Jango Offers Musician a Chance To Become Rock Stars With $30 Promotion Budget
by
on March 04, 2009,
I just love it when web companies come up with new monetization ideas that don’t contain the word “advertising” at all, are clever and are also intended to be interesting to the target audience - interesting enough for people to actually pay for what they have to offer. Today I think that we have an idea that is very much like this introduced by Jango, one of the most popular custom internet radio services that enjoys the audience of 6 million people monthly.
The new initiative announced today is called Jango Airplay and is very similar to Adsense: where on Adsense advertisers pay for clicks, on Jango Airplay musicians pay to be heard on the internet radio by Jango users. The idea is very simple: Jango helps musicians grow their popularity and asks for some money in exchange.
A musician will have to invest $30 for his or her music to be added to the playlist and Jango will send the music to the audience this musician wants to target. $30 will buy a musician 1,000 plays which is $.03 per one user listening to your song. And these rates sound totally affordable to me - especially if the musicians are offered further ways to use such listeners in helping promote their music with their votes and recommendations.
The targeting algorithm on Jango allows the musicians to choose exactly who they are willing to target: parameters include age, gender and location. But the most interesting thing is that the musician can choose popular artists who they want to appear alongside with and those Jango users who want to listen to music from those popular artists will be offered music from unknown artists promoted by Jango along with the encouragement to vote for the song or even become a fan of this new musician - hence helping the unknown artist or band get new fans via viral growth.
The response from the beta test is pretty impressive as every 10th play of a song resulted in some positive action from the listener (a comment, a vote or becoming a fan) which definitely facilitated distribution of the new music to more and more people these users recommend it to with their actions.
At some point the need to pay is eliminated as 50 people who like a song means that it will be added to general rotation without any extra costs to the musician so if every 10th listeners actually likes a song, it means that a 5,000 plays campaign ($100) can easily get your song to general rotation if it is actually good.
Of course there may be an issue of listeners objecting to letting musicians pay to reach their ears but I somehow have a feeling that there will be no problems with that if Jango still lets people demonstrate they dislike certain songs and don’t want to listen to them in the future - sponsored or not.
And for musicians this certainly sounds like a good idea where you know exactly what you pay for and what you get in return - in the number of plays for your song. The only thing is that you could only get more than you expected as listeners to Jango radio help you promote your song with their votes and actions - and who would object getting more for the same money?
I don’t think there’s anything wrong about the new idea introduced by Jango: many people are willing to pay for promotion of their creations - be it books or blogs or whatever form a creation can take - and so they buy clicks with Google Adwords and pay for display ads on relevant blogs and websites. So why should a musician be unwilling to do a very similar thing to promote his or her music?
I have a feeling that musicians will be more than happy to pay for reaching their target audience and getting some level of popularity and buzz. In fact, we have seen pretty similar ideas in non-music world for promotion of links - sponsored sites on StumbleUpon and sponsored links on Reddit are both based on a very similar idea of letting the publisher pay for some eyeballs while users will decide if the content is worth further promotion to more eyeballs. All in all, everyone wins, including the users who get to listen to the music for free with Jango keeping afloat with a new revenue stream.
