Posts Tagged ‘cd’
What Is The Music Industry Challenge?
Band Members Wanted: Great Songwriter, Guitar Players & Social Media Expert!
Brand Marketing – marketing a company logo and services to the public ?
Music Marketing – what is music marketing ? Are you marketing the music then introduce the band – or is it the band being marketed to a possible fan base and then invited to hear them play. There are many musical genre’s and each will have a different approach to marketing that particular style to be successful.
Image Marketing: Do people buy into an image first and then listen to the music to see if they will purchase? It’s the image if you are crusin’ online or it’s the music first if you listen to radio. Would you buy a bands music if you saw their image was the total opposite of what you imagined, based on listening to their music.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the music business – it’s a very unique industry this thing called music and not many successful business models are associated with the industry, and the marketing of it is very much misunderstood. And that is changing of course and biggest example of this home grown marketing is Justin Bieber – if you study his success you will find a lot of it comes by way of his Youtube releases.
The direction bands need to start with is a competitive online presence with all the trimmings. Then you need to make sure you have the a great combo of singer, songwriter, guitar player and drummer and a social media wunderkind. You could be the next big thing and nobody would know because you don’t have a big profile online if you get googled. You need to become an online affiliate marketing expert with your band as the product.
To market music you need to go beyond the usual spamming and email everyone you know and hope they pass it along to their group of friends and keep going til its viral. The odds of that happening are slim to about none.
If we take a look at the cross section of how music was marketed in the past. The record labels would start out with presenting the album to radio, print media and video programs if the band had a video. That was followed up with the record company promo guys working a focus track or single until such time as it got some airplay and work on the print media reviewers to review the album, hoping for a favorable review.
If enough airplay was forthcoming, the record label would support the band on a small tour capitalizing on pockets of support. The tour would include concert dates at local venues supported by interviews at radio, the print media and television. The record company would do cross promotions getting the radio station to sponsor the concert dates, concert promoters would give away tickets to the show and retailers would put up posters and order extra product.
Reality nowadays is you will likely release your first couple of albums yourself or through a small independent record label. You will need to finance it yourself with the only sources of revenue being your offstage CD and merchandise sales. If you have done it right and built a consistent following that will support you at concerts, buy your releases and you have built yourself a decent website you could be ready for the next level.
To take a run at this you will need to have some serious financing behind you, for example; you will need to hire your own radio promoter who could charge you $4,000+ per month to promote you and if you don’t have someone onboard to do your online marketing – that can be another $400 a week as well.
The newest twist is to pay to open for successful acts so you can access their audience – it’s a pay-to-play concept. I heard of one band paying over $150,000 for the privilege of opening up for a well known band on tour.
So what to do – it’s a fine line and the old adage of “know your audience” is taking on a whole new meaning as radio promoters vs SEO are expensive and incredibly time consuming. The music industry challenge of course is to find your niche, cater to it and sell sell sell – it’s just the path to get there is a long and costly one.
The point is music marketing has and is changing and you need lots of street smarts to break a band. The major labels are still the most connected because they have the history and the deepest pockets. The number of bands being signed has dropped considerably, so to get their attention you need to groom yourself and be ready if they come courting you.
Having said all that – the market shares the majors enjoyed 20 years ago has also dropped – if I was to guess I’d say they have lost at least 30% plus, which leaves that much more room for independent record labels, distributors and bands to take up the slack. With all the stats you read about CD sales being down, keep in mind the purchase of music is not and that is encouraging. You can record a decent sounding record nowadays for under $5,000 – all you need is a digital recorder, some good mic’s for vocals. You can mix yourself with programs you can download online on a 30 day trial for free or get a pro to do for you.
Fortunately, we have all these wonderful social media networking toys available to us to get the message across, a lot of it for free. You can blog, email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube your audience, combine that with social news sites like Digg & Stumbleupon, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, build yourself a few niche websites, create buzz and traffic and build a fan base.
If you need to get some CD DVDs duplicated or replicated you can contact us at ONESTOP Media Shop in Canada and ICE Digital Media in the US. Watch our YouTube video
And so it goes …