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Featured Speaker – Ian Heath
Fri Oct 23, 2pm Cavalier Room
$10 + fees or included in Conference Pass

Connecting with Fans—Creating, Cultivating and Capitalizing on the most important of all relationships

Communication is at the core of the music industry, and fostering a strong emotional connection between a musician and their fans, and even between the fans and each other, is the key to creating a sustainable career. Endearing fans to the artist, and creating a sense of community with the fans, can be achieved through effective communication in both the online and offline worlds, thus stimulating word-of-mouth and pushing forward the organic spread of awareness surrounding an artist’s music. Audience expectations are changing; outward broadcasting-style communication and promotion has given way to more two-way conversational communication, which is providing a huge opportunity for artists to develop extremely strong relationships with their fans, as well as learn more information than ever before about them, ultimately enabling artists to create more specifically targeted products to sell.

Listeners will be more likely to become customers, and customers more likely to become evangelists, spreading the word to new people, and turning them into new fans and customers, and so on. Building a business around your music has never been so accessible to so many people, and the opportunity exists today to grow that business much further independently, before enlisting the aid of business partners. This talk will endeavour to give attendees some concrete advice on more effective promotion tactics, how to take an interactive approach to nurturing their band-fan relationships, how to communicate effectively with their audience, tips on collecting fan info (and using it!), building customer databases and how to create many options for monetization (digital, physical, subscriptions, merch, bundles, donations, touring, free/freemium, ad-supported, etc.).

Ian Heath is a marketing manager at Sony Music Canada and runs the musician-focused website Intrsctn.com [music+interactivity]. The Intrsctn website endeavours to provide helpful, honest advice to independent musicians and bands seeking to promote themselves and their music more effectively using all the tools available in the modern online age. As a marketing manager, Ian is responsible for working closely with the Sony Music Canada A&R department to develop domestic acts (including illScarlett, The New Cities, Priestess and others); plus project-managing Canadian album releases by a roster of internationally signed artists including Kings Of Leon, Franz Ferdinand, Lamb Of God, Three Days Grace, Anti-Flag, Imogen Heap, Sean Kingston and others. In the past, Ian has also managed independent bands (The Wooden Sky, Arkata); worked for a few indie record labels (Teenage USA Recordings, Song Corp); produced, engineered and digitally edited (The Misfits, Michale Graves) and played guitar, bass, and drums in a few bands you have never heard of.