Creating album art? Thinking about advertising your band? Over the last year, I have been working within the intersection of behavioral targeting, the music industry and ad design. I can tell you that artists everywhere submit images for inclusion in banner ad campaigns that are less appealing, more boring and exceedingly less mysterious than a box of Cheerios.

This post demonstrates why it's essential to use advertising and strategic PR to 'bridge' potential fan groups that have overlapping music preference profiles but remain entirely disconnected from each other on the Internet.

One might be misled into believing that the equation: decent artist + solid business support = success. However this formula is about as a sound as building a table that only has...one leg. If you are ever thinking about financially backing or supporting an artist, you should know that there are two other legs of the table that are of equal or greater importance. In fact, if these first two legs are solid, the third leg, the business leg, almost organically grows itself.

Even with overlap, at one thousand fans per artist, one million artists cannot acquire one billion true fans.  All the music lovers in the world are never going to accept and process billions of artist-initiated emails, status updates and text messages.  Pushy self-promotion doesn’t scale.  If everyone is doing it, nobody is going to do it effectively; the same applies to fundraising; fans are going to tune these messages out.  Collectively, artists and their managers are running the risk of appearing like financial planners at a cookout…occasionally invited, but often avoided.