Here is a great example of an unpaid (so far as we know) celebrity endorsement for a previously almost unknown artist and what can happen from just ONE tweet and instagram.
Keep in mind the following
1) The artist is almost completely unknown
2) He has almost no sales funnel in place
3) No remarketing or any paid media whatsoever ( not surprising here for obvious reasons )
“I make music as Christopher the Conquered. Just over 1 week ago, Ryan Adams tweeted a photo of my new album (unreleased, it doesn’t come out until next year) with the text: “You guys @ctconquered is the real deal. This record is blowing my mind!!!” Here’s a link: https://twitter.com/TheRyanAdams/status/627930152379351040
He also posted it on Instagram with: “This is a crazy and incredible record. Holy shit. Congrats @ctconquered” Here’s that link: https://instagram.com/p/55LLUtTDBl/
First of all, I need to say I am very thankful to Ryan for sharing my music. There’s nothing in it for him, so it’s just very sweet of him. So thank you, Ryan!
I have never met Ryan Adams. I played a show opening for the wonderful Natalie Prass and gave her an advance copy of the cd. It seems to have made its way from Iowa (where I live) to Los Angeles, where Ryan lives. Therefore, I owe Natalie a thank you, as well!
Obviously, I was very surprised to see these posts, and after overcoming the initial shock, it occurred to me that I should try to quantify the effect of these posts. We’ll call it the “Ryan Adams bump”. 
So, 1 week later, what’s happened? Well, I’m not playing on the late night circuit or anything like that, but I did get a lot of interest in my music. Here’s how the last week has played out:
Website Page Views – 2489 Views
Youtube Videos: 1653 New Views
Soundcloud: Single from Album – 572 Plays
Facebook: 82 New Likes
Instagram: 40 New Followers
Twitter: 31 New Followers
Spotify: 28 New Followers
Email Newsletter: 12 Signups
Internet Sales (Not including iTunes, Spotify, etc. – that takes a while to get those numbers): $86
I took a look at the analytics for what I could above (website, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) and for the rest I can basically speak anecdotally.
My website was averaging about 30 page views a day before the posts. The day of the post, I got 999 page views. It’s been dropping exponentially since then, about to be back to it’s “normal” state. We’ll see if the overall average ups a little.
YouTube videos saw a 701% growth over the previous week! Whoa.
The single off the album on Soundcloud had pretty much tapered off after its release in April around 900 plays, get a couple a day since the mid-June. It had 950 plays right when Ryan posted, that jumped up to 1572 within one week.
Facebook was a 179% growth in likes from the previous week. Not bad.
Instagram is hard to tell, definitely a jump in follows, though!
Twitter analytics, interestingly, say that my increase was in line with growth since the beginning of July…I did play a big festival then…I would’ve expected a noticeable bump here.
Spotify followers had definitely tapered off, so that was a noticeable boost! Now that I have over 250 followers though, I can verify my artist profile and get analytics on that…not sure if I’ll be able to look back at this time period though.
I had zero email signups and zero internet sales the week before this, and honestly, my weekly averages had been close to zero for a while. So definitely a bump there. It’ll be interesting to see how revenues from digital music outlets are affected.
Now I did get two other pieces of press in this week, one on Noisey.Vice.com and one on PureVolume.com (a new music video). So it’s not clear that all of the increases are due strictly to the “Ryan Adams bump”, but undoubtedly he gave me a lot of momentum. And experience tells me that those other press bits wouldn’t amount to much.
What I’m curious about is if these numbers could be extrapolated to predict the effect of being personally advocated for by a celebrity? Taylor Swift (whose album 1989 Ryan Adams is currently creating a cover version of in the style of The Smiths) has 100 times the number of Twitter followers that Ryan does. Would it be reasonable to expect that if she posted about my music, I would see 100 times the above numbers in impact?”
So we can answer this question pretty well.
First, this type of thinking exemplifies the wrong way to approach or to think about what a given celebrity can do for you. First, if there is no demographic match between his fan base and Taylor Swifts, her enormously bigger reach would result in a lot more traffic but in the end, might not be worthwhile. In music, its very hard to sell something that can be downloaded for free so easily, but in his case, we need to know much more about his fans. What kind of music do they like? What other groups do they like? What other Facebook Pages do they like? What other twitter accounts do his fans follow? This will lead to a better understanding and maybe a better celebrity match for him. Taylor Swifts amazing reach may be largely wasted, where endorsements from other groups or celebrities that are more within his target audience, may be much more effective and lead to the increased performances and album sales that he wants.
Too many people want to “go viral” without really understanding what that means, and many people want to “get on Oprah” because they are thinking in terms of mass exposure. If you are a 50 year old bluegrass mandolin player, how much do you think a tweet from Britney Spears would help you? After all the hoopla dies down, not much in the long run. You get lots of eyeballs but 99 percent of them are wasted.
The formula is, the right product, matched to the right celebrity in terms of demographics, positioning, and expertise, with the right marketing and publicity in place beforehand and after. That is what gives you the winning combination.
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