Nick Crocker has been transforming digital entertainment since serving as General Manager at Musicadium in Australia, where he wrote “9 Ways to Ride the Digital Music Wave.” Named with Native Digital co-founder Ben Johnson to Smart Company’s “2009 Hot 30 Under 30”, Nick is ND’s Managing Director. Nick and Ben launched the world’s first music blog for a major label (The In Sound From Way Out, for EMI) and collaborated with Wotnews in 2009 to track a variety of online music conversations (blogs, social networks and forums) through the blog aggregator, We Are Hunted. Nick is a regular commentator on issues relating to music, marketing and technology for publications such as Billboard, AFR and NME.
R&G: How did you get your start in music and marketing?
Nick: I ran a digital distribution company called Musicadium based on the Tunecore model, with a flat fee worldwide distribution, no royalties, no ownership in the music. My background in law and political science gave me an analytical framework so that with my passion for music and ability to write, I was given the responsibility to run a start-up. The start for me with marketing came from being at Musicadium, having a very small marketing budget, and being forced to consider, “How do I market when I’ve got no money to do it?” I’d been reading Seth Godin and realized this was an opportunity to actually live the reality of what Seth talks about and see if it works. We made a decision that rather than marketing to the world, we’d market back to our customer base and let them market for us. We did that by sending an email each week with a bunch of tips for them as to how to market themselves online. We delivered real tangible value to our customer base: things that they could go out and use that day, that hour, that minute. All of a sudden, the number of people who were coming through jumped by 1000%, just by word of mouth. We were also distributing music digitally. We’d distribute the music for the artists and then they’d come back to us and say, “Okay, well, my music’s distributed. It’s available everywhere in the world now on iTunes. What do I do now? How do I market it?” So in 2008 I wrote an eBook called – it’s a terrible name, but it’s called, “9 Ways to Ride the Digital Music Wave.” I spent a couple of weeks writing this eBook with the nine things I thought each one of the artists who was working with me needed to do to market his or herself online. We gave it away to our customers – gave it to anyone who wanted it – and put it everywhere we could. It was mildly successful and people started paying attention. Once you go that far – to write a 9000-word eBook on digital marketing and music in such a burgeoning industry – you’re probably ahead of most people. That’s basically how I became a digital music marketer.
R&G: You’re currently running Native Digital?
Nick: Yeah. I left Musicadium in October last year. As a result of that eBook and as a result of the work I was doing, I was coming into contact with a lot of people. I saw an opportunity or a gap in the market to be full-time in the digital music space – not just talking about it but actually consulting on it. My first client was EMI Australia. They said, “Come and talk to us about our digital strategy.” What came of that was a website called, The In Sound From Way Out, which is the first blog written for a major music label. After we did the site strategy, we said to them, “We’ve got a vision for this now, and we don’t want you to go and get someone else to build it, so we’ll build it for you.” Once we built it, we thought, “We know this story and we love it, so we’re going to go and tell people about it.” We came up with that concept and pushed it out. It got written up on Wired on the day it launched, which was a great boost, gave it some excellent exposure, and sort of put Native on the map in that space. That was a real thrill. The blog has also been incredibly valuable for EMI Australia, not just as an external marketing tool, but as an internal tool for people to share the stories about the music they love.
