Remake, Remodel: The Evolution Of The Record Label

More documents

Recommendations

Info

This pre-draft version is strictly for review purposes only and is not for general dissemination or sharing. ‘I am very happy with the digital download market,’ he says, ‘but then our fans tend to buy more albums. Our tracks-to-album ratios are about 2.5 to 1, whereas for majors it’s more like 12 to 1.’ Clearly the alternative music repertoire of the Beggars Group lends itself naturally to the album format, and the label group has made a deliberate policy to put more of the focus for sales on to the album format. This leaves singles primarily as snapshot showcases for the album, rather than important revenue streams in their own right. This is in marked contrast to the strategy of labels with a more pop or urban flavour. Release schedules Digital formats enable artists and labels to optimise release dates as there aren’t the huge stock commitments and movements as with the physical world. Also, digital sales themselves can provide up-to-the-minute market information to inform and modify the marketing plan. Universal saw the rapid online take-up of the singles by new artist Jessie J and successfully brought forward her planned album release by a month in February (2011). As David Joseph says of the decision and the online analytics that informed it, ‘The internet is telling you when to release something and when not to.’ Music discovery The internet has created many new ways of discovering music and many of our interviewees commented on how healthy this was, especially in leveling the playing field for artists, and enabling artists to succeed on merit – rather than by dint of huge marketing budgets. Martin Mills notes, ‘The beauty at the moment is that the two big digital payers – iTunes and Spotify – are pretty much barrier-free, be you a big player or a small player.’ Music discovery in the past was mainly through radio, TV and the press, with bigger companies being able to ‘work’ these channels better than small labels because of their scale and budgets. Different types of discovery mechanisms exist in the digital space and are changing the landscape completely. They include: Blogs – where hundreds of music fans recommend their favourite music to those who find them, with services like the Hype Machine and elbo.ws aggregating what is happening on blogs and ranking the most popular and written about new acts; iTunes Genius – an algorithm designed to assess what is in your iTunes library and recommend similar music (the recommendations tend to be driven by genre). Apple also launched its own social network within iTunes called Ping in late-2010 which links through to Twitter and lists what music people are buying or liking; 44
This pre-draft version is strictly for review purposes only and is not for general dissemination or sharing. Last.fm – using the Audioscrobbler technology, it offers recommendations based on what other users, with similar tastes to you, are listening to; Spotify – playlists can be easily compiled on Spotify and links to them shared through email, social media such as Facebook and Twitter as well as aggregated on dedicated sites such as ShareMyPlaylists. Spotify also uses its own version of ‘scrobbling’ to generate the “related artists” and “artist radio” features on its site, based on listening statistics; mflow – this UK-based business model enables consumers to ‘follow’ other consumers whose recommendations they find relevant and useful. Recommendation is in turn rewarded through credits to buy further music; Pandora – currently only available in the US, its approach is to analyse the core musical components of tracks and match similar songs. They tracks are all dissected individually by musicologists; Amazon – arguably the biggest recommendation engine in the world given the scale of its customer base, it uses customer purchasing of CDs and downloads at the core of its music suggestions (saying ‘People who bought X also bought Y and Z); Social media – users of sites like Twitter and Facebook can quickly share details of what they are listening to through links to services like Spotify and we7 as well as YouTube clips and even SoundCloud embeds. Other more dedicated sites include Songkick (which makes concert recommendations) and GetGlue which, akin to Foursquare, lets users ‘check in’ to the types of media content (TV shows, movies, music) they are consuming. The next generation of social media apps like LoKast and Flowd are bringing geolocation into the mix. Barriers to growth in digital One senior executive in a major label said, ‘There are decades of legacy built into everyone’s mindset and thinking. Most people are so resistant to change. People are fearful that if they do something new, it will go wrong and spell the end of the end of the business they have worked in for all these years. The reality is they have to take risks and back new ideas. That way there’ll be a future, but just clinging on by the fingernails to the past is just destined to fail.’ This executive underlined an issue that many in the industry feel – that new business models, especially digital, can only happen if people are willing to experiment. Whether there is sufficient willingness to try out new things is a matter for debate – but the fact that over 60 business models have already been licensed in the UK indicates an openness to try things out. The BPI has set up an Innovation Panel designed to bring together labels and digital retail businesses, including start-ups, to share consumer research in order to help services develop their offerings. 45
Page 1 and 2: Remake, Remodel: The Evolution Of T
Page 3 and 4: This pre-draft version is strictly
Page 43: This pre-draft version is strictly
Page 55: This pre-draft version is strictly

Remake, Remodel: The Evolution Of The Record Label

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?