Linkability
KFC coming out with their new Double Down sandwich. It’s bacon and cheese wrapped inside two pieces of fried chicken. In fact, today, al Qaeda said, ‘We quit. When it comes to killing Americans, we can’t keep up with you guys.’
Do you find that funny? I find it hilarious. And after laughing out loud at Jay Leno’s joke in the "New York Times", I had to read it to Felice. But today, I’ve got an audience, I’m passing it on to you, and who knows, you might further spread the word, burnishing Jay Leno’s image, and lord knows it needs polishing, Tina Fey took a swipe at it last night:
And I wouldn’t have forwarded this to you if it weren’t for the faux show Tina Fey talks about four minutes in: "Dancing With The Real Stars: America’s Small Business Owners". That’s funny. Unless you don’t have a sense of humor. And if you don’t have one, Tina truly pushes your buttons in this clip, where she says Tea Partiers are so obese, they protest sitting down. Used to be that music was right alongside comedy, testing limits, but you won’t find an artist willing to offend, not today, not a performer with any traction, because the mantra is to avoid turning off any potential customer, you need to grow your audience. But fascinatingly, it’s those who are edgy, those who stand for something, those who offend who engender linkability.
How do you get linked? How do you go viral?
By establishing a base. It does no good to be on TV once, to get a single spin on a radio station. You’ve got to establish a core that pays attention to your every move. And, if you’re lucky, you’ll do something that one of your flock will believe is so great they’ll forward it to those outside your membership, who will spread the word. The people putting up the links? These are the new gatekeepers. How do you get TMZ or the HuffPo or any trusted amalgamating resource to link to your creation?
It’s got to be really damn good.
I watched four Tina Fey clips from last night’s SNL. I’m only gonna link to one more, her newscast:
A diehard will be interested in the Tiger Woods commentator, which is pretty decent, and the Justin Bieber skit, which I believe is lame. But the casual surfer is only interested in the tip-top vignette. Linkability isn’t about everything, just one thing.
And that one thing is placed alongside links that may be of a completely different nature, could be music, could be news…hell, have you watched that video of the blowing up of Texas Stadium? Not fantastic, don’t waste your time, but the photo got me to click through.
What’s it going to take to get people to click through?
Think about that. It might be best to try your best and wait for the lucky accident. But if you’re trying to accelerate your career, expand your base, you need something special.
Special usually evidences creativity. Sure, train-wreck episodes garner eyeballs, but no loyalty, no one is endeared to you, no one comes back. And you want people to like you, to bond to you. It’s no longer about saying LOOK AT ME, but having people say LOOK AT THAT!
We’ve got a cornucopia of information. And it’s at our fingertips. But it’s overwhelming in quantity. So we rely on our filters. Which are these compendium sites and our friends. We trust them before we trust you. Approach us directly and we’ll shake you off. You’ve got to reach us through an intermediary.
Old media is stymied by this. Newspapers can’t understand why we’d rather surf a link site than the paper itself. It’s because the link site extracts the essence, tells us what we really want to know. Newspapers have to realize not all their content is equal, to survive they must create link sites of their own, maybe featuring only their own content, but a place we can go for the headlines that truly interest us.
And no matter how good Tina Fey might have been on SNL, I’m not going to watch the show, not even DVR it. Why? When I’ve got intermediary filters who’ll distill the essence for later viewing. Each one of these clips has ads attached. I’d run the rates way up. I’d charge more as the clips go viral. That’s where the new money is.
So if your band wants to blow up, you’ve got to go viral, you’ve got to engender a plethora of links.
You can trade on sex, you can do something outrageous, but chances are it’s not going to pay long term dividends. Which is why smart acts are just playing to their core and waiting to get lucky. But, if you want to game the system, you need a hit. Something that will be linked to that people will watch and end up loving you.
Having a lot of plays on YouTube shows interest, but it doesn’t demonstrate linkability, there’s no viral effect. Unless, of course, your clip is being embedded everywhere, which is why rights holders should never restrain embeddability, that’s forgoing long term money for the short. But the key is to make music so great that it breaks out of the YouTube ghetto. On to other link sites. And that’s not easy. But doable.
In other words, there are certain people who never listen to terrestrial radio, or never listen to the station that plays you. And there are some acts who will never get terrestrial radio play. But instead of lamenting all that, realize everybody’s got an Internet connection (and if they don’t, the odds of them buying your music and/or a concert ticket are slim). And everybody’s got their favorite link sites. In order to reach people, you’ve got to penetrate these sites, you’ve got to be linked to them. This is much more important than a few more spins on the station that’s already playing you.
And what’s truly amazing is once you’ve broken through, once you’ve established yourself as quality, like Tina Fey, link sites will be tracking your every move, looking to see if you do something great, that they can feature, because they’re built on links, that’s truly their calling card.
Furthermore, notice that I’m linking to Fey’s clips on the HuffPo. I’d never go to NBC.com. Why? There’s no filter. I start with the filter, otherwise there’s too much data to comprehend. Which is exactly where we are in the music business. Tons of music, few trusted sites telling us what to listen to. Can you imagine how powerful trusted music sites, linking to what’s great, will be? They’ll be beholden to no one, no record company, no promotion man. Because if you’re beholden to a purveyor, it no longer works. That’s old school. New school is I can only feature the best or people will stop coming to my site.
So, you’ve got to make the best.
Get cracking.
And know that music filtering sites are coming. They may not be just around the corner, but they’ll arrive. And then we’ll have a class of winners and a ton of losers. The losers will bitch, just like in the old days, that they can’t get traction, the gatekeepers don’t care. But the truth is, the public now only cares about the truly spectacular. And the only ones who don’t know this are those making crap. Which, unfortunately, is most. In every field. There’s a tippity-top, and everybody else. Sure, the Long Tail means your relatives in Timbuktu have access to your home made junk, but it really means that the head of the tail is gigantic, now, more than ever. Top Forty? TOP FIVE! Maybe even TOP TWO!
