After operating in stealth mode for some time I’m excited to officially announce the launch of Good Prints.

Good Prints is my take on premium merchandise: Fine art prints of cover artwork, mounted on high-quality bamboo panels. The prints are manufactured on demand in Hamburg by expert hands and can be ordered without a minimum order quantity.

Good Prints are the perfect product to complete any artist’s or label’s product portfolio. They are a great fit for a limited collector’s item and generate additional revenue with an asset that already exists – cover artwork. Good Prints can be nicely bundled and add a ton of value to digital products. They can be signed, stamped or further customized and look just nice.

Read about all the details here or get in touch with me anytime.

Why Good Prints?
When planning an artist’s product portfolio, my best advice is to create attractive offers that correspond to the various levels of fan engagement – from the guy that just heard a song of the artist for the first time on his timeline on facebook to the über-fan that has been following every step of the band for the last 5 years. While it’s crucial to provide a free taste for the newly-arrived, it’s equally important to have something special up one’s sleeve for the die-hard fans or those whose wallet is just a bit thicker.
A lot of times the range of artist products is made up of low- to mid-priced items, starting with a digital download for 0.99 and ending with a t-shirt for 19.99 $/€. There’s nothing wrong with that, only a lot of money is left on the table as there’s dramatically more revenue in higher-priced items. In addition, true fans are craving special items that help them to be identified as such and that add special value to their lives.

Now high-value items usually come with hefty production cost, posing a high financial risk. This is where Good Prints is stepping in: With on-demand production and no minimum order quantity labels and artists can offer their fans a premium product risk-free, while at the same time new opportunities of revenue generation open up.

To me, Good Prints is also about bringing back the beauty of cover art. With all the great new inventions of the digital age the sad news is: Cover artwork has been reduced to thumbnail size and is held captive in computer screens. Good Prints has set out to release the beautiful cover art and put it back on the map. Therefor – in addition to the manufacturing service – I am launching an online-shop where a handpicked selection of cover artwork can be purchased. All of these artworks are available for a limited time and in limited quantity – sort of an alternative draft to the ubiquity and unlimited availability of digital goods. Happy shopping!

Here’s a nice picture that I took earlier today that speaks more than words: Discount supermarket chain Lidl just launched their Deluxe line for Christmas featuring selected gourmet products. This is maybe the perfect example of the demand that limited premium goods can create when packaged and presented in the right way, even though they come at a price that is distinctly higher than the rest.

In addition, it’s a good opportunity to announce the launch of my premium merchandise line Good Prints that is almost here, giving labels and artists the opportunity to beef up their merch portfolio with fine art prints of cover artwork mounted on high quality bamboo panels. It’s a truly awesome item where the quality and value can be experienced at first hand – all at an affordable price point. I’ll get into details a bit later, for now there’s a preview of a sample below. You’re welcome to contact me for any questions up-front anytime!

When facing these questions there are two simple tricks:

1.Questioning
Asking yourself the following two questions very often helps to find a decision: What’s in it for my clients or fans, in which way does my spending improve my customers’ situation? Does it enable me to noticeably stand out from the competition?

2.Comparing
Let’s take the example of the $ 3000 online-shop for an artist and put the money into context. For the same amount of money you could:

• invite the 60 most influential people in the industry for lunch or an extensive round of drinks ($ 50)
• print 333 t-shirts ($ 5 each) and send them to the most important editors and bloggers ($ 4 postage)
• give a 50% rebate on the first 600 CDs that you’ve planned to sell for $ 10
• print 6000 buttons with your logo on it ($ 0,50 each) and distribute them for free at your shows
• etc.

The example given only works because there are many alternatives that are free or that cost a maximum of $ 10 monthly. If you do not have the money to fulfil all of your self-imposed requirements yet, should this really stop you from just starting anyway with a low-budget alternative? If you are working on your initial setup it might be a good idea to get the core right and focus on what’s really important to your customers/fans/clients instead of spending too much time and money on details. In case of doubt the customers of a hot dog stand care more about the fact that there actually IS a stand that sells damn good hot dogs to them rather than the fact that it’s painted in nice Pantone colors and has shiny rims on its wheels. If you’re planning to set up your hot dog business in NYC though you should better make sure to get the most bling-bling stand available with all the competition on every corner – as it will help you to stand out.

The first time I got to fully experience music streaming it felt like the first time sitting in front of Audiogalaxy or Soulseek, the famed Peer-to-peer services, and having a seemingly unlimited number of albums, tracks and mixtapes right at my fingertips. How awesome. I stayed up all night and was looking for rare tracks where it was virtually impossible to get hold of the vinyl version or CD, at the same time my mixtape collection grew rapidly. Now while I have always been a nerd for music, I found myself staring at the searchbox a lot of times and thinking about something to enter. That’s when browsing other users’ collections came in handy that seemed to have a similar taste or had an eclectic mix of music that looked promising. It didn’t cost anything but a lot of time to unearth the gems from these collections, but being a student I had plenty of it.

With streaming services it’s not very different: While all of the services offer an abundance of music (13 million tracks is more than I can listen to in my lifetime, sadly) they do a rather poor job when it comes to music discovery. Here’s a commercial for French service Deezer (recently launched in Germany).

While it shows nicely how the mobile version fits into daily life it also shows one major assumption that Deezer and the any other services rely on: The willingness of the user to create playlists out of the millions of tracks. The level of risk is high – remember the 1% rule (aka the 90/9/1 rule) that says that only 1% of all internet users are actually creating content?
For me the reality check already fails at 0:02: When the male protagonist swiftly turns on the music on his mobile I’d find myself browsing around what to play and probably end up with one of the albums that I’ve listened to the other day. I don’t really create my own playlists because I don’t find the time to do so and it doesn’t really give me joy since I spend way too much time in front of a screen everyday already. Plus, given that I cancel my subscription and move on to another service, all of my playlists are useless and I have to set everything up again. It’s even worse for your average Joe Smith that isn’t really up-to-date with the latest music and who is totally overwhelmed by the choice on offer.

Looking at the albums that the mobile app of German service Simfy is recommending doesn’t help much: Every week a selection of 8 mainstream releases and popular artists is displayed, that’s it. Alexandra Stan or Pitbull, anyone? Even if Joe had a few friends that are not only Simfy users but also belong to the 1% that create content online (read: playlists) AND have a similar taste in music he’d still be left alone sitting on the side of his bed wondering what to play because a list of playlists is nowhere to be found in the mobile app – except his own playlists or the ones that he’s favorited before in the browser or desktop version.

So how to find cool playlists? Neither Simfy or Deezer do a great job here or give playlist discovery much space in their browser or desktop versions which is hard to comprehend. But as I said, even worse, playlists can’t be discovered at all in the mobile apps.

How does the market and innovation leader Spotify handle this? Playlists are a big part of Spotify’s user experience, especially with the newly-added Apps within Spotify where artist playlists can be found (e.g. in the Def Jam app). Older apps like ShareMyPlaylists help finding the best-rated user-generated playlists, additionally the playlists are curated by the ShareMyPlaylists team.
This helps a lot to discover both new and old music within Spotify – if you’re using the desktop version. If you’re – like me – primarily using the mobile app, there is not a single way to discover playlists. The news tab of the app comes with 10 recent tracks and releases each week plus the twitter stream of the Spotify account. No recommended playlists, nowhere. Still, Spotify does a way better job to incorporate playlists into their service than their competitors. It’s understood that Spotify wants to leave the content curation job to third partners, fair enough. I’d just expect the mobile app to come with the core features of the desktop version, especially since the mobile app is maybe the biggest selling point of the premium subscription.

Conclusion: While I view content curation and music discovery as maybe the most important factor in the effort to reach a mass market this area is treated rather poorly throughout all services (except Spotify who are “outsourcing” it). What’s a shop that has 5000 different brands of whiskey on offer really worth to the occasional drinker if he’s left alone by himself standing in front of the shelves, without the advice of an expert? While the internet has eliminated quite a few gatekeepers, the importance of trusted sources has grown exponentially to the volume of information that is available online. I’m looking forward to see this reflected in the products of streaming services, with Spotify being the one to make the first attempt in this area with their app ecosystem. What are you waiting for, competition?

***UPDATE***

I’ve received quite a lot of responses to my post in the last days and would like to highlight two fresh and new services that both do a great job regarding curation: First there’s gogoyoko.com from Iceland that have a great selection of independent music on their site and provide a steadily growing number of carefully compiled playlists from both members of their team as well the gogoyoko users.
Then there’s Norwegian service WiMP that takes curation to a whole other level: WiMP is all about recommendations that are frequently updated by experts for each country where the service is available. Both the desktop version (that runs on Adobe AIR) as well as the mobile app feature really cool playlists and additionally there are numerous album lists. The good news is that WiMP is launching in Germany at the beginning of May already but if you’re really curious you can request a login to the closed beta version here. For me this is really an alternative to Spotify and I’m sure you’ll love this, too.

I’m glad to see so much development happening right now in the world of streaming. To me, this is much more exciting than the same old discussion about the low royalty payments – the combination of the pay-per-stream model and the rapidly increasing number of streams might just turn into the most sustainable business model ever seen in the music business. I’m very sure that eventually music streaming will be deeply tied into the daily life of everyone (at least in the western world) and might even replace radio some day.

It must have been the wet dream of every record label, in this case German independent label Chimperator. With all the huge opportunities around the label finds itself faced with more than delicate task though: Converting the new listeners sustainibly into fans and eventually into paying customers. So how are they doing?

Again, there have been very good moves in terms of increasing awareness and awarding the newly-arrived fans. Whenever the number of facebook fans reached a critical step, a new track was released on Youtube, accompanied with a free download of the MP3 – and Cro didn’t miss to thank everyone for their support. Then there has been the secret club tour where the dates were announced without the location, fitting perfectly into the incognito image of the panda-mask wearing rapper. When the number of facebook fans reached 105.000, fans from Cro’s hometown Stuttgart could apply to be served free pizza, personally delivered by Cro and his DJ which received a lot of good feedback from his facebook fans and certainly didn’t hurt to communicate the image of the well-grounded rapper from „next door“.

So far goes the praise. At the beginning of February, the label came up with the first merch, actually the first purchasabke products ever, communicated via Cro’s facebook page: 3 different T-Shirts and a sweater. While the design is of course always a highly subjective topic, the real discussion was centered around the pricing of these items. A T-Shirt sold for 24,99 to 26,99 € and the sweater for 49,99 €, bumping up the prices of regular bandmerch significantly to streetwear level. Not to forget these have been the first official products ever, the first time that something was charged for, leaving a somewhat bad taste in the fans’ mouths. Comments on facebook went crazy. Of course, there’s the usual trolling and digital hate everywhere but it was clear to see that people simply felt ripped off and felt like their fanhood was being taken advantage of. Additionally, it turned out that a lot of fans would have rather liked to purchase items of Cro’s very own T-Shirt brand „Vio Vio“ that had already been featured in the video to „Easy“ – which would have been the consequent move and probably even more interesting for Cro (not his label, of course) from an economic standpoint.

Things started to feel really awkward to me when a couple of days later the range of merch was extended by iPhone cases and skins, even for an Ikea table. Awkward because this happened before any music has been officially released and it felt like the label couldn’t wait to cash in on the popularity of the artist. Awkward because it wasn’t even put up for sale on the label’s merchstore (where fan data could be collected) but it appeared to be a cooperation with a webshop for customizable iPhone cases and skins where the fans were led to purchase the stuff. In a nutshell: The artist’s popularity was used to boost another business where he probably received only a small percentage of everything that was sold. The accusation to „sell out“ was spread all over the comments.

Another few days later Cro announced that he won’t go on tour, opening up for fellow German rapper Casper as there’s a conflict with the recording of his debut album that the label wants to release in summer 2012. Again, comments went crazy. People were not only disappointed but upset because they had bought tickets for the Casper shows solely for the reason to see Cro. Bummer.

Latest news was yesterday’s announcement to officially release „Easy“ digitally and physically. The label decided to release the single as CD and a limited edition CD with 3 bonus tracks, additionally it will be available digitally. What really drew my attention was the content of the announcement on facebook: Cro is asking the fans to do “an experiment together” that had been developed in the Chimperator labs. They want to „turn the rules of the music industry upside-down“ and are aiming for a chart position although „Easy“ has already been released as a free download. Read: „Fuck it, let’s try to monetize this free download by any means. We’d be stupid not to.“ Basically this is music industry at its best, not upside-down. What is missing here is the real value for the fan: When selling it “normally”, the re-release would have been the perfect opportunity to „up-sell“ something that provides additional value to the fan (which a chart position clearly doesn’t) and to add something personal like an autograph to it and make it unique.

Looking at the Amazon sales charts proves that – for now – this strategy is working just as intended. My very own view is that in the long run all the things that I mentioned here are standing in opposition to creating long-lasting relationships with the fanbase and a sustainable artist development. Of course it’s always very easy to watch and critize, no doubt about that. I’m not saying that e.g. selling iPhone cases is a bad idea or „too commercial”, contrary to that it’s refreshing to see that merchandise must not always be limited to T-Shirts. To me, the pace and timing is just not right.

Same goes for the „official“ release of „Easy“: I don’t think that selling a limited CD single for almost 7 € is a good idea when the most important goal should be to establish tight bonds with your loyal fanbase. And why sell it on Amazon when it’d be of great value to actually know who your most loyal fans are that actually spend money for your music? Chart positions, right – the wet dream again. Why not create a „pay what you want“ campaign for the digital release and let fans decide, if and how much they want to pay for a single that they already have on their HDs plus 3 bonus tracks? Maybe even do the same for the CD single, with a minimum price that covers the hard costs – all exclusively announced on facebook as a special treat to the fans. The rest can still pick up the normal CD single at Amazon or digitally on iTunes. Speaking from the response of the fans to the release of „Easy“ the label would still be able to generate decent revenue this way but – and this is way more important – the fans would be even more engaged and follow Cro for a long time.

As I said before, it’s too easy to just watch and be wise after the event. The emerging career of Cro is simply a perfect example for the very sensitive and fragile phase of converting awareness into real money, that’s what makes it an interesting topic. I will be most happy to be proven wrong with my conclusions and wish both Chimperator and Cro continued success!