Steve Spiro is the VP Marketing at Myxer.com, the leading provider of mobile content. He has over 30 years of marketing experience, having worked at both global corporations and technology start-ups. He spent 15 years at Motorola in various senior management roles both in the U.S. and Japan, and also helped lead 4 Internet start-ups over the last 12 years.

How many of your fans have cellphones?   It’s almost a rhetorical question these days.  There are over 250 million cellphones in just the U.S. alone (over 3  billion worldwide) so there’ a real good bet that it’s close to 100%. 

ringtones create great word of mouth buzz every time a bands’ fan phone rings.   Similar to word of mouth buzz, mobile content can create viral online buzz by sharing widgets and links. Ringtones, wallpapers, mobile videos, etc. can be offered from your website, your MySpace page or sites with large communities that focus on offering mobile content to their audience. A vital part of a bands success depends on their ability to direct their fans to their physical, online, and mobile offerings.

Beyond just online and word of mouth buzz, artists can promote their mobile content on all of their flyers, promotional items, stickers, T-shirts, album covers and more. You can create customized text codes for each of your ringtones or wallpapers and promote those codes directly from stage or on any of your printed materials.  This has a great impact on the fan that is just discovering your music for the first time because they can leave the show with your music on their phone to take home with them. A great guerilla marketing campaign would be to create stickers that only feature customized texting codes for free ringtones, then place them around you local area in bars, on stop signs, and hard to reach places on college campuses; then see how many hits you get.

Traditionally the ringtone industry only dealt with the hits thus providing a market where $1.99 or $2.99 ringtones were the only way to get new ringtones to fans’ phones. As more artists begin to offer ringtones and fans find new ways to create their own ringtones we have found that the promotional value of the ringtone can outweigh the money generated from just sales alone. You may choose to give free ringtones either as part of your promotional efforts, or as means to build up your list.   You can even use the free ringtones to help drive sales of digital downloads from iTunes, Rhapsody, Amie Street, etc. or to help sell other merch.

Speaking of lists, indie bands are also creating their own mobile fanlists so they can access their advocates right on the day they are performing to get additional people to hear them play at the venue. New trends in the online and mobile music industry have all pointed to the ability to engage your audience with updates and announcements as a very valuable tool to work with other online and mobile businesses. If you have the ability to get your core fans to download your new release or buy tickets to your shows just by keeping up on your email and text messaging updates you will have the power to run successful publicity and marketing campaigns very easily.

It literally takes only a few minutes to get your MP3’s converted into ringtones and many services are free.  Plus, your fans---virtually on any phone on any carrier worldwide will have access to your content.   You don’t have to try and fight to be on a carrier’s “deck”.   Why not take advantage of this excellent marketing tool?

The future is a mobile future and it’s here now

• Legitimize your band as cutting-edge and ready for advancing mobile technology.
• Interacting with fans via the mobile phone will start to create awareness of the mobile phones’            potential to close the gap between artists and fans.
• The mobile phone will become a place where artists can handle fan education, sales, publicity, promotions, street team management, and more.