marketing

What you should learn about the music business

Posted on September 2, 2021 | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling | 1 Comment

The business of music changes at a frightening pace. At the same time, we’re stuck with archaic methods of copyright. Being a musician today means balancing keeping abreast of new modes of distribution while chasing royalties. Crucially, the question of where your music sits in the broader soundscape and where you can find your audiences are more pertinent than ever.

Daniel Ek told investors in July 2020 that musicians should release more music, more regularly. This is the crux of streaming: musicians should be creators who churn out content to stay relevant to algorithms. What does it mean to embrace the creator economy as a musician? How can you play the game instead of being played by agents, labels, streaming services, etc.? And what do you need to do this?

The basics

The bible in the music business, and music business-related courses, is still Don Passman‘s All you need to know about the music business. The book tells you about what kind of people you need around you as a musician, record deals, copyrights, publishing, touring, merch. From there we get to issues of financing, PR, and marketing. There’s other books, for sure, but Passman’s is the one most people fall back on. And while he has done well to keep on top of new developments, there are elements in the reality of a musician’s every day life that aren’t captured in the book. Let’s run through the basics before turning to those new challenges.

To sign or not to sign, that is/was the first question

In the current landscape, most artists still face this question first: do I want to aim to sign with a major record label? Do I aim for an independent label or do I go DIY? There’s advantages and disadvantages to each one:

Major label deal means lots of support, global links, experienced people, and the potential to piggyback off of a bigger artist’s success. It also means losing some control over your work and signing away of your rights. You can also be seen as collateral for another artist instead of your own person with a creative vision.
Signing to an independent – in as far they still properly exist – gives you an international network geared specifically towards artists. Moreover, you won’t get lost in a large roster of others. There can, however, be a lack of financial leverage and knowledge outside of the bigger global markets.
Going DIY means having full control of your creative vision, your rights, and being in control of your communications. It also means you require your own capital, your own network, and a willingness to put in work you might rather spend making music.

Copyrights

Copyright is about ownership, but also about having the right to copy, perform, play, broadcast, and adapt a work of music. Copyright is valuable and always a partnership between various people involved in writing a song: usually 50/50 between music and lyrics. It’s important to note that for copyright to come into play a recording is necessary. Which leads into the issue of the master rights. Whoever owns those rights gets to decide how to exploit the recording. It used to be the case that whoever paid for a recording would own the master rights. This is, for example, why the archives of public broadcasters are so valuable: they paid for the recording and thus claim the master rights allowing them to put it on TV, YouTube, etc.

Touring

A painful topic while we’re still riding pandemic waves, but still very important. Touring can make for good income. Yet, how do you organise it well? First off, find the right people to book and manage your tour. Then, think about how to market yourself and how to take advantage of the marketing of the venues where you will play. Furthermore, think about ticketing and what you can do with dynamic pricing structures and VIP ticketing. Once you get a larger fanbase it also become an option to approach sponsors for your tours.

Financing

It’s important to know how money flows through the music industry. Moreover, it’s important to know who makes that money and how they do that. Traditionally, this involved record and publishing deals – with advances – touring, merchandise, royalties derives from CMOs, record sales and potential royalties of those. Of course, there’s also the potential to get on soundtracks or get into synch deals. Finally, there’s the option to go direct through crowdfunding, subscriptions, and donations.

Marketing

Any good marketing plan starts with asking why you do what you do and from there explaining why others should care about that too. Getting your marketing plan together can involve a PEST (political, economical, social, and technology) analysis of your potential demographic. You can also do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of your product – your music. From there, you can start to determine your market, your audience, which channels to use, and which tools to implement. Before you start anything, make sure you do a projection of the results you want. And ask important questions like ‘when will I make a profit?’

The everyday life challenges of right now

While those basics are necessary, it’s also important to keep up with new opportunities and changing technologies. Especially as and when they challenge the basic structures as described above. It’s easy to feel caught within a wide web of channels to engage with, algorithms to perform in, playlists to get put on, and audiences to speak to. However, it’s also possible to focus on specific tools, platforms, and technologies and build community.

Who are your audience(s)?

I’m purposefully ambiguous about the plural in the header for this section. You will have more than one audience, but it’s also important to start small. If you can find your niche that will give you a solid base to build out from. The reason I want to talk about audiences in plural is because even a niche will have multiple different audiences. A useful thought experiment, which I take from Jack Abraham, is to try and write down up to 100 different audiences for your music.

Tools & Platforms

There are many, many tools out there today to create and release music. So much, so that the number of creators that are self-releasing is growing fast.

On the one hand, it’s wonderful to have the tools available to quickly release your music to any and all streaming providers. On the other hand, it’s impossible to do that and stand out from the crowd of 60,000 daily uploaded tracks. At which point it becomes interesting to look at other available tools, especially if you’ve started carving out your niche audience. You can, for example, monetize that audience directly through a subscription model. Or, you can consider what you should make to best speak to your niche audience. It might be the case that simply making and releasing music isn’t the best way to go about that. Instead, video might work better for you. Take livestreaming, which can be done in a concert form, but also in the form of a more narrative arc where you take your audience into your creative process.

Experiment

Once you start to think about your audiences and the great variety of tools and platforms available to build and speak to your community, it’s important to experiment. Not only should artists now act like entrepreneurs, they would do well to think like product managers too. Thinking about go-to-market strategies isn’t a bad thing, to give one example. For so long, the focus for musicians has been to create an album and release one or more singles in the run up to the album’s release. Nowadays, you might be better off giving concerts with your work-in-progress, or simply livestreaming your studio work. Whatever it is, you won’t find out if you don’t experiment. And whoever your community is, that first niche you tie to yourself or your band those are the ones you have to keep involving in feedback loops throughout your experiments.

A course to tackle the everyday

To try and work through the challenges of the everyday realities of musicians – and perhaps agents and label owners as well – I’m working on a short cohort-based-course with the aforementioned Jack Abraham. The course will first of all provide a global community of learners and practitioners. Secondly, it provides a problem-motivated and practical way to learn about what’s going on in the music industry today. It brings the most recent developments into the (virtual) classroom. Third, it gives people the tools to play the game instead of being played by the game. If you’re interested in this course, feel free to talk to me directly or help us about by taking a short, 5-question survey.

What the End of the App Era Means for the Music Business

Posted on October 30, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

The average smartphone user downloads less than 1 app per month, according to comScore. The era of apps is ending, and we’re moving in an era of artificial intelligence interacting with us through messaging apps, chatbots, voice-controlled interfaces, and smart devices.

What happens to music in this context? How do you make sure your music stands out? How do you communicate your brand when the interface goes from visual to conversational? And what strategic opportunities and challenges does the conversational interface present to streaming services?

How will we remember bands when interfaces are voice-controlled?

Posted on October 8, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

I have phrased the above question as a problem for listeners, but this is a much bigger problem for artists.

The last few weeks have been filled with big news for those closely following voice interfaces. Amazon just announced a bunch of new devices, including a cheaper version of the Echo and a new Echo Plus, that utilize Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. Google has upgraded its voice assistant, and has included it in new headphones which can automatically translate what people are saying, alongside a bunch of other devices that quite frankly look more exciting than Apple‘s. And to top that all off, multi-room hifi-set producer, Sonos, has just integrated Alexa in its speakers.

The problem in the title is actually easily solved for a listener: you can simply ask what’s playing. However you simply can’t be bothered to ask what’s playing every other song. So this problem is much more important for the artist, than for the listener.

If you haven’t used these devices yet, you may not be aware of some of the challenges, but here they are:

It’s already hard to be remembered – how will people remember you when they don’t even see your name? On our phones or laptops, we occasionally see what’s playing. When we select a playlist, we often see what artists are on there. Something may stick. When we play ask Alexa to play Spotify‘s RapCaviar playlist, we don’t get clues of what’s playing. It’s basically the same as with radio, but at least there you have DJs who will tell you what’s playing. Any music or artist that you don’t care to Shazam will be forgotten.
How do you stay top of mind enough for people to replay you? People often start playing music without looking at their phones or music libraries. This means they request what’s top of mind: artists they remember in that moment, or big brands in music and playlists, such as aforementioned Spotify playlist, Majestic Casual, or Diplo & Friends.
How do you compete with ‘functional music’? The most popular ‘music’ apps on Alexa are all kinds of sleep and meditation sound apps. This list excludes Spotify and other music services, due to a deeper integration with Alexa, but it’s telling: people use these voice interfaces to request music to augment specific activities. Sleeping, bathing, meditating, cooking, whatever.

There are great solutions to these problems. And they’re not hard to figure out (people in hiphop have been shouting their name and their label’s name on tracks for decades).

I may do a follow-up on tactics and strategy for the age of “zero UI”, when the user interface is mostly controlled by voice and artificial intelligence, but for now, I’d love to hear about what you think. Ping me on Twitter: @basgras.

Painting: Wojtek Siudmak – “Le regard gourmand”

When to leverage platforms, and when to own your audience

Posted on July 30, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Platforms born out of the web 2.0 wave of internet startups, like Facebook, Medium, and Spotify, have done a great job bringing huge audiences together. But building your presence on their platforms can come at the cost of them owning your link to your audience.

I was having a small discussion on Twitter with Arnon Woolfson, a smart strategist in entertainment, brands, and partnerships, which arose in response to Facebook now allowing you to link Groups to Pages, allowing for easier management of fan communities.

Personally, I see a lot of opportunity in this. Facebook is pushing groups as a feature (meaning it’s more visible in news feeds), and I’ve long been a proponent for making sure your fan base is interconnected. However, rightly so, Arnon had some objections, particularly regarding not having good control over your fan relationship. Music streaming coop Resonate‘s founder Peter Harris even went as far as to call it digital serfdom, which is a powerful analogy.

Digital serfdom

The idea is that in order to be able to attain success, you more or less have to leverage aforementioned web 2.0 platforms. As you leverage these platforms to build your connection to fans, the ones to get the most value out of that are not the participants of the relation, but the platform itself. This is a tragic reality of the dominant model for the social web as it has emerged in the last 15 years.

This is also something that will continue to be the status quo until platforms that offer an alternative distribution of value manage to create products and communities that are as sticky and as compelling as the ones they’re competing with.

When to leverage

I believe one of the key skills for people building up profiles in the digital age – whether bands, brands, or personal – is being able to move audiences from one platform to another. You should focus on 2 or 3 platforms at a time, leveraging the ones that work best for your specific purposes.

The number 1 thing young companies, brands, or artists cannot afford is friction. It has to be easy to discover your music or product. Then you have to do everything you can to make sure you can reach those people who discovered you a second time. For me, Twitter filled this role for a long time: discover my writings, follow me on Twitter, and then see my future writings. Then one and a half year ago, I decided to ‘cash out’ my Twitter following by converting them into a newsletter following. I now have over 1,500 email addresses of people who work in similar fields, and can reach them directly to their inbox (and do so every week).

Twitter stopped being effective for me. Less than 10% of my followers were actually seeing my tweets. Now, my weekly newsletters have an open rate of over 50%. For a long time I published my articles on Medium, and then that stopped being effective, so I stopped (I’ve noticed positive changes recently so I started publishing there again occasionally). I always used Medium as a platform to drive people to my newsletter.

If a platform stops being effective for you: stop using it.

Don’t invest too much time into it. Make sure you can reach your followers through other channels, and then focus on those channels that are most effective.

When to own

Focus on ownership, e.g. bringing fans to your own app or club, when that is more convenient for the fans too. Else you’re going to lose a lot of opportunities, because perhaps only 1 in 20 people will convert from Facebook to your app, and you’ll have put a lot of energy into something that simply doesn’t work well.

Spend a lot of time thinking about your long term goals and what kind of data you’d need in order to successfully measure how well you’re doing. Then look at whether the platforms you’re leveraging offer that data or not. If not, figure out a way that you might be able to drive behaviour from those places to other places where you can get that data. If that’s no good, then you need to figure out how to get your audience onto a platform that gives you more ownership.

This was one of my issues with Medium: I couldn’t get enough data on my audience. I didn’t really know where they were coming from, and didn’t know who was clicking what, what part of my audience was returning, etc. With my newsletter and own website I know this perfectly.

That’s why I was happy to hear about the Facebook Groups announcement, because I could start building a community for the newsletter there while still maintaining ownership over the data & relation to them. (the group is called MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE Backstage)

A golden rule?

Leverage digital serfdom. Even if you want to change that system: it’s easier to corrupt and co-opt it than to completely avoid it.

Create a place or channel you own: this can be through email, SMS, or other, but it’s important you get enough data from it, and you can provide people with an incentive to join your channel this way. Then when leveraging any platform, always figure out how you can use it to add people to your owned channels.

No need to reinvent the wheel. No need to build your personal ‘Facebook for fans’. Just use what works, while it works, and always be ready to move on to the next channel.

My Midem wrap-up: Chatbots + marketing Run The Jewels panels

Posted on June 10, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

What a week. I spent it at Midem – one of the most well-known music business conferences organised every year in Cannes. Before I’m off to Sonár+D this week, I thought I’d type up a little update.

About 10 months ago, Midem‘s conference manager got in touch with me to see if we could put a panel together. We landed on the topic of chatbots and Messenger apps, because I think the trend signifies an important shift to a new generation of user interfaces (especially considering voice-activated UI, which will quickly be permeating our daily lives).

It was so great to finally be able to have all these people in the same room, and talk about what they’re doing, get their thoughts out, get them discussing with each other. And the line-up was awesome.

Panel: Messaging Apps, Bots, AI & Music: A New Frontier of Fan Engagement

A quick look at the line-up:

Ricardo Chamberlain, Digital Marketing Manager, Sony Music Entertainment (USA)
Runs a very interesting label bot, which includes messages from artists such as Enrique Iglesias. He also worked on the CNCO campaign with Landmrk, which I’m a big fan of.
Luke Ferrar, Head of Digital, Polydor (UK)
Launched the first chatbot with Bastille.
Gustavo Goldschmidt, CEO & Co-Founder, SuperPlayer (Brazil)
Runs Brazil’s biggest streaming service which not only recommends music through a chatbot, but also builds chatbots for artists, which then drives fans to their service when they want to stream something.
Syd Lawrence, CEO & Co-Founder, The Bot Platform (UK)
Launched the Hardwell bot, which is probably the most well-known example of chatbots being used in music.
Tim Heineke, Founder, POP (Netherlands)
Used to run a cool startup named Shuffler.fm which turned blogs into radio stations and became a kind of StumbleUpon for music discovery, and also co-founded FUGA.
Nikoo Sadr, Interactive Marketing Manager, The Orchard (UK)
One of the most brilliant minds in digital marketing, in general. Previously with Music Ally.

FULL VIDEO:

WRITE UP:

Messaging, bots, and AI’s music evolution by Music Ally’s Eamon Forde

Run The Jewels’ Marketing Panel

A few weeks ago, I was asked if I could also moderated the RTJ marketing panel — which would have been a no-brainer anyway, but having a personal connection to this, made me so excited to do it that I forgot to even introduce myself during the panel.

My first real music business job was with a startup called official.fm. As a student, I listened to a lot of underground and indie hiphop, which made me a big fan of the Definitive Jux label, which put out music by Aesop Rock, Mr. Lif, RJD2, and El-P (also one of the founders). The other founder was Amaechi Uzoigwe, who now manages Run The Jewels. I remember feeling a little starstruck at the time. Now, years later, it was so good to catch up with Amaechi and the inspiring success he’s created for RTJ and himself.

Also on the panel was Zena White, who’s MD of The Other Hand, and does great things for RTJ, Stones Throw, Ghostly, BadBadNotGood, DJ Shadow and more.

FULL VIDEO:

WRITE UP:

How Run The Jewels found fame & fortune: by focusing on fans by Music Ally’s Stuart Dredge

Why playlists should be part of your social media strategy

Posted on May 14, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

The emphasis of playlist strategy is usually placed on how artists can get their music on popular curated playlists. Let’s discuss the long-term value of artists stepping into the curator role themselves.

In the context of this article, when referring to playlist strategy, I mean playlists that you create.

For most of the readers of this article, the two most important places for developing a cohesive playlist strategy are YouTube and Spotify (and maybe Soundcloud). They’re the places with the highest amount of traffic and search queries.

Objectives

You’re going to be using your playlists to achieve 3 things:

To get discovered by (potential) new fans;
To establish a habit for fans that keeps them connected to you;
To create regular engaging content for your socials to help you stay top of mind for fans.

Discovery. Habit. Top of mind.

Building your playlists

Let’s address objective 1 first: getting your music discovered. This is the main concern for most artists. Before anything, your music has to be good. If people are not sharing your music, it’s probably not that great. This needs to be your #1 concern and priority. If people are not sharing your music, go work on your sound instead of marketing something that people don’t care about.

Keep reading if you’re actually at a level where your music gets traffic through friend recommendations.

You’re ready to get your music discovered.

Variety

Take a couple of your best tracks. For each of these tracks, create a playlist. Add tracks from similar artists, artists that inspire you, anything that is somehow logically related to your music.

Understand that a lot of users will start playing your playlist and then switch to background listening. The logical relation has to be there, even when people are focusing on a different tab in their browser, or have moved on to another activity away from the computer.

For the music you select, the most important criterium is that it has to be music that people actually search for.

People will type search queries, and you need to create the best chance that they will land on your playlist. Think carefully the first few times you make these playlists. Over time, you’ll find the best way to do it and the amount of effort required will decrease.

Do not place your track at the top. People need somewhat familiar content to get into a playlist. Place it somewhere in the middle.

Remember the listener’s perspective: this is not about your music — this is about their experience. If you provide them with a good experience, they’ll listen to your music. If you don’t, they won’t. Simple.

Consistency & regularity

You’re going to pick a day of the week and every week you’re going to update your playlist on that day. If your playlists delight your listeners, they’ll check back every week on that day (that’s why Spotify’s Discover Weekly feature is so important to them).

This means you let people create a habit around your playlists. And while all other content of the playlists might change every week, you’ll have at least one of your tracks in there. So, the habit implies that returning listeners will listen to you every week.

It’s an elegant way to make sure fans don’t miss out on new music through their cluttered Facebook and Twitter feeds and inboxes.

Bi-weekly is also ok. Monthly is a maybe. Anything irregular is a big no. Either you execute this strategy, or you don’t. This particular strategy only works when applied consistently and with fixed regularity.

YouTube vs Spotify

YouTube and Spotify require their own approaches. They’re very different services, that drive very different types of music listening behaviours, bookmarking, etc.

For YouTube, I’d focus on making an ever-growing set of playlists from your main channel where you also post your music videos. It might net you subscribers, too.

This means every YouTube playlist becomes a finished product. Keep them short: roughly 10 tracks. Every week, you’ll create a new playlist with new content, and one of your tracks in there. Share it on your socials: some nice new content for fans.

For Spotify, you’re going to do something different. They’ve actually demoted user-generated playlists in search results, so it’s a bit harder to get found now. So, instead, you’re going to turn it into a tool to connect with your fans and familiarize them with your music taste.

Your Spotify playlists should be longer. 30 tracks or more. Think of them more as radio stations that are refreshed every week. Your followers check in, tune into the new content and also reconnect to your music (like the Diplo & Friends playlist).

User stories

I want to explain a concept from product management called ‘user stories’ — they’re used to describe certain things people expect from or want to be able to do with a product or service. They’re a useful way to not lose sight of what’s important to the people you’re making something for. What’s important to you, is not always what’s important to your target audience.

For your fans

Let’s think from the perspective of fans. And let’s define fan as someone who has shared your music with someone else. Facebook likes don’t count. We’re talking about the people who care enough about your music to share it with others.

Let’s think of some of the reasons why they might be interested in your playlist:

“I want to learn more about the music that inspires this artist.”
“I’ve already heard everything by this artist, but I want more!”
“I wonder what other music this DJ / producer plays besides his own tracks.”

As people get more familiar with your playlists, they may start to develop some more specific expectations, such as “I want to know about the freshest new releases this artist curates” or “I just need some great party music” and they associate your playlists with that.

Focus on the bullet pointed user stories first. You need to get people in, and then get them to form a habit. There are a lot of people creating good playlists for more specific purposes, but the advantage of the bullet pointed items is that they’re all focused on you — and nobody does you like you.

For people who don’t know you

This gets more tricky, because there are so many reasons why someone might land on your playlist. Think about what kind of music you’re curating. What are people trying to achieve when they’re searching for that type of music? A lot of them are going to land on your playlist by looking for an artist other than you, Four Tet for example.

“I want to listen to Four Tet.”
- Yup – some people will just click the first playlist they see if it includes Four Tet and they spot the cover art.
“I want to listen to music like Four Tet.”
“I just want to put on some chill out music and not think about it.”
“I want to listen to a playlist that includes music like Four Tet.”
“I’m curious about discovering more music like Four Tet.”

Although similar, these are different motivations that correspond with different behaviour types. It also means people will judge the quality of your playlist differently (quality is defined as to whether it scratches the person’s itch).

Long term effects

If you do well, your music might actually become associated with the other acts you include in your playlists. This means algorithms will add it to the ‘play next’ queue on YouTube, to ‘similar artists’ on Spotify, or even have you appear in the Discover Weekly of people who listen to a lot of music like that.

Your playlist may become a brand on its own: something artists try to get their music featured in. This means you’re able to shine a light on great artists you feel are not getting enough recognition. Then there will be the people who follow you on playlists, but not on other socials. These may be actual fans (people who share your music) or just people who are into the music you curate.

Playlists are a social medium in their own right. Treat them like that.