Seth Godin is a marketing guru and a regular feature on the panels at music industry exhibitions. In this in-depth interview he chats to Music Marketing’s David Hooper about the seismic changes that are happening in the music industry, and how you as a musician can best place yourself in the digital market.
Band Metrics is a newly launched (on the back of this year’s Midem) service that allows bands to keep track of their radio exposure in different cities, and who’s talking about them on Twitter along with their location, plotted on a Google map. While the radio tracking service is only really useful to larger, more famous acts, the Twitter locator is quite useful, as long as you take care to make sure your band name is distinctive, as the word filter can’t differentiate between subjects or pick up phrasings. The platform is bound to develop, and add functions to it’s reporting, but even now it’s a relatively handy little tool for planning a tour and guaging the level of interest in your act in a given location.
In interviews with both Pharell Williams of N.E.R.D (click on the tab for videos from the 23rd of Jan) and Neptunes fame (named best producer of the 00’s) Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien on the Midem blog, they both talk about how the music industry is going to have to accept the way people are consuming music on the web and adapt to it, essentially that there is no sense in victimising people for file-sharing and exchanging music on the internet. Williams describes file sharing as ‘taste-testing’ for music, increasing listener base and giving musicians greater audience reach.
O’Brien likens P2P file sharing to the ‘home-taping’ of the 80’s – suggesting, like Pharell, that it is a way of introducing new listeners to your music, who will then go on to buy concert tickets, merchandise or other music products, if they really like the music. He also cites services like Spotify as the more attractive answer to the ‘deeply unsexy, utilitarian’ file sharing websites – criticising the recording industry for not moving fast enough to create services that cater to consumers taste for easy access to digital music. He also stresses the importance of connecting with your fans, ‘building your tribe’, even for huge acts like Radiohead.
Nice little article over at Hypebot (who are up to their necks in Midem at the moment) on some top line music market trends: according to a survey of more than 8,000 music consumers, 45% of listeners are happy to listen to an advert in order to fund a download of a track, and 41% to fund a stream of a song. Here is a run down of the stats:
Vevo was born of the collaboration between YouTube and the major labels, after the long argument about revenues from YouTube’s streaming of copyrighted music and videos. Vevo has been streaming music video since December ‘09, and in that one short month, has overtaken Myspace music as the No.1 music video site in the US. Techcrunch reports the following figures, with a more detailed analysis.
Top U.S. Music Services On The Web (in unique visitors, December, 2009)
Most of the traffic on Vevo was driven there from YouTube, and the service isn’t available outside the States yet, but given the warm reception Vevo has recieved, look for roll-out into Europe and Asia in the near future, as well as startled reactions from their competitors.
Head over to the Midem blog and watch an interview in which Ed O’Brien discusses how they made a success of releasing ‘In Rainbows’ independently of any record labels, and what that success meant for their band.As one of the most important ‘game changing’ releases of recent years it’s interesting to hear O’Brien tell the big labels to sit up and take notice. Of course Radiohead had the benefits of already having been made famous working with record labels (XL, TBD, Parlophone, Capitol), and the novelty and notoriety of being one of the first big acts to give their music away, but there are lessons to be learnt.
After the success of the Christmas No.1, Rage Against the Machine, anti-X-Factor facebook campaign, a lot of copycat campaigns have sprung up attempting to achieve the same effect, and get specifically unknown music into the charts. The most ambitious of them has got to be ‘Storm The Charts’, which intends to place an indie musician at each slot of the UK Top 40. Currently the mainstream charts are devoid of ‘interesting’ music not becuase music fans don’t buy music, but because their tastes are far more varied than those of the people that buy chart music; those who are swayed by the marketing methods of the Big 4, and what’s pumped (pimped) through the TV on a Saturday night. Bringing disparate fans together for high profile campaigns is only a short term ’statement’ trying to get the attention of the industry and asking them to pay more attention to smaller artists, but it’s hard to see how the major labels can defocus their marketing budgets and make the same kind of impact for a wider range of smaller acts. Nevertheless, it’s something we’d like to see happen, and if enough noise is made, then it might further persuade the industry that the broadening of music consumption that is apparent online should be mirrored in the mainstream. This would have the knock on effect of encouraging them in their efforts to monetise content online, and mean that we’re all more likely to see viable legal alternatives to the file-sharing that’s so widely prevalent, and widely blamed for causing the steep decline in physical sales.
If you’re interested in participating in the campaign, however Quixotic it may seem, you can get more details by clicking onto, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=231943888357 – the main Facebook group, or www.myspace.com/stormthecharts.
On Tuesday, M.I.A. tweeted a link to a music video without explanation, and the press (don’t make me say Blogosphere) jumped on it, full of speculation about what it could possibly be. Oddly, it turned out to be a new song called “Space Odyssey” that’ll be on her forthcoming album.
No big surprises, really. Every album release seems to be preceded by more or less official leaks these days, so why was thins one paid so much attention? It came on the back of some controversial statements that MIA made against the New York Times’ recommendation of holidays in Sri Lanka (where she’s concerned about civil violence), and it had both the seal of official approval and the element of mystery to it, to encourage speculation and conversation.
Replicating this buildup of momentum is possible even on a smaller scale. Any glimmer of notoriety for your band that can be tied into a current issue and subverted to your own purposes. Try and tie these things in to the release of your own new bit of hot content and you should see interest snowballing; people love following links, and the more meat you can put around an issue, the deeper people will explore it.
HMV
is one high street music chain that has thus far survived the decimation that has killed off Zavvi, Fopp, and other music retailers, and Luminar is a behind the scenes operator of a large group of nightclubs across the UK. According to a report in the Times ‘the two companies are discussing the possibility of setting up a small number of pilots that would involve HMV stores and Luminar clubs cross-marketing to each others’ customers.’ This seems like a smart move on HMV’s part, taking a few more of their eggs out of the physical retail market. In the light of the proposed deal between Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which if approved would sweep the board on high level gigs, it makes sense for mid level venues to start tying in with big players in the music industry for some marketing support, thereby providing another route to heavliy promoted artists, and safeguarding their territory from downward incursion.
HMV already has its own record label, and close ties into live venues, which are proving more resistant to the general slump in the music market than physical record sales.
The Daily Mail has unearthed an old letter from a certain David Jones, dated September ‘67. Bowie responded to his first American fan letter, from a 14 year old girl named Sandra, personally and fully. Now that’s connecting with fans… Not only does he thank her personally, but asks her to stay in touch, and talks about instituting a US fan club. Pretty savvy for a young man in the first flushes of his career, and 40 years before Trent Reznor started having the same ideas.
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