Director of production company Manhattan Multimedia, Malcolm Burt details his research on the age of the internet and its real impact on the marketing of music today.
Music Marketing
Ernest Sternberg says that the most important commodities in Western economies are icons – images and the associations they carry. This has never been more apparent than here and now in the music industry, where the icons have become the only things that matter – talent and musical ability, even the ability to carry a tune – have all fallen by the wayside.
In much the same way as most Hollywood ‘blockbuster’ films have become pure, cynical, demographically-targeted ‘product’, the marketing of music (which is, and has always been, inextricably linked to the same cult of stardom that drives the marketing of films), has become blurred with tie-ins and marketing deals that leave listeners wondering where the cross-promotion ends and the music or film begins.
Music producers and musicians have always been under assault for ‘selling out’ and becoming ‘product’. However, to demonstrate just how commodified music marketing has become, at EMCI – the premier company linking the corporate world with the broad spectrum of contemporary entertainment, music and technology – (emci.com, 2002), the list of artists are called ‘available properties’ broken into ‘adult target’, ‘young adult target’ and ‘teen target’.
The EMCI site lists some of their major achievements on their ‘Corporate Highlights’ page as follows:
Even dead performers are not immune from being resurrected for commercial gain. Elvis’s sell-out Elvis The Concert world tour of 2000-2001 featured backing singers, musicians and video footage of Elvis from previous concerts.
Radio marketing
One of the most overbearing influences on modern music played on the radio has been the shady and often confusing world of ‘payola’ and ‘indies’ – that control virtually every song played on radio today. It could be said that payola is the most important part of music marketing on the radio today.
Payola – The paying of cash or gifts in exchange for airplay – is a contraction of the words ‘pay’ and ‘Victrola’ (LP record player), and it began in 1960 when Alan Reed was indicted for accepting $2,500 which he claimed was a token of gratitude and did not affect airplay. (The History of Rock, 2002). From these humble beginnings, payola has become so firmly entrenched in modern radio, some believe the system could not function without it. The system of payola and ‘indies’ is complex enough to warrant an explanation of how the system works.
Record labels are forbidden to pay radio stations directly to influence their playlists, so they pay PR firms (or ‘quarterbacks’ as they are known) to promote singles. The quarterbacks then hire ’indies’ – independent promoters. The indie selects a radio station (or works with an existing contact in a station) and negotiates with the playlist controller an amount of money required to get the single on air – in direct violation of payola laws. The indie then claims that station as his/her own, and is paid by the original record company every time the radio station adds a new song to their playlist.
This way the record companies do indeed bribe radio stations to play singles, but they do it behind the ‘quarterbacks’ and their legitimate PR companies. It is also probably the most important form of marketing music on the radio – mainstream radio plays what the record labels pay them to play.
‘Virtually all the songs played on a typical commercial radio station – known as “adds” in the trade – are paid for.’ (Boehlert, 2001)
Manufactured music
‘Pop music has always been vulnerable to commercial manipulation, but this time the process has been inverted so that commerce gives birth to the band before its members have even met.’ (Crumley, 1997)
The mid 80’s brought a crop of prefabricated bands, one of the most successful being New Kids on The Block, a pop band brought together specifically for commercial reasons. They were followed in the 90’s with Backstreet Boys, N’SYNC, 5, and perhaps the most phenomenally successful example of a pop group as product, the Spice Girls.
Two established music producers advertised for young girls, no singing talent necessary, then placed them in one house in order to craft a perfect pop machine. No marketing opportunity was missed – the biography, the cameras (Polaroid), the movie (Spiceworld), an ill-fated scooter deal (Aprilia – the deal fell apart and the Girls were sued when Ginger Spice abruptly left the group) as well as the usual posters, videos, fan magazines, etc.
‘The Spice Girls would be best understood by dropping all musical or cultural references and adopting a hard and cynical marketing mindset.’ (Crumley, 1997)
Ouch – the rampant marketing of the spice girls actually led to the ‘Spice Girls Syndrome’ – the signing up of bands or artists for multiple endorsement deals, regardless of the long-term effect. (Esch, 2001)
The expensive marketing now practiced by record labels (as well as the huge costs of getting a single on the radio) is actually shrinking the new sounds and talents coming forth. The only way to get a single on mainstream radio is to have a contract with a major label, however due to spiralling marketing costs and an overall downturn in the record-buying public, some record labels are shrinking their artist rosters in order to put more money behind less artists.
The availability of music on the Internet is allowing more artists to be heard than ever before, but at the same time it is limiting the ability of the major record labels, who are suffering from the downturn in sales, to back anything but sure-fire (read: stale and careful) hits. Could this be justice returned to the labels and ‘power to the people’ who want wide and varied music to choose from at reasonable rates?
Marketing music in the digital age
‘In April (2002), the IFPI reported that worldwide music sales were down 5 percent in 2001, to $33.7 billion.'(Shachtman, 2002)
As with films, the advent of the Internet has had a drastic effect on music marketing and distribution. It has often been said that observing the effects of Internet piracy on the music system is an excellent way to predict what will shortly follow in the film industry. It’s a concept that is easy to swallow – film and music may be different in some ways, but on the Internet they are both reduced to a digital stream of ones and zeros – the only difference being that films are a great deal larger at this point.
When Napster started out it was seen as a way to take back control – musicians could market for themselves, ‘information wanted to be free’ was the rallying catchcry, and suddenly record collections from around the world were available at the click of a button. However, mass copyright violation and outright stealing of commercial works of music became rampant.
The major studios were slow off the mark to establish their own online presences, preferring to try and squash the illegitimate file trading services in court with massive infringement cases. Napster has now been shuttered and other sites such as MP3.com have taken a beating and been severely curtailed or bought up by the very companies who sued them.
A limp lineup of legitimate file trading services have been released over the last twelve months, including Pressplay, Rhapsody, MusicNet, eMusic, MusicMatch, FullAudio, and a music service by AOL which is wrapped up inside the company’s ISP subscription. All except AOL’s service (which has nearly 18 million users) have fared poorly due to unrealistic restrictions on file usage, inability to transfer files to other devices, high pricing and limited catalogs.
IM Spam
It wasn’t long before enterprising music marketers realised that user preferences and downloaded file details on the illegitimate file trading services were easily available (in order to sign up to these services, users had to fill out information about their music preferences, which would then be made available to other users…and marketers), as well as details about the song files being made available on the user’s hard drive – the online equivalent of displaying your record collection in your front window.
This created a delicious one-on-one targeted marketing opportunity, and marketers quickly began using the Instant Messaging features enabled in some file sharing utilities to enquire if a user would like to buy other records from artists they had detected on their hard drive.
Outraged users responded quickly (although paradoxically, for people using a free service to trade illegal files) on many sites across the Internet, including F**kedcompany.com, a popular website listing dotcom disasters, and with very active boards on all manner of topics, including Napster.
‘I’m a major (5000+files downloaded) P2P user, and I started getting spammed on Napster 3 weeks ago. I didn’t even know I’d been spammed until the next day when I got the same message again. It made me VERY angry. Let me put marketers on notice: I would NEVER buy a product that used my Ims for advertising.’ (‘Pratt’, 2002)
and a corporate take on ‘IM Spam’ from Jim Nail, online advertising analyst with Forrester Research:
‘This is a really bad idea because instant messaging physically is like a private conversation. This is like you’re talking with your boyfriend over the phone and 1-800-Flowers jumps in and says “I see you’re having an argument, why don’t you buy some flowers?”‘(Nail, 2001)
Online marketers such as L90, ADD Marketing and Big Champagne see peer-to-peer networks as a perfect way to promote goods to highly targeted customers. These marketers were thrilled by the 20% response rates to an earlier experiment where Big Champagne pushed an acoustic version of an Aimee Mann single on the Napster and Gnutella networks.
Not to lose market share to marketers, the peer-to-peer operators themselves are now cultivating ways to market services directly to their own client bases. AOL is developing an IM based song trading system, along with a variety of other subscription based online music services, in an attempt to make buying music over the net as easy as chatting to a friend online. Plans are also being made to incorporate AOL’s IM system into future versions of MusicNet.
‘IM-ing is probably the most efficient viral marketing tool online in the U.S. today’ (Samit, 2002)
However there are even more inventive ways of marketing music – inside the music itself.
Digital Payloads offers content owners a way of placing a five second advertisement at the start of an MP3 file before they release it on the web – the file could then be distributed widely and even undergo a name change, and still contain the five second ad.
Digital Payloads insists this is an unobtrusive way of the content owners promoting their services, in the same way as a radio DJ introduces songs. Digital Payload’s John Brewer believes the advertisements do more than just spruik the album from which they came, but could in fact legitimise illegal file trading services, as the service:
‘…gives Napster and Scour a licensed track to trade, and the labels get the branding, and we can put links within the file so that people are encouraged to buy the CD.’ (King, 2000)
As with any other MP3 file, the advertisement could be stripped from the song file and re-released using relatively simple editing software.
