Digital Strategy for Music Promotion
With the web playing an increasingly large part in everyday entertainment, record labels are looking to new and more social ways to market music. But is the new wave of music-flavoured games and applications simply another way to hype a band or an increasingly important way to drive revenues?
Speaking at Twitter’s first-ever developers’ conference, Black Eyed Peas frontman, Will.i.am outlined a vision of the music industry of the future where developers will be just as important to a band as the musicians that play on the record. He claimed:
“A band’s going to be a singer, a guitar player, a bass player, a code writer, a guy who makes applications, a guy who does computer animation; that is a group. It’s going to be self-contained content providers and digital distributers.”
Does this mean entertainers and artists simply need to be more web savvy or do they need to change the whole way they think about content? Or is it just the case that musicians need to alter their approach to who they employ?
In his presentation Will.i.am suggested the traditional idea of the label-as-gatemaster, necessary to nurture and promote talent, was crumbling, claiming simply: “It’s not that music is dead; it’s just that the people that housed it are dead.”
Taken further, as content continues to shift online, does his argument ultimately extend across the whole content spectrum with everyone in the entertainment industry ultimately needing to employ dedicated, in-house digital creatives to complement their traditional talents? Will.i.am’s idea of a coder as a full-time band member may seem a stretch, but popular music is a business and it’s the money-making potential of the web that he’s really talking about. At the moment online apps are perceived as money-makers, with mobile apps particularly voguish. But what returns can they currently expect from these?
Playing for music
With rising sales of smartphones, and the boom in the app economy, labels are making increasingly bold steps into the music app market. Spurred by the success of the console-based Rock Band and Guitar Hero, labels are already experimenting with the casual games market. iPhone users can download Tap Tap Revenge - a game that requires users to tap virtual blocks in time to music - tied-in with full-length albums by artists ranging from Lady Gaga, to Metallica and Coldplay. Animated super-group, Gorillaz, recently launched their album Plastic Beach, with an immersive online game and iPhone app, while Universal Music recently struck a deal to license its songs to social games specialist Conduit Labs.
Forrester analyst Sonal Gandhi says that while labels started making apps for “purely promotional” purposes, they have since realised the money-making potential:
“I don’t think it’s going to be a significant amount of money any time soon, but labels are diversifying their revenue streams and this could be another revenue stream that they’re getting money from, when the other revenue streams are starting to dry up.”
For the sorts of revenues mass-market entertainers expect, smartphone uptake is crucial. Strategy Analytics estimates that smartphones accounted for 18% of total mobile shipments in Q1 this year. When this reaches more than 50%, the revenue potential starts to become a lot more interesting.
As smartphone use inevitably grows, so too will entertainers’ appetite for producing mobile apps. Ghandi believes that apps will soon start to become a “natural part of creating promotional material for the artist, just like having MySpace pages now - almost a given.”
As the online music market begins to lurch towards cloud-based services, Ovum music expert Adrian Drury adds that games could prove a compelling way to prolong the transactional per-album or per-track model that was popularised by iTunes.
“There is a potential opportunity here for some of these social games because it gives the labels new vehicles to go and package up applications which allow them to meter music again, rather than give people all-you-can-eat services.”
Engaging with fans
The key concept among industry thinkers seems to be about engagement. While games and applications help consumers to connect to a band, the social side of reaching out to consumers is also becoming a core part of label strategy. Desperate to keep pace with their core demographic of teenagers and young adults, the music industry is increasingly looking to Facebook and Twitter as an essential way to engage.
For unsigned artists this has become particularly powerful tool, with acts able to use social media to build up an international fan base that would be impossible in the days before MySpace. Noush Skaugen, a British songwriter, is one example of this. The web-savvy singer has used Twitter to build a following of 1.2m people without any label input. Labels are increasingly looking to replicate this kind of success for their own artists.
Leslie Gilotti, a founder at music PR firm CharmFactory claims that while labels used to treat online promotions as a completely separate entity from TV and print campaigns there has been a shift in thinking and far more integration taking hold, with the web often surpassing traditional media as a way to promote acts.
“We’re working on the Oasis: Time Flies release,” says Gilotti. “The band has now split up so the only thing we really have to work with is online at the moment, because we can’t rely on the traditional model of getting the band in to talk about their career… We’re creating a quiz and a special widget for people to use on their social networking profiles - we’ve done similar things in the past and they’ve just flown like wildfire, because people do like to stamp their mark on what they like.
“You think about when you’re at school - a lot of the music that you listen to defines the people that you hang out with and the way you dress - that is an age group that is completely active online and that it just seems like a natural progression to meet them that way.”
Where is the money?
Though social engagement is important from a promotional perspective, critics will still argue that word-of-mouth interest and viral successes do not translate into real digital revenues. However, with physical album sales continuing to slump, the social web could perhaps hold the key to future revenue streams.
“There are so many things that are vying for people’s attention that if you’re not constantly connecting with your fans then they might forget about you,” says Sonal Gandi. “The whole idea that we’ve been providing here at Forrester is that you don’t even need to have an album anymore. You can keep putting out creative output in the form of videos and songs and remixes… that’s the way to make money these days.”
US indie band, OK GO are another case in point. Gilloti, who continues to promote the band, recalls that their label initially had great misgivings about the low-budget ‘treadmill’ video they produced for their single Here it Goes Again, on the grounds of its production values. However, the viral hit, which has now notched up more than 2.6m views on YouTube, has brought about financial benefits, though it did not translate into CD sales.
“The band has since then been able to play in markets where they didn’t even have an album out. You go to a place where you’ve never had a record released and all of a sudden 5,000 people show up to your show - there’s a revenue stream right there. You’ve got a big advertising campaign of energy drink completely ripping-off your video, and doing a TV advert that looks a lot like your music video - there’s a revenue stream right there. You get sponsorship sponsorship deals - there’s another revenue stream there. And I think that has all sparked off of a viral hit.”
Will.i.am’s vision of a musical future littered by independent, self contained, music-creators and publishers may not resonate with everyone in the industry.
“I think it’s an extreme case,” says Ovum’s Adrian Drury. “In all creative industries you have a spectrum of people - from people who are only comfortable with the creation of their art, through to the other end of the spectrum where you have artists who are very comfortable with the technology of publishing and distribution.”
However, he claims that bands that do become their own publishing entities “may end up becoming one of the big media majors of the future”.
With bands, artists and most importantly labels, all looking to boost their digital presence, the revenue opportunities found through apps, games, and social engagement should not be underestimated. By keeping pace of these changes and using money inventively, labels could even get ahead in a digital sector they have been notoriously slow to capitalise on in the past. With the advent of the iPad and other media-expanding devices, the lessons being learnt by the music industry could also have far wider repercussions, opening up opportunities for other creatives ranging from authors and actors to visual artists and filmmakers. But, whether they use the internet in a creative content sense or as a more creative marketing tool or as for new revenue streams, the key point is that they’ll need to take digital media seriously and not as an afterthought.
