Online Music Marketing
January 30th, 2009 by Lior ShamirIn a post called “Don’t Confuse Technology with Marketing” published today on The Music Snob, I found the opening statement intriguing: “The use of music marketing technology is not in and of itself an act of music marketing.” The post develops into an insightful, artist’s perspective on the plethora of web-based music marketing and networking solutions aimed at independent artists and promoters, and questions their claim – each service with its unique proposition – as “an act of marketing” by mere subscription to and execution of their service. The Music Snob highlights that the majority of these services provide a means for fans to find the artist and not visa versa. For instance, if the artist is distributing his music to iTunes, he is certainly making his music available for purchase… but that’s not marketing, that’s plain old supply. So how do you create demand? By marketing.
One of the successful attributes of social networks is the balance of push and pull marketing. In push marketing, you look for and find friends. In pull marketing, friends look for and find you. Popular folks enjoy more of the pull while the less socially apt have to push. This is a tried and tested socio-ecosystem, online and off. However, musicians and music listeners are, by definition, unequal. There may be a cross over – musicians may also listen to and purchase music and music listeners may also write songs and play in band – but one is supplying and the other is consuming. In a world where music is ubiquitous and available in limitless varieties, the marketplace is not in favour of the musician and, therefore, he must actively market (push and push hard) to find music listeners to consume his music. The advent of taste making music technology such as Pandora, iLike and Last.fm has made it easier for musicians to develop their presence online but that, I hope The Snob will agree, is far too passive to constitute a true marketing effort through technology which, first and foremost, caters to the consumer’s appetite for music (and not necessarily your music).
From my understanding, what this post suggests, at least in part, is that few artists manage to market themselves successfully, even with an array of revolutionary “marketing” tools, and, resultantly, the music industry’s bottom line pretty much remains the same: a handful of artists sell while the vast majority don’t, even if all of them have a presence on MySpace, Facebook, ReverbNation, Sellaband, OurStage, Music Nation, Sonicbids etc. etc.