Quick Hits: Accents / Umlauts in Music Search ; Maximizing Instagram Story “Highlights”
Adventures in Music Marketing
Happy New Year Friends. I’m working on a few longer posts regarding music marketing (e.g. about self driven efforts by independent artists versus bigger record label run campaigns).
Coming up next is a post about how minor nuances in music metadata can wildly effect an artist’s stream counts. Another one is about how “streaming exclusives” may actually benefit independent artists. You can also catch up with my previous posts, including most recently an in depth look at audio fingerprinting and how new music can easily wipe out existing works using that technology, right here in the archive.
In the meantime, here are two quick things to consider when marketing your music on digital platforms. Two quick hits here on that topic just in time for the first work week of 2020. Thanks for reading.
Handling accents and umlauts in artist names
Today’s important music metadata lesson for artists + labels: Most of us American English speakers ignore accents, umlauts in our search for your music. Have you worked with the digital music providers to have “alternative search terms” for you, if you do use accents / umlauts?
In the photo example below, consumer search on Traxsource will NOT find Freerange Records artist Lövestad, without the “ö” having it’s umlaut over the “o” in the search bar.
Try searching for “Lovestad” with the umulat, Lövestad, there’s NO problem … .
Spotify will resolve the search for Lövestad without the umlaut if you just type “Lovestad”, you will still find the artist, unlike Traxsource.
The point: Search criteria can vary wildly on music services, so make it simple to discover your artist if possible and skip accents and umlauts in your artist’s name. Ha, and we didn’t even talk about voice search here, but alas, this is just a “quick hit” for today.
The Quirks of Instagram Story “Highlights”
It never ceases to amaze me the amount tinkering you have to do with various platforms to find the digital marketing feature quirks.
The most recent example: I just composed an End of Year Review Instagram (IG) Stories “Highlight” for my music group FSQ (Funk Style Quality) and discovered playing back the highlight for fans doesn’t always work right, read on :
IG “Highlights” allows multiple IG “Stories” — each “story” being a 15 seconds long video — to be collated in a single package, with up to 100 “stories” allowed in an individual “highlight”. Here’s the math:
The Highlights are presented as a collection on the musical artists’ IG profile page. Here are some of the highlights I have made for my artist FSQ.
Unlike the temporal nature of IG stories which expire after 24 hours, IG “Highlights” collections will remain on an artist profile as long as they would like them to be there.
This IG feature is great for artists to gather + store moments or collections like “tour highlights”, “recording the album in the studio”, “2020 merch”. At the end of this post are some references for music artists and managers looking to maximize IG Highlights feature.
What is great about IG Highlights is: You can get and share a URL web link to an individual IG highlights package. For instance here is my “Best of 2019” package.
BTW, I almost maxed out this “Highlight”. FSQ’s “Best of 2019” is composed of 89 individual stories packaged into one long broadcast, it’s 22 minutes and 15 seconds long! Max as I mentioned is 25 minutes.
So yes — the feature quirk I mentioned — here it is:
If you access the IG highlight from a web browser (e.g. outside the IG mobile app), NO AUDIO from the IG highlight will play.
For instance, I use music quite a bit in IG stories— both from Instagram’s music library — and my own music I have placed in the story videos.
I HAVE gotten the audio to play from my “Best of 2019” Instagram Highlight in a browser (Chrome) once, by clicking to it via my Instagram profile page. You can visit this link, then click on “Best of 2019” .
https://www.instagram.com/fsqofficial/
But I can’t share the direct highlight URL link and expect people will get the audio. This is wildly disappointing considering the amount of time and work that went into producing the “Best of 2019” 22 minute long IG Highlight. LOL, the joke is on me.
Also, I was expecting to be able to distribute that FSQ “Best of 2019” URL on social channels and that it would play back properly for our fans. The whole point was to make this year end review accessible everywhere and easy to follow. I’m hoping Instagram will fix the audio playback issue with IG “Highlights” URLs. I will be reaching out to them about this problem.
The point: If you spend enough time as a music artist marketer maximizing digital media platforms to your advantage, you’re going to come across those quirks that break what you are trying to achieve with the cool features of said platforms.
PS — do you hear audio when you click through and playback our FSQ “Best of 2019” IG Highlight? Please comment and let us know ..
Resources for Music Marketers using Instagram Highlights
