download article - Music Inc. Magazine

TRENDS I BY DAN DALEY
Going Beyond Web Sites
MySpace. YouTube. Facebook. Weblogs. Podcasts. These words
didn’t even exist five years ago, but they are quickly being
embraced by the music products industry, especially as Web
sites become so ubiquitous that they’re virtually invisible.
Mazzotti Music, located in Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Park Slope
neighborhood, is a quintessential user. Its owners, Sarah Michaels and
Stasha Claire, are young women in a traditionally male-dominated business.
They opened the store in late 2005, where it has become a locus for
Brooklyn’s robust local music scene (which is giving Manhattan’s scene a
run for its money). According to Michaels, creating a MySpace
page was second nature, and its networking aspect complemented
the social nature of the store itself.
“Local musicians check it out, and they also use it to stay in
touch when they’re on tour,” she said. Bands and artists sign on
as “friends” — links that lead viewers to their own pages on
MySpace, where their friends lead to yet more linked pages, creating
a near-infinite network.
“People use it as a way to market themselves or help their
favorite bands,” Michaels added. “The benefit to us is that we
get positive feedback for being part of that. If someone adds
themselves to our friends list and doesn’t turn out to be a customer,
someone else that gets added to their page could be. You
never know how deep it goes.”
THE MYSPACE NETWORK
That depth has drawn other
music product retailers to
MySpace. LA Music, which has
two locations in Mississauga, a
suburb of Toronto, has a blog on
its MySpace page. It was set up
late last year and is maintained by
an informal rotating corps of sales
floor employees who also put
their own music up on the page,
according to manager Rob Piperni.
He said LA Music’s page links
to pages established by customers
and suppliers, such as guitar makers
Gibson and Fender. It also links up to artist pages, like a YouTube video
of noted bassist Victor Wooten, who’d offered a clinic at one of LA’s stores
last year. “It’s all a good synergy of demographics,” Piperni said. “MySpace
is a place where we have relevance to the people who spend time there.”
MacDaddy Music is one of a growing number of virtual MI retailers, and
A Web site’s not enough
anymore for some MI
retailers. Many are
turning to other online
mediums like MySpace
and podcasts to expand
their reach
52 I MUSIC INC. I JULY 2007
operates an online store from
an office and warehouse in
Duluth, Minn. For owner
Aaron Peterson, who considered
a brick-and-mortar dealership
at one point but decided
against it for overhead cost reasons,
MySpace is just one of
several tactics that go beyond
his Web site. He also has messenger
accounts with MSN,
Yahoo and AOL’s IM, and
“stores” on eBay and Craigslist.
“We try to get into as many
different places as we can that
have a network,” Peterson
said. “Each one is one small
piece of the puzzle in marketing
to a certain demographic.
Younger people in bands are
comfortable with the idea of
buying online now.”
He said he’s currently considering
a subscription-based
blog on MySpace, which would
also have 30-second sound file
samples from various new pedals
and instruments at the
store. “We’ll send them out
with the parameter settings so
people can copy them,” he said.
He currently uses MySpace
to send weekly newsletters and
bulletins to friends alerting them
to specials and sales. In the
dynamic known as viral marketing,
these missives are circulated
through the connected network
of linked friends’ pages.
Russ Maddox, owner of
Birmingham Percussion Center
in Birmingham, Ala., opted for
streaming video that can also
be repackaged as downloadable

podcasts from his Web site. He also added
a blog entitled “Ask The Expert,” which
lets e-mailed questions be answered by
percussion professionals and sales staff.
The podcasts, which feature Maddox giving
drum lessons and product reviews, are
crucial to Birmingham Percussion’s Internet
strategy. “The podcasts are something totally
different than you would find on most [MI
retail] Web sites,” he said. “I look at it as
completing the virtual infrastructure you
started with a Web site and online sales.”
Maddox said he sees tools like
MySpace and streaming video as a way to
counter what he refers to as the “infiltration”
of national and regional chains into
local markets via the Internet, as well as
with brick-and-mortar locations.
“The market in my area is no larger or
bWEB
SPEAK
> MYSPACE is the world’s largest networking
site, dwarfing other online communities like
AOL and Yahoo. It’s also favored by a
younger demographic, one that expresses
itself on virtually every page with music
files and pictures.
> WEBLOGS — or blogs, for short — are narrative
postings, e-mail that you come to as
much as it comes to you.
> PODCASTS are essentially video versions of
blogs, downloadable to the Apple iPods from
which they derive their name. They can offer
exponentially greater impact due to their
multimedia components but are subject to a
greater variety of file format protocols,
meaning that compatibility can sometimes
be an issue.
smaller than it was 10 years ago, but with
companies outside that area using the
Internet, they’re taking market share by taking
sales over the Internet,” he said. “What
I’m doing with these kinds of tools is taking
the attitude, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,
but do it with something they’re not giving
the market, like lessons. MySpace is an end
run around the big guys’ Web portals.”
Michaels at Mazzotti Music also found
MySpace’s younger demographic skew
has buoyed her store’s education component.
Pamela Means, an alt-folk artist
known for her percussive acoustic guitar
style (the Worcester Phoenix describes it as
JULY 2007 I MUSIC INC. I 53

54 I MUSIC INC. I JULY 2007
“kamikaze”), teaches at the store and
Michaels said Means’ extensive MySpace
page and her renown among a certain
cohort increases both the number of students
and traffic through the store.
A PAGE IN THE MANUFACTURERS’ BOOK
Manufacturers have also found benefits
in stepping up their Internet presence.
Yamaha’s Band and Orchestral division has
created 38 podcast episodes with videos of
clinics and performances by Yamaha
endorsers, available for free via iTunes.
“It’s a way to get the message across
dynamically,” said Kurt Witt, marketing
manager for the division. “It’s a way for a
kid in Nebraska to see Phil Woods play,
which he might not have the
opportunity to otherwise.”
Witt made another point
that manufacturers have taken
to heart. “We can control the
message,” he said. “We can set
the tone and own the conversation.
In magazine advertising,
we have to play on the magazine’s
terms. But on a podcast,
we own the conversation
between us and the consumer.”
Yamaha has also given the
podcasts a retail dimension: One
episode comes with a downloadable
rebate coupon, in the form
of a PDF document, applicable to
the instrument featured in that
episode.
Joe Sparacio, Web projects
manager for Roland, said the
company has been using
YouTube as a secondary means
of posting instructional and
marketing videos, along with
its Web site, and using
GoogleAnalytics to track its effectiveness.
Sparacio said there’s an emerging strategy
to use YouTube “personalize” products in
the future. “We’re considering setting up a
page for a product, sort of turning it into a
living entity,” he said.
SPOOFING
b
Reduced to its fundamentals, MySpace is
an extension of word-of-mouth, the single
most important element in marketing a
music store, service or product. It’s also the
single most uncontrollable element. Some
retailers take a laissez-faire approach to
monitoring their “friends,” expecting a network’s
many points of input will outweigh
any attempts to sabotage a reputation.
“Neither MySpace or YouTube does a
good job of moderating their sites, in my
opinion — anyone can be Jimmy Page,” said
Maddox, referring to the Led Zeppelin guitarist.
Assuming the actual artist does not
have his or her own MySpace page, anyone
can assert the name as his or her own. “The
problem is, sometimes people see that kind
of thing linked to a store and know it’s not
who the Jimmy Page it says it is, and they
might bump the store from their page.” Still,
MySpace page holders can vet potential
linkers and deny linking if they so desire.
SALES CHANNEL
SURFING
MySpace, Second Life, blogs and podcasts may seem frivolous
to some, but they will be crucial to reaching the musicians in
the next iteration of the generational sequence. According to marketing
firm Digital Live Wire, Millennials — those born between
1980 and 2000 — will outnumber both baby boomers and Gen-Xers
by the year 2010 and will be the most significant consumer sector
for the media and entertainment industries, which includes a huge
chunk of the music products industry.
Not only will they be big, they will be fragmented and difficult to
reach. The increasing number of media channels — instant messaging,
e-mail, social networks, chat rooms, iPods, mobile phones,
MP3 Players, P2P networks, handheld devices, digital video
recorders, video games, game consoles and next-generation communities
and devices — through which this generation communicates
and consumes entertainment makes them a highly elusive
target for businesses hoping to market to them.
Increasingly, MI retailers are not simply selling an instrument;
they, like others trying to reach this cohort, are offering a “product
or service that will enhance and empower their lifestyles, as well
as allow self-expression,” the marketer writes on its blog. It may
sound like marketing-speak, but the bottom line is clear: learn the
new channels of communication.
Alternate channels of communication
on multiple levels will be the methodology
of the future (see “Sales Channel
Surfing”). Since music is such a highly
integrated component of lifestyle now, MI
retailers will have to confront the need to
reach an increasingly fragmented audience.
Fortunately, there are a lot of tools
out there to help do that, no matter how
funny their names sound. MI
Dan Daley is a veteran journalist, author, songwriter and
music producer. He covers the business and technology segments
of the entertainment industry.