Please see our blog post “Hello New Horizons” for more details about our decision.

If you have any questions please get in touch: support@appreciationengine.com

Thanks for all your support and happy March!

The post Musichype.com has retired appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.

2013 is starting off with new and exciting adventures for our team. Our new service, the Appreciation Engine, is taking off. 

If you visit the Appreciation Engine you’ll notice it looks a little familiar. The engine that sits underneath MusicHype.com has been split off to help businesses & brands create powerful customer profiles based on social activity. 

Unfortunately it’s also a bittersweet time for our team because on February 28th, 2013 MusicHype.com will be closing its doors.

We’re sad to say farewell to our beloved site and customers like you who’ve communicated, loved and rewarded your fans.

But while MusicHype.com is shutting down our belief that bands and businesses need to tailor content & build relationships with their fans lives on.

Here are a couple things you should think about doing for shutdown:

• download your latest reports from your dashboard
• communicate with your fans & let them know any campaigns you’re running will be shutting down at the end of the month
• remove any MusicHype widgets or links from your site

Remember, you have until the end of February to get it all done. And if you need a hand with anything please send us an email.

Our team wishes you all the best. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Best wishes,
Jeff & Annabel

The post Hello new horizons appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.

We’ve worked with bands, labels & management companies over the past three years to run a whole range of campaigns. Based on our experience the most effective and least spammy way to interact with fans is through key social network messaging, and one of least effective can be a “task-based campaign.”

Mission or task-based campaigns usually sit on a stand alone page and show everything the fan needs to do to win the big prize. It’s usually a lot of stuff. There are a few reasons why this approach might not work for your artist or brand.

Building a specific page with a list of tasks can be:

• overwhelming for fans – quite often they decide to give up even before they start
• can be perceived as spam by the fan’s friends, the exact people you’re trying to reach – this happens because a fan will complete all the tasks within a hour & you lose the natural & more genuine word-of-mouth marketing, not to mention irritating the fan’s friends
• might not be a good fit for your fan demographic – tasks & gamification can work well for some age groups, especially tweens, but older age groups tend not to engage with these types of campaigns because they see them as spammy
• legally complex – assigning specific tasks to specific rewards creates a “giveaway” type of scenario. In our experience this involves a lot of back and forth over Terms and Conditions of this “giveaway” or “promotion” with legal teams – ugh!
• less flexible – setting up firm tasks and rewards at the very beginning of a campaign doesn’t leave room to make changes. The nature of social media is always shifting. What works for one brand might not work for another. It’s especially important that the social media team can be flexible with their approach to see what works and what doesn’t.

To be clear we’ve had some very successful task-based campaigns because the artist fits the tween demographic. For bands and brands who live outside the tween world task-based campaigns take on a really spammy feel. For these clients we take a more organic approach to get fans taking action. Yes, this approach does take more time, but if you’re asking for someone to spend money you should make this your top priority.

You still create a list of tasks you want your fans to do but instead of posting them for everyone to see you drip feed them out to your audience over the appropriate social networks. For example if the social media team decided they wanted fans to “like” a band video on Youtube they would tweet, post on Facebook, share on Instagram and comment on YouTube. An example tweet could  be “We want to get 5,000+ Likes on the @band video “Love and death in the time of  Cholera” http://mhy.pe/UwKnht Help us out friends!”

These types of short bursts are really effective because they make tasks easy & immediate for fans. Rather than a fan having to remember the types of things they need to do they just watch the social networks they’re on already & take small steps. This kind of engagement is far more effective & more about building a community of influencers.

Another plus to this kind of an approach is it gives you the opportunity to actually talk to your fans. Reach out to some and thank them, or even start up a conversation. This also shows you’re not a one-way feed. There’s nothing worse than seeing a Twitter feed of someone who is always talking at their fans and never talking to them. If you’re not taking this kind of approach just know another brand is doing this and winning your potential fan over right now.

Fans who follow and listen to you online are valuable people you want to start having conversations with. So start today.

The post Incentivize Your Fans Without Creating A Spam Machine appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.

It’s such lovely news today, our sister site MusicHype.com is a finalist for the Innovator Awards 2012.

We’re privileged to be up against some very stiff competition in our category. Congratulations to Booktrack, Jumpshift & Smallworlds for being our fellow finalists.

Our core technology, the Appreciation Engine, was born & built in New Zealand, so we couldn’t be prouder of the recognition in our homeland.

Best of luck to everyone in the awards and way to go Kiwis!

The post We’re feeling particularly innovative today appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.

Another recent example was The Only Place by Best Coast, an album that I really like, but is still – several months after its release – not available to me. I even tried purchasing it on vinyl via their website, and was met with a regional restriction there too – they literally would not let me give them my money for their music. As a result, despite Best Coast being one of my favorite recent bands, I’ve barely touched the new album.

So anyway, Endless Flowers – it’s fantastic. Right from the opening chords, you know you’re in for something special. The title track and opener kicks things off with distorted and muddy chords over a dancefloor-ready beat – you know you’re in for a treat. Equal parts Jesus & Mary Chain and New Order, guitar pop versus indie dance. It’s the kind of album where you know from the first few chords that you’re going to love it. Highlights include the aforementioned opener, Sunday (Psychic Conversation #9), and the My Bloody Valentine influenced “My Surfing Lucifer”. Top shelf.

And since it’s not available everywhere on streaming services here’s a stream of the full album at Rolling Stone that they don’t get any money for. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

The post In Heavy Rotation: “Endless Flowers” – Crocodiles appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.

We send you an email showing who these fans are and how many points they’ve earnt over the last two weeks. You can use the links in the email to communicate directly with these fans.

Your fan message page filters to your very active fans & lets you communicate via Facebook, Twitter or Email

You use our page to tell your fans via email, Twitter or Facebook:

• thanks!
• chat with them
• give them a coupon code
• reward them with some free swag

You’ll see these fans highlighted in your dashboard

We’ll also highlight these super active fans with a ping icon, so can easily identify them.

Remember, each time you communicate with a fan you bring them further into your tribe. So start talking.

Image courtesy of Flickr user kingair42

The post 1 Ping Only appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.

And boy, what singles they were.

From his first hit single, the beautiful “You Send Me” (consisting of little more than the same three word phrase repeated over and over – the second word swapped out for “thrill” in the second verse) right through the the sublime, posthumously released “A Change Is Gonna Come” (below), Cooke wrote some of the most powerful songs of his generation. It is his voice that’s the real killer: smoothly wrapping itself around the song, but rough around the edges, giving it an edge that allowed him to move from gospel to soul to rock ‘n roll. Arguably one of the finest voices that pop music has ever produced.

His songwriting is also vastly underrated. “A Change Is Gonna Come” sees him tackle racial inequality – America was still very much segregated in 1964 – a brave move even for an African American of his status, and considered by many to be his finest work. Even with comparatively lighter subject matter like dance crazes (“Shake”, “Twistin’ the Night Away” or “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha”), straight pop tunes (“Another Saturday Night” (below), “Having a Party”), love songs (“Cupid”, “You Send Me”, “Only Sixteen”) to upbeat spirituals (“Jesus Gave Me Water”, “Touch The Hem Of His Garment”), his songs are all touched with an irresistible charisma that is impossible not to be charmed by.

The best compilation I’ve found to date is also the most popular: Portrait Of A Legend (pictured above). A 30 song collection that gathers together the vast majority of his great singles and originals, with very little of the trite album stuff. Not everything is there, the beautiful stripped-back demo version of “I’ll Come Running Back to You”, for example, or his great cover of Dylan’s “Blowing In The Wind”, so there’s plenty more out there to discover once you’ve exhausted Portrait.

Sam Cooke on Rdio
Sam Cooke on Deezer
Sam Cooke on Spotify
Sam Cooke on Grooveshark

The post In Heavy Rotation: Sam Cooke appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.

I’ve gone through beta a number of times, with different companies. It’s always stressful getting ready to launch and figuring out how you’re going to manage & collect beta testers.

This year we discovered the beta system Prefinery. These guys have built a site that handles your beta submissions & management. Yes, we did high-five each other at the MusicHype office – we didn’t have to build our own beta management system on-top of our product.

Prefinery gives you all the customizable forms & emails you need to manage beta testers & invite. Place their sign up form on your website to capture people who want invites, then sign into their back-end to approve or reject any sign ups. The invitee gets emailed their code and back on your site they input their invite code which runs a check against prefinery.

I also liked being able to set up specific codes. I could easily send out pre-determined codes for media partners and bloggers, so their community could automatically access our site.

And pricing is very reasonable, especially for startups. We began on their free plan and upgraded everytime we hit a threshold. It was very painless.

Customizing the Prefinery emails, putting up the forms and giving the system a good test took us 2 days, in-between other final bits and pieces of site testing & tweaks.

If you’re looking to run a website beta Prefinery gives you great value for money and takes away the management head-ache.

The post We Used Prefinery to Manage our Beta Sign Ups appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.

Recently, a substantial study was performed by industry veteran, Mark Mulligan, that really shows some amazing numbers and confidence in the streaming services as a new revenue stream for rights holders, labels, and management companies. The money WILL come, however, these sites have to scale first and it is only a matter of time. In 2006, I recall folks referring to iTunes as the death of the music business and artists will suffer. As we have learned over the years, that is not true. Apple accounts for a primary source of income for A LOT of artists, due to the scalable factor, as iTunes has grown substantially.

It’s important to remember that because of the nature of these music subscription services, we will see millions of people around the world taking a “chance” on an artist, with nearly zero friction and barrier to entry. The aggregation of that discovery, consumption, and sharing, is what will push subscription over the top, very soon!

The post Cloudy With a Chance of Discovery appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.

They’ve both won a 6-month free plan on MusicHype, plus they get to give two of their lucky fans a year-long subscription to Rdio, Spotify or Deezer.

And don’t worry we’ll be having another fan drive later on this year.

The post Fan Drive Winners appeared first on TheAppreciationEngine Blog.