Five Trends Changing Music Marketing

Marketing music has never been straightforward. That’s why back in the day, label executives would use the single as the shortcut to finding an audience on which to propel the artist, and even more importantly, their latest album. Meanwhile, radio stations were largely in lockstep, since they would rather play the ‘catchiest’ hits as well as help build familiarity for those hits (those that got through dreaded call-out research). Still, neither side really knew which songs audiences would take to their hearts. The signal was foggy, at least until the record reached the shops. Even then, it was hard to know whether people liked the music, or just didn’t know about it. Hence the market was a constant flow of ‘push and pray’.

The single biggest change brought by streaming is the clarity of the signal. It has improved. It is clearer now which songs people really like. The art of marketing is to seed the song into the right places and wait to see what pops where. The challenge for label marketers isn’t so much to grasp this new world – they do. Their challenge is to have enough direct levers they can pull to make the new world order tip in their artists’ favour. The cause of many a migraine for marketers, however, is that they have very few direct levers and are at the mercy of gatekeepers, influencers and other layers that sit between their songs and the audience.

The problems for music marketers are manifold. We’ve listed just some of them here, each with a kernel of a solution. Whether music marketers have it in their power to fashion the solutions into actionable marketing tactics is a different story. But, given that global marketing is one of the core competencies of a modern record label (and a modern artist manager), the broader solution is for marketers to push their agenda higher up the chain, and for more corporate-level innovation and investment to get the marketing engines changed up and fit for purpose. We argue as well that to succeed in doing this, marketers should change behaviours and start marketing for the environment now, not yesterday.

In this short report (download for free on the MIDiA webpages), Consulting Director Keith Jopling examines five problematical trends changing the way music is marketed, and points to potential solutions.

Problem (and solution) 1: Managing linear decline

The steady decline of linear radio and TV audiences is eroding these platforms’ contribution to music marketing effectiveness. The industry seems to live in hope that this will find a self-cure. A label’s power to get an artist’s song on the radio is seen by the artist as second fiddle to streaming, so the solution is obvious ­– either work with radio to improve its relevance or -get better at playlist pitching and see radio as a bi-product or bonus, not an essential. With playlist pitching getting harder, perhaps the former option is actually the better one.

Currently, radio is the only large-scale media that labels have for reaching national audiences at a shared time and place. But radio’s rolling playlist slots are too low in volume. One simple change would be for labels/publishers/managers to convince radio brands to expand their playlists to accommodate many more slots for new music (preferably with much better analytics to measure this, as audiences continue to migrate from broadcast to on-demand). For one thing, it would help radio’s issues in competing with streaming platforms if they could increase their capacity for song discovery by trading off new songs with catalogue plays or heavy rotation hits - ‘track of the hour’ rather than ‘track of the day’. Radio could argue that it is a better discovery platform than streaming, given it can add powerful context (daypart, presenters, artist stories) that streaming currently does not. Radio provides a sense of community. Streaming platforms are frozen wastelands in comparison. Radio can only make this argument however, if it can go further to compete with streaming on volume.

The plethora of branded radio apps now on the market is hardly a joined-up force to take on streaming, but if the market continues to evolve this way, then radio providers must use their brand equity and identity to serve super-niches, and serve them better – be it genre, demographic, a particular scene, theme or location. The most successful will begin to stem the loss in audience reach, but also fill the gaps left by streaming services to hold onto those audiences in terms of engagement and emotional attachment. For all the rhetoric of streaming platforms, one of those gaps is music discovery.

Download our free report to read the following further problems & solutions:

• Managing streaming economics and higher song volumes
• Managing post-album creativity
• Managing global-local culture
• Managing music value

Fan upsell is the money left on the table

In the mainstream pop world, the upsell potential to super-fans remains a gaping hole in the potential growth for the industry. Labels have acquired merchandise companies for incremental revenue but have so far stayed clear of the one sector in which the artists’ ‘product’ remains a scarce premium – live performance. Yet, real estate and demand can be created outside of the main live sector dominated by Live Nation and AEG. Companies like Dice and Sofar Sounds and even City Winery in the USA have proved this.

Some horizontal thinking is required on the subject of music’s value problem – whether it be that previous ‘promotional’ channels be abandoned unless there is directly attributable consumption as a result, or that labels can create more live real estate (through monetising showcases or converting tour support funding into direct ticketed appearances). Artists remain super-valuable brands. Average revenue per artist must go one way – up. Artists must use this as the benchmark for choosing their preferred means of representation, not just the size of their streaming numbers.