Jeeni Blog

Helping the next generation of talent to build a global fanbase

How to grow your Facebook group.

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How to grow your Facebook group.

Times are moving fast when it comes to social media, in particular the use of community groups to target your audiences with event, streaming and watch-parties going live every second of the day all around the globe.

All of a sudden it feels like everyone except me is an expert at creating successful Facebook groups, so I decided I would take some time to try and unpick why are Facebook groups so successful.

Had the groups been going for years and grown their members organically? Did they have large budgets and were they spending loads of money on Ads? Were they all marketing experts? Did they engage large teams of enthusiastic influencers? 

To my surprise I found that in most instances these assumptions were just not the case. Rock The Lock Down, founded by Lucy Pardoe & Ollie Hughes, is a great example, with over 887,000 members in less than 6 weeks.

I finally had to admit I was missing the critical ingredients for a successful campaign. 

I only watched a selection of YouTube Videos, so not exhaustive, and I will watch some more tomorrow, but in the meantime to save you time, these were my key take-aways.

1. Make sure you take extra time to set up the group correctly, with an accurate, yet brief description. Check to make sure you have completed all sections, not just the about, which is the mistake I made.

2. Get as many people as possible to like your landing page, so that you can invite all of those people to your community group. Really simple and easy to use, but Facebook only allow you invite 50-100 in one day to stop you spamming. Which is what I also did!!

3. Make the group public, as you want as many members as possible to grow and contribute to organic growth. 

4. Create as many discussions and engage with all your members as often as you can, be as helpful as possible, share and like and answer their questions. Be a guru, be supportive, open, honest and kind.  

5. Use a bot to run competitions, contests, have freebies and giveaways , looping the bot back to join the group.

6. Join other relevant groups, share those groups and contribute as much knowledge and wisdom as you can helping members in those groups. It’s all about genuine and engaging conversation. Write guest posts and contribute wherever you can. Share and reuse your work on different sites, saving time and money. Keep the content helpful and meaningful. Cross-promote as often as you can and contact group's admin to share your group.

7. Test, test and trial Facebook ads that are targeted and specific, making sure you have set up demographics and location settings. 

8. Create an exciting and interesting email campaign to support engagement from existing and new customer databases.

9. Interlink and entwine your groups posts and comments on You Tube and use back-links to improve your SEO.

10. Remember groups are for genuine enthusiasts who love music, or food, travel etc, and members do not want to see any information that is not relevant to what they love.

At the end of the day this is all about them after all!

In the meantime, please feel free to invite friends to our Independent Musicians and Performers Group and we will soon be at 2,000 members.

15
Dec

Giack Bazz - 'Childhood Dream' Album Review

Back in 2016, Giack Bazz released his first album, ‘Childhood Dream’. The debut of the Italian singer-songwriter is a dazzling and transportive dive into nostalgia, sentimental imagery and grief. After losing his mother at a young age, Giack had a mountain of un-processed emotion that he had to unleash, and ‘Childhood Dream’ is packed to each corner with every truth and painful memory Giack had to give.  Although Giack has now expressed his talent and creativity across many ground-breaking projects, including a giant 366 track album as a part of ‘The Royalty Instrumentality Project’, it can sometimes be incredibly insightful to reflect on the origins and context of fascinating and experimental artists. By looking at where an artist has been, in contrast to where they currently find themselves, you can gain an informative, albeit condensed idea of their journey as a person as well as a creative. In many ways, this beautifully in-depth debut inadvertently set out a loose blueprint for Giack’s future as an artist.  In comparison to Giack’s later work, ‘Childhood Dream’ tends to have a more fundamental and focused attitude to instrumentation and production techniques. The simplicity and clarity in these stripped-back arrangements end up giving the album a charming and effective tone as it doesn’t distract from the source of the bitter-sweet narratives: Giack’s voice.   Speaking of Giack’s voice, it's so expressive and rich in this album which is only enhanced with the use of double-tracking which fills the stereo space up with his emotional intent. Giack harnesses deep-set and perhaps previously under-processed feelings and thoughts in his performances. As he put it himself, “The album is the closure I needed to my childhood. It is an acknowledgement, the acceptance that the dreams we have and the rose-tinted glasses we have are painful to remove.”  In terms purely of songwriting and production choice, ‘Morning’ is a clear highlight for me on this album. The decision to have thrashing, distorted guitar with no accompaniment other than Giack’s voice works so well in the choruses and draws attention to the part instead of masking it with layers of bass and drums. The reverb on the two parts that make up the song creates a clear physical space causing an authentic sensation of atmosphere and immersion.  The joyous home-video samples from Giack’s childhood, heard in the title track, have a slightly melancholic and touching intention relating to how he honours his late Mother. As Giack put it, “The songs have some noise collections from my family tapes and it's a way to honour her memory and to tell her that I understand why she tried to keep the truth.”  This album is often dark and pained, especially in the penultimate track, ‘Piazza Roma’. Although (unlike the others), the track is exclusively sung in Italian, I don’t believe understanding the lyrics is necessary to comprehend the pain in this harrowing and anguished piece. In the verses, the guitar is exhausted as though it itself is emotionally drained. It sluggishly carries the jangling chords all by itself, as Giack gives a similarly tired, yet determined vocal performance. Just before the choruses, a pause can be heard as though Giack is about ready to resign to grief, yet triumphantly, he rises up to sing his heart out in his native tongue.  With the ‘This Is the Beginning’ intro and ‘This Is Not the End’ outro, Giack opens up his personal origin yet refuses to close it at this point because although, as Giack stated, that without his childhood bereavement, “I’d be someone else”, the grief does not define him. He therefore leaves the album open and even ends it as it begins, with a repeating sole note on the piano, implying optimism, self-growth and a strength in accepting his past. A stunningly poignant close to this expressive and emotionally challenging debut.  How can Jeeni support artists like Giack Bazz?   JEENI is a multi-channel platform for original entertainment on demand. We’re a direct service between creatives and the global audience.   • We give creatives, independent artists and performers a showcase for their talent and services. And they keep 100% of everything they make.  • We empower our audience and reward them every step of the way.  • We promise to treat our members ethically, fairly, honestly and with respect.  • Access to artist liaison and a supportive marketing team  Check out Giack Bazz’s Showcase on Jeeni: https://jeeni.com/showcase/giack-bazz

06
Jun

Jeeni - the ethical alternative in streaming services, where artists can make a living.

This article by Andy Cush shows why Jeeni is needed more than ever. Jeeni.com is a streaming global platform where musicians and performers keep 100% of their sales, merchandise, tickets, donations and payments. No rip-offs, no fakes, no hype, no ads. Jeeni is the ethical alternative and will provide musicians and performers with a streaming platform where they can really make a living. How Musicians Are Fighting for Streaming Pay During the Pandemic. By Andy Cush With concerts on hold, it’s abundantly clear that most musicians can’t live off streaming income alone. How could the system be fixed? Indie rockers Stolen Jars are not exactly Coldplay or U2, but they’re not a garage band either. They tour regularly and have been covered by NPR and The New York Times. They have a fanbase. They’ve placed one of their off-kilter songs in an iPad commercial. They currently have more than 22,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Bandleader Cody Fitzgerald estimates he makes about $1,500 to $2,000 every year from streaming services, which is good for about a month’s rent on his New York apartment. That annual streaming income, Fitzgerald is quick to note, is quite high for bands of Stolen Jars’ stature. “Most people are on labels, which means they get, at most, 50 percent of that,” he says. Fitzgerald self-releases Stolen Jars’ albums. He is also the band’s primary songwriter and performs many of the instruments on the recordings himself, all of which entitles him to an unusually large share of the total payments from services like Spotify and Apple Music. Musicians with different label and publishing situations—even those whose music is more popular—may make significantly less. Tasmin Little, a celebrated classical violinist based in the UK, has received honors including a Classic BRIT award and an Order of the British Empire designation from Queen Elizabeth. She has more than 600,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, and her recordings are featured on popular playlists like Classical Essentials, which has 1.9 million followers. Little tweeted last month that she was recently paid £12.34, or around $15.50, for six months of streaming on Spotify, a period in which she would have had over 3.5 million total streams, according to her current statistics. When the coronavirus pandemic shut down the possibility of touring for the foreseeable future, cash-strapped musicians lost their most reliable way to make money. Revenue from streaming has always been small for many indie musicians, but now it is one of the few income sources available, along with sales of merch, physical records, and downloads on Bandcamp. According to artists, the pandemic is only exacerbating the inequities of a system that is rigged against the people who make it run. Under these dire circumstances, musicians are organizing through unions and other advocacy groups to fight for larger payments from streaming platforms. One such group is the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), a new organization that counts Fitzgerald as a member of its steering committee, alongside members of bands like Speedy Ortiz and Downtown Boys. Another is the Keep Music Alive alliance, a partnership between the UK’s Musicians Union and songwriters association the Ivors Academy, which joined forces after the pandemic’s onset, aiming to remedy the “woefully insufficient” payments made from streaming services, according to a mission statement. These organizations differ in approach, location, and scale—the Musicians’ Union was formed in the 19th century and represents 30,000 people; UMAW was formed in May and its current membership numbers in the hundreds—but both are responding to the same crisis. “I don’t have any friends who don’t have some kind of financial worries right now,” says Sadie Dupuis, UMAW founding member and guitarist-songwriter of Speedy Ortiz. “For most musicians I know who are touring full-time, the work they have outside of that is all based in the service industry, and they can’t get back into that either.” According to Mark Taylor, communications director of the Ivors Academy, the situation represents nothing less than an existential crisis over the future of music itself. “We really just want to keep music alive,” he says. “It’s good for us, it’s good for our souls, it’s good for the economy, it’s good for culture.” In the UK, the Keep Music Alive campaign is pushing for a government review of the streaming industry, which it hopes will result in additional regulations over the way payments are doled out. The UMAW, as a new organization aimed at a host of issues including streaming, has not yet formalized a set of demands for changes. Both groups acknowledge that the process of fixing streaming will be as complicated as the recognition of its brokenness is simple.How do streaming payments work? Artists receive, on average, a small fraction of a cent for each time one of their songs is streamed on a major platform. A seemingly obvious fix would be for the platforms to simply increase this number. But while these tiny per-stream payments are a useful concept for identifying the problem, they’re not particularly useful for solving it, because they don’t reflect the mechanism by which the platforms actually distribute money. According to a detailed survey of streaming payments by the music industry analytics company Soundcharts, streaming platforms pay out roughly 60 to 70 percent of their annual revenue to “rightsholders,” a group that includes musicians, record labels, songwriters, publishers—anyone who has a financial stake in the sales of a given record. Spotify, the most popular platform in the U.S. and globally, projected a total revenue between roughly $9 and $9.5 billion for 2020 in a recent letter to shareholders, which would make the total rightsholders’ take something like $6 billion for this year. That huge pile of money is then divvied up to artists (and their associated labels and so on) according to their stream counts as a fraction of the total streams on the platform for a given period. A single stream does not entitle a musician to a payment of some fixed amount; it entitles them to a slightly larger piece of the total rightsholders’ pie. To understand why per-stream payments can be an unrepresentative metric, imagine no one streamed anything on Spotify for all of 2020, except for a single person who played, say, 100 gecs’ “Money Machine” a single time. As long as those hypothetical non-listeners didn’t cancel their subscriptions, and money kept rolling in to Spotify, that one play could earn 100 gecs millions of dollars, because it would entitle them to the whole pie. Soundcharts offers another way of looking at it. Each time Spotify introduces a new feature aimed at keeping people listening for longer, like autoplaying similar artists after you finish an album, it sends the average per-stream figure down. That’s not because Spotify is suddenly skimping on payments, but because people are streaming more songs—and when people stream more songs, a single stream is equivalent to a smaller pie slice. That’s fine for established artists whose music is regularly recommended by these listener-retention features, because the dilution in value of a single stream is offset by an increase in streams. But for artists who aren’t being recommended, it means their streams are worth less.How could platforms make payments bigger? Though making streaming services work better for musicians is not as straightforward as demanding a higher payment per stream, there are several ways the system could theoretically be changed to get more money into artists’ pockets. Most obviously, companies like Spotify could increase the 60 to 70 percent share of their revenue that they pay out to rightsholders. But if recent history is any indication, that number is likely to go down before it goes up. Spotify renegotiated its deals with labels in 2017; before that, the payout number was more like 80 percent. At the time, the labels agreed to have their payments cut—thereby reducing musicians’ payments as well—because they believed they needed Spotify in order to ensure their own survival. With streaming accounting for an ever-increasing majority share of the recording industry’s revenue each year, the labels probably won’t be changing their minds about that anytime soon. But even if Spotify and the labels reverted back to the old deals, it doesn’t seem like it would do much for the average musician; it’s not as though indie bands were rolling in dough from streaming back in 2015. Groups advocating for bigger streaming payments could demand that Spotify give up an even larger revenue share—90 percent, say—but it’s hard to imagine Spotify would agree to it. Even the labels, who would have to sign off on such a deal and would be its chief beneficiaries, seem more inclined to accept Spotify’s word that they’re better off making less money so that Spotify can thrive. Another option would be to advocate for the platforms to increase their subscription price. Higher monthly fees means more revenue; more revenue increases the size of the overall pie given out to rightsholders; a bigger pie means bigger slices for all musicians. But while most music fans likely agree that artists deserve more money, asking listeners to pay up themselves is trickier. “It’s interesting, the price of a subscription has stayed static for a number of years,” says Taylor of the Keep Music Alive alliance. “But frankly, given where we are economically right now, and pressure on peoples’ wallets, that’s probably not the route to go down as a campaign.” Instead, Keep Music Alive advocates for overhauling the payment system entirely, toward what’s known as a user-centric model, which would apportion the subscription fee from each user to the artists they actually listened to that month. If I only listen to 100 gecs, my $9.99—minus Spotify’s take—goes directly to 100 gecs and their label. The current system, known as pro rata, gives more financial weight to the preferences of users who stream more songs, whereas user-centric payments would treat the preferences of all users equally. Taylor says the user-centric model is a better reflection of how listeners interact with the artists they love outside of the streaming realm: “We choose to go to gigs, to buy merchandise, and part of that exchange is, ‘I want my money to go to this artist, so they can make a living, and do more of what they do.’ That is a very distinct relationship that currently doesn’t work, really, in streaming.” A user-centric model is appealing in the abstract, and there is reason to believe it could financially benefit some smaller artists in the long run. According to a 2017 study by the Finnish Music Publishers Association, 10 percent of all streaming revenue flows to the top .4 percent of artists under the pro rata system. The study found that a user-centric system would cut the revenue to that top tier nearly in half and increase the overall flow of money to less popular artists. However, some individual small artists ended up receiving less money under a user-centric system in the study’s simulation. The French streaming platform Deezer announced a switch to user-centric payments last year, but for now there is little real-world data showing its effects one way or the other.What about labels? Streaming platforms do not make payments directly to musicians, but rather to labels, distributors, publishers, and copyright collection societies, all of whom take their own cuts before passing the money along. The share of revenue that ends up in a performing artist’s pocket also depends on factors that have more to do with these other parties than the streaming services themselves: chiefly, whether the artists are performing their own compositions or someone else’s, and the size of the splits they’ve negotiated with their label over revenue from their recordings. These factors may help explain why a songwriter with no label like Stolen Jars’ Cody Fitzgerald makes more money from streaming than a signed artist who mostly performs works by other composers like Tasmin Little, despite the greater popularity of Little’s recordings. The label’s cut of an artist’s streaming revenue varies from artist to artist and label to label, and the contracts that govern it aren’t generally made public. But several experts estimate that labels get anywhere from 50 to 85 percent. Fifty-fifty splits are common to indie labels; majors generally take a larger share. The Keep Music Alive campaign broadly presents itself as a critique of the streaming industry, but its specific platform focuses equally on the role of labels. According to Taylor, the 85 percent a major label might take from an artist’s revenue is no longer justified in the streaming era. “A lot of that is a hangup from when they had larger overheads, from when they had to store and ship CDs,” he says. “There was a cost to all of that, which is now largely being reduced. We’re basing this new system on outdated models.”What’s next? For musicians facing an undeniably appealing and increasingly dominant technology that threatens to usurp their livelihood, resistance can seem futile. It would be foolish to pretend that streaming isn’t an amazing service from a listener’s perspective, or that it will go away just because it doesn’t seem fair. Talk to enough musicians and you’ll find plenty who are vocal critics of streaming, but still host their albums on streaming services and are subscribers themselves. “It would be great to strike a new balance, because these streaming services are really helpful in terms of music discovery—I buy more records than I used to, because I can get psyched up on something new without having to go to the listening station at the Virgin Megastore,” says Dupuis. “But the discrepancy between what mega-corporations are pulling in off artists’ music and what we’re pulling in is pretty gross.” An individual musician who’s inclined to protest that discrepancy has limited options. They could pull their catalog from the platforms, but that seems doomed to fail as anything other than an act of symbolism.“Unless there’s a big collective action to do that, that will not do anything,” Fitzgerald says. “If you do it by yourself, it will just make it so you can’t grow your fanbase, so you can’t be a band.” Spotify’s problems with paying musicians may be inextricable from its value proposition to subscribers: $9.99 per month is an incredibly small price to pay for push-button access to nearly the entire history of recorded music. Practically every musician on Earth is vying for their piece of the pie, and there just may not be enough to go around. Spotify understandably wants to make money, and probably deserves something for its development of the technology itself. But even if it conceded to pay 100 percent of its revenue to rightsholders, and somehow managed to continue operating, the payouts under the current system would still be paltry for many musicians. Take Tasmin Little’s $15.50 for six months of streaming. Multiply that by 10—a factor which would far exceed Spotify’s total revenue if it were applied to its entire catalog—and it’s still only $155. Recognizing the futility of the situation doesn’t inure musicians to its indignities, which have continued rolling in as the pandemic pause stretches into an epoch of its own. First, there was the virtual “tip jar” that Spotify rolled out as an optional add-on to artist pages, which allowed listeners to donate money to musicians directly—an apparently well-intentioned gesture that nonetheless served as a tacit admission that streaming revenue could never keep most artists afloat on its own, even as Spotify subscriptions and revenue surged during the early weeks of the outbreak. Then, there was the news that Spotify had paid the wildly popular podcaster Joe Rogan over $100 million for exclusive rights to his show, the latest indicator of a larger priority shift toward podcasts for the company. Ted Gioia, a music historian and jazz pianist, summed up musicians’ frustrations with a tweet: “A musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they’re paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights… In other words, Spotify values Rogan more than any musician in the history of the world. Sound fair to you?” I emailed Gioia, who has written a celebrated book on music’s power to subvert existing orders, to ask if there’s any way that musicians, and the listeners who love them, can change the streaming system for the better. In a thoughtful and lengthy response, he chastised the record industry for failing to keep up with technological innovations on its own, allowing tech companies like Spotify to swoop in and set the negotiating terms. He pointed out that individual musicians have little to no leverage in their dealings with streaming platforms, despite the fact that their music makes those platforms run. He called the prospect of convincing platforms to pay musicians more a “pipe dream.” Despite all this, he ended his message with a faint note of hope. One way to fix things, he wrote, “would involve musicians taking control of their own destiny,” and walking away from streaming en masse to start something new. “Make no mistake, musicians could run their own streaming and distribution platforms, and reallocate the cash toward the people who create the songs,” he continued. “No, I don’t expect any of these things to happen. I’m just saying they could happen.” Click HERE to visit or return to jeeni.com

03
Sep

Interview with Opera Star Joy Tamayo, Inside Story at Jeeni

Kate Stewart’s Inside Story interview with the great opera soprano Joy Tamayo, star of Spring Street, global premiere on Jeeni.com Spring Street is an opera that was created by one of Jeeni’s biggest supporters Pete Wyer. How did he approach you to take part? With Pete we worked together back in 2019 for the Twilight Chorus, we performed this at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. But we weren’t actually introduced then. In 2020 January I wrote him an email, inviting him to an opera that I wrote which we turned into a film. He wrote me back and said “WOW! You guys are making something”, and so we started talking about projects and he sent me a song and he said, “a soprano is doing this, what do you think of it?” And that just started the ball rolling so to speak for this project. What did you think of the project once Pete described it to you? His music really excited me; the Twilight Chorus resonated with me well. And with this project when I first looked at the music, I thought it was beautiful that he found a way to commemorate his friends. This is something I love doing as well with my group, it’s storytelling and its wonderful music. So I immediately said yes, before he started giving me the music. And without even knowing the rest of the performers. You have been performing since around the age of three, what made you choose opera over other genres of music? I don’t think I chose opera, at three I was mostly singing with my dad, my parents really inculcated this love for music at such a young age. And I remember my dad would play the guitar and I would sing with him. So, this love for singing in particular I think brought me to the realisation that I love to do music. I got into the Philippines high school for the arts when I was 12 and it was just a normal progression from a love for music and focusing on opera. Because that was the type of music that the school was also teaching. In retrospect, I love other types of singing as well. And the pandemic has allowed me to explore other types of music. Also realising that you can just sing in your living room and have a setup, your microphone, your preamp and file-sharing as we did with Pete’s work, it was all online. So back to the question, I didn’t choose opera, I just thought music was wonderful. And I had an easy time expressing myself through music and opera. And now I’m exploring with singing and not really minding the boundaries and structures. I really love the discipline and rigour that comes with opera singing. So I still bring that with me even with other types of music that I’m exploring right now. You haven’t actually been able to meet many of the other cast members in person yet. So has it been strange working on a brand-new opera in a global pandemic? Yes, to say the least, New York being silent, for fourteen months or so, it’s been odd. I met Heday one of the performers this year, we did a video. But I was just going around with them, I didn’t have a big part in the video. But I was able to say Hi to Maren and Heday. It’s been strange but you make the best of the situation and it’s been really exciting and fun.  So, Spring Street is based in Manhattan and you’re based in Brooklyn but as you said you are originally from the Philippines. So how did that relocation come about? I got a scholarship at Crane School of Music, in upstate New York and so followed the American dream and moved here. It’s been a wild ride! For us in the Philippines your always thinking of the next step and for me being offered a scholarship, exploring another country, and also making sure that I do my best at the particular genre that I was exploring at that time, which was opera, it felt like the best move for me at that point. So, I moved to upstate New York and then I ended up here in Brooklyn and it's where I’ve been since 2014. So, Joy as well as being an amazing singer your also an actress and I’ve seen clips of the opera and your facial expressions in Spring Street are well, full of Joy I guess. It looks like you had a lot of fun with it, did you enjoy taking part? Yes, that was super fun! I remember it was around probably the end of winter when we shot some of the videos, and as you can imagine we were stuck at home for the longest time. So to be able to go outside and shoot some videos, was really fun. And to leave the living room, you know most of the videos were shot in the living room. And I remember I would send some videos to Pete, and he would say “you know what we could use this for this part” just like a collaboration back and forth. Your performance in spring street is going to be streamed worldwide on Jeeni.com in a couple of months too, a far bigger audience that could fit in an opera house. How do you feel about that? It’s hard to wrap my head around that, I haven't really contemplated the meaning of that big of a project. Now everything is online, a cat video can have millions of views, more than for example the Mets latest opera. But it’s certainly exciting. With this pandemic it seems like all of us are doing things; making art, making music, building communities in the living room, so it’s about file sharing, “oh watch this” or “have you seen my latest video”. There’s so much stuff online so I’m very excited about doing a similar thing. To finish today, Joy you’re a soprano which means that you have the highest vocal range of all of the vocal types. So I don’t suppose you could give us a little tiny demonstration? Although it is early morning in New York, so she hasn’t had the chance to warm up Joy complies happily. “No pressure” she laughs and proceeds to demonstrate her amazing vocal skills. You can watch the Inside Story Interview with Joy Tamayo by clicking here: Joy Tamayo Inside Story Spring Street Opera Joy Tamayo will be performing in the exclusive world première of Spring Street and the full performance can be watched Saturday 24th July 2021 on https://jeeni.com/springstreet/ Inspired by life on Spring Street, Manhattan – setting the poetry of Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo to music by Pete Wyer – wildly eclectic like the street itself.