare. The response was immediate. The most popular of the first three, "I Love My Phone," has been downloaded 40,900 times, according to zShare.

That's sparked the interest of observers like London-based Dave Haynes, GM of digital audio platform SoundCloud U.K., which enables musicians to securely share and collaborate on songs online. "Because Twitter is very hyped, he's getting a lot of media attention out of it," Haynes says. "It's also serving to increase his fan base and what he means to them with that direct relationship."

Two more tracks, the timely "He's Behind You, He's Got Swine Flu" and "Where My Heart Has Been," were launched through Twitter May 8 and 9.


—Richard Smirke



TRENT REZNOR
Followers: 533,150

When Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor announced the band's summer tour, he posted the news to his blog. Ever since, he's been announcing new dates and festival stops with Twitter. He also uses Twitter to alert fans when new information about each tour stop is made available on his blog, such as the set times for each show, details on the concert's camera policy and chances to win free tickets.

This works because Reznor is a prolific Twitterer: He's dissed Chris Cornell's track "Scream" ("You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable?"), cracked jokes ("Here at NIN labs we're actually working on a device that lets you punch people through the internet") and posted links to eight-bit videogame soundtracks of his music.

Reznor is such a fan of the application that he built Twitter-like functionality into his much-heralded iPhone app. Using Twinkle, a version of Twitter made for the iPhone, the app lets NIN fans post comments, photos and links for each other to read in a mobile Twitter built just for Nine Inch Nails fans.

It also gives users the option to tag their posts with their location data—pulled from the iPhone's GPS chip—so fans in the same area can meet in person. At press time, it was the 29th-most-popular free music app in the iPhone App Store.

—Anthony Bruno



LILY ALLEN
Followers: 383,256

For the cheeky British singer Lily Allen, what started as a fun game on April Fools' Day turned into a competition that lasted through her entire spring U.S. tour. Starting with her kickoff show in San Diego, Allen hid two pairs of concert tickets and used Twitter to give fans rhyming clues to find them. In just the first 10 days, Allen's Twitter following jumped from 50,000 to 150,000, says Capitol Records VP of marketing Meg Harkins. (Allen now has more than 380,000 followers.)

"Twitter is a perfect interface for her because she loves interacting with her fans and she's so witty," Harkins says. When Harkins was on call to watch the tickets in New York, she saw fans go running for them. In most cases, she says, fans were already waiting in locations where they guessed Allen would hide them.

A week after the Feb. 9 release of her sophomore album, "It's Not Me, It's You," Allen also got attention from her much-publicized bout with celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. Hilton taunted (er, tweeted), "Congrats on your album doing well in America, though. It's REALLY HARD to sell copies when u discount it to $3.99. Desperate!" Allen's response: "Its also number one everywhere else in the world douchebag. Go away you little parasite." The singer's Twitter page has become high-profile enough that it was one of several accounts—along with those of President Barack Obama and Britney Spears—broken into by a French hacker.

—Laura Leebove



IMOGEN HEAP
Followers: 360,408


Imogen Heap is lauded for her atmospheric pop music and her technological savvy, so it's no surprise that the U.K. singer is taking Twitter beyond the simple status update.

When the time came to write a new biography to promote her third album, "Ellipse" (out Aug. 4 on RCA), the artist asked her nearly 325,000 followers for help, culling together a fascinating, fan-centric document from more than 2,000 submissions to her secondary Twitter account—she currently has three. "I've been lucky to have a lovely fan base," Heap says. "They give me encouragement, and they're a really creative bunch."

To return the favor, Heap posts snippets of in-progress songs from her new record through the Twitter-friendly video streaming site 12seconds.tv. "There may be people who don't really like my music, but they're just interested in the process of how I record," she says.

Additionally, a song from "Ellipse" titled "Half-Life" will incorporate sounds of crowd chatter that Imogen recorded at the February Twestival, and she's planning a Twitter-assisted improvisational performance for the July TED conference in Oxford, England, at which fans will watch her live set at ustream.tv and send their real-time feedback. "They'll tweet me things like 'Go faster' or 'Switch to A minor,' and I'll follow people's ideas about where the music should go," she says.

—Monica Herrera


MANDI PERKINS
Followers: 234

Twitter is the "main way I connect with fans when I'm on the road," says singer/songwriter Mandi Perkins, who is currently playing U.S. clubs in support of her 2008 album "Alice in No Man's Land." As a developing touring artist who doesn't always have access to the Internet, she uses a mobile phone with almost unlimited reception. "Twitter works differently from social networking sites, because you can write from anywhere at any time, which is what makes it such a valuable communication tool when you're on the road," she says.

She also likes Twitter's ability to quickly send time-sensitive information to a large group of fans. "If a show is going to be delayed, or I know something very cool is about to happen," she says, "I can grab a phone and tell a bunch of different people at once."

In addition to allowing fans to send song requests before a concert, Perkins says Twitter also opens communication among artists on the road. "Bands can now get instantaneous advice on what routes to take, the best places to eat and safe areas to sleep," she says. Perkins plans to use Twitter to help reschedule any shows that get canceled by reaching out to fans in the market and tweeting, "Can you guys please let me know if there's some kind of venue in your area that's open in two weeks?"

—Mitchell Peters



JONAS BROTHERS

Followers: 178,731

What's a hotter topic than swine flu? According to Twitter, the Jonas Brothers. On May 6, the band sent a single tweet asking its 170,000-plus followers to submit questions for a live webcast on Facebook. The message included a link that directed fans to a search-optimized template for their submission, which led to the hashtag #jonaslive dethroning the panic-inducing virus as the No. 1 Twitter trend and remaining in the top 10 for three days.

According to Brian Ressler, director of online marketing for Hollywood Records, more than 800,000 fans participated in the May 7 Facebook webcast—a partnership with ustream.tv and one of three that the Jonas Brothers are doing to promote their June 14 release, "Lines, Vines and Trying Times." He attributes much of that success to Facebook's rival.

"Twitter was a big part of people tuning in," Ressler says. He also points out that since the Jonas Brothers launched their Twitter account in April, they frequently post links to their official pages on MySpace, YouTube and Facebook, where the label maintains a larger presence. "You can use Twitter to drive traffic to a social networking site, and the Jonas Brothers have done that really well," he says. "It all works together."

For an act with as many fans as the Jonas Brothers, who already have more than 1 million followers on both Facebook and MySpace and the most subscribers of any musician on YouTube, Ressler says Twitter is just another piece of the expanding puzzle. "It's all about having one big community," he says, "and Twitter is just another extension of that."

—Monica Herrera

J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League
Followers: 4,420

An off-the-cuff comment turned into a Twitter/ustream.tv ritual for the production team J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League. Unbeknownst to the trio—members Rook, Colione and Kenny "Barto" Bartolomei—their co-manager Chuck Greene created a ustream.tv account after watching other event streams. "During a studio session later that week," Greene recalls, "Colione mentioned that if people could also watch them live as they worked, they would laugh their asses off. I proceeded to stream and thus began our ritual."

In April, when the trio began collaborating on a Young Jeezy project, the act decided it would be fun to Twitter with fans during its session. "Between 1,500 and 2,000 people chatted with us live," Rook says of the all-night affair. When Greene added the ustream.tv component, the League began twittering fans the location of the site so they could also view the live proceedings. (Linking Twitter with ustream.tv allows tweets to run as scrolling messages on the screen.) Since then, the League incorporated both technologies during a second session with Jeezy and another with OJ Da Juiceman.

Having recently staged Twitter/ustream.tv session with Plies, the League plans to continue the ritual with any artist who agrees to participate. "We love the interaction with fans and the creative process," Greene says. "They get to see that these guys are regular people who can make you laugh as well as make amazing music before your eyes."

—Gail Mitchell

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