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The Great Escape 2015
TGE2015: Music marketing needs to adapt for the streaming future
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 6 March 2015
CMU Business Editor Chris Cooke on the CMU Insights conference strand Music Marketing Is Broken: Let’s Fix It, due to take place at The Great Escape this May.
As we start to see music consumption slowly shift from CD sales and downloads over to the streaming platforms, it creates some interesting challenges for the way record companies plan and implement their marketing strategies. Because the key objective of those marketing strategies changes from ‘maximising first week sales’ to ‘ensuring sustained listening’. Which is another reason why the move from downloads to streams today is much more revolutionary than the move from CDs to downloads a decade ago.
iTunes, of course, was simply a digital manifestation of the traditional record shop. And while the record industry had to adapt in terms of licensing and distribution, the way the labels marketed each album release stayed pretty much the same, albeit with some extra digital channels thrown in. Build hype in the weeks ahead of release to maximise sales in the weeks immediately following the release, before standing down and declaring the record ‘catalogue’.
But in the streaming domain things change; and that’s true whichever streaming business model ultimately wins out. Sure, some hit records will still dominate the streaming platforms to such an extent that artist and label will see quick-win revenues, but in the main the objective is to ensure that people keep coming back to your records again and again in the years to come, so that each month your music accounts for as big a share as possible of overall listening, so you see a bigger cut of the ad and subscription revenues that are generated.
Of course we’re not quite there yet. Streaming is growing at one hell of a pace, but in the UK last year was still behind CDs and downloads in terms of overall revenue. But streaming is already a significant revenue stream and is only set to get more so, which means record labels – as the primary marketers of recorded music – need to start exploring how, exactly, sustained listening can be assured.
And that is what we will be considering in depth at The Great Escape this year with the first of the CMU Insights conference strands to be fully announced, Music Marketing Is Broken: Let’s Fix It.
Thanks to a keynote from Spotify’s Will Hope we will learn what is really driving streams in 2015, and we will then hear from some leading marketing and PR experts from within the record industry about what changes they are seeing, how they are adapting, and what they think are the challenges ahead, if and when streaming becomes the biggest part of the record industry’s business.
I think we all know that playlists are a key part of this, as a way of standing out from the flood of new music that appears on the streaming services each week, and as a mechanic for encouraging fans to return to an artist’s records again and again. But what do we mean by that? Should artists and labels be setting up their own playlists? Or should they be PRing playlist owners as if they were DJs or journalists? And are the streaming platforms themselves as much new media as they are the new retailers? These are also questions we plan to tackle during this strand.
And finally, what about live? Marketing debates tend to focus on the labels, because traditionally they have driven most music marketing activity, with campaigns always centred on an album release, even if the artist and their other business partners have other products to sell.
And I think it’s fair to say that tour promoters, who often work with artists just as they are releasing new records, have often benefited from the hype the labels create in order to sell more tickets, even though labels aren’t traditionally cut into any live revenue. Indeed, even today we get PRed tour listings by labels more than we do promoters, even though it is the latter’s business that is being publicised.
That said, the live sector has become more proactive in its marketing in recent years, beyond a few print ads, billboards and sending some listings over to the PA, and that is something we will also explore in our music marketing strand. We know the music industry at large is swimming in data in the digital age, and it’s perhaps in the live space where these analytics are most vital day-to-day. But how exactly?
And as new ticketing services enter the market that are more than just agents – they offer curation, or social networking tools, or are linked to media and online communities – how can promoters use these new apps and platforms to engage fans? And does it mean changing the way promoters choose ticketing suppliers and having tickets on sale through many more channels?
So lots of questions, but we’ve got just the right people lined up to help answer them. Check out the full schedule for ‘Music Marketing Is Broken: Let’s Fix It’ here, and look out for news of some additional speakers next month. And don’t forget, this is just one of four strands presented by CMU Insights at The Great Escape this year. We’ll be announcing the line-ups for the others in the coming weeks too.
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