You’re probably not having any luck getting your songs on the radio, right?
That’s because terrestrial radio doesn’t want you.
You see, record labels have a full staff of professional radio pluggers whose full-time job is to pitch their clients’ record catalog to station managers, playlist programmers, DJs and program producers.
They are insiders − they know all the politics and all the rules. Their rolodexes are packed with every name, number and email in the industry.
So how are you supposed to compete?
Almost 70 million Americans tune into online radio each month. Overall listenership exploded by more than a third last year alone. Online radio has become the single most powerful source of music discovery, which is why up-and-coming artists are falling over themselves to land even a few minutes of airplay on music services such as Jango.
“Inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity are the key behaviors of ADHD.”
I was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) at the age of 16. I don’t presume that music listeners at large suffer from it but rather draw the comparison to the syndrome due to the endless choice and ease of switching from one piece of music to another ? impulsively.
With terrestrial radio, I can always ‘turn the dial’ but I’m otherwise passively engaged. As I’m no longer willing to be spoon fed music and advertising by terrestrial radio, I consume it interactively online or via cable or satellite. I listen to whatever I like, whenever I want, on any device I choose.
Consequently, I’m busy running my music applications and managing my playlists instead of sitting back and just listening. I’m the DJ. I’m the station. I’m not listening like I used to because I’m busy broadcasting to myself… rating, sharing, editing, remixing, collaborating, plugging in, adding plug-ins, logging off, connecting elsewhere.
I’m not sure that this is a good thing for someone with ADHD.
Brian Hazard of the Music Think Tank published a comprehensive post addressing the pay-for-play model that online streaming playlist service, Jango, adopted as part of its monetization strategy, dispelling the analogy to terrestrial radio payola and drawing references to mainstream advertising mediums. In March, I promoted Jango Airplay and touched on the controversial issues Brian addresses in his piece but his first-hand experience and engaging write-up of the music dotcom serves the topic more justice: Is Jango Payola?
“When we launched our free digital distribution service, we knew we would be able to provide our users with new possibilities to help them expand their own marketing. With Jango Airplay, our users can freely invest into getting radio promotions and establish unique social interactions with new fans to help drive music sales. We are very excited to be working with Jango to provide an effective marketing avenue to our users.” said Kevin Rivers, Founder and CEO of WaTunes.
“We designed Jango Airplay to give emerging artists an affordable and effective way to get their music proactively played to real listeners who like similar music. Thanks to WaTunes and affordable technology it is cheaper than ever to produce and sell music – but getting your music heard is the first step. We are very excited to bring WaTunes users in front of our 6 Million listeners. ” said Mattias Stanghed, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Jango.
Spotify, the streaming music service, announced last Thursday that Paul Brown will take on the role as the company’s UK Managing Director on April 20th. It appears as if Brown was headhunted from Pandora where he served as Managing Director International. Formerly at Sony Music UK where he contributed to the company’s digital music expansion and currently a Non-Executive Director at artist funding site, Slicethepie, Brown is the ideal candidate to spearhead Spotify’s operations in the UK where the uptake to the service has been “phenomenal”, Spotify noted on their blog.
P2P streaming music service, Grooveshark, has launched an artist promotion initiative – much like the track placement scheme Jango conceived of – as a means for artists and music promoters to purchase plays on its platform, a direct advertising approach that makes sense. The Gainesville, Florida, company of approximately 40 young entrepreneurs has created a music service that rivals that of Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming.
Grooveshark claims to have deployed a legal music discovery and consumption model, providing its users with a financial incentive to share music, compensating artist/labels for their respective share of ‘broadcasts’, and maximizing illegal file sharing by financing its original sources. Whether this service is actually legal or not is questionable and it appears that the company has created an expensive model to sustain on ad revenues alone. However, they’re coming through on some very interesting marketing features for small budget music marketing campaigns. At its core, Grooveshark Artists offers pay-for-play audio realestate matched to its existing track recommendations and provides analytics tools for track placement optimization.
In addition, it has partnered up with some of the most talked about music tech startups for music retail, licensing, funding, and more, including Bandcamp, Sellaband and TheNextBigSound, all under the Grooveshark banner which already includes a number of subsidiary services including Tinysong, a track link generating tool for viral distribution, and Twisten.fm, a Twitter crawler that finds music-related tweets and links them to playable tracks. All of this put together amounts to a powerful enterprise of do-it-yourself marketing and a 360 indie approach akin to ReverbNation.
On demand music streaming service, Spotify, has been on my radar since the company announced a distribution deal with CD Baby in the first week of February. CD Baby, the leading force in independent music retail and digital music distribution, represents more than 175,000 artists which account for over one million tracks, all of which are now available through Spotify’s lightweight music streaming application. This licensing deal marks the ‘long-tail’ trend in music availability and consumption, and celebrates the access independent artists have today to mass audiences through pioneering music services, many of which had treated indie talent as nothing more than an afterthought after securing major label catalogues. Under the aphorism of “access not ownership”, the Luxemburg-based company has been growing exponentially since its €15.3m venture capital injection in October 2008 and, in turn, joining an elite group of legal music experience providers such as Pandora, Last.fm, TheSixtyOne, and others, which have found success in catering to music consumers through a balanced and worldly music library whilst reserving significant real-estate for up and coming artists: a pop-culture and grassroots music mix that appears to be paving the way for a new industry. A spot in Spotify’s limelight is not yet available directly for small acts and labels but CD Baby has certainly lowered the barrier of entry. Thank you Derek or, rather, Disc Makers for making this possible…
Online streaming radio and music tastemaker, Jango, has launched a somewhat controversial artist promotion programme called Jango Airplay. Essentially a pay-to-play scheme [and reminiscent of terrestrial radio “payola” which has been illegal since the fifties], Jango Airplay provides artists and their agents a direct means of plugging their songs to Jango’s listener base of 6 million for a fee. Much like the StumbleUpon advertising initiative, displaying a sponsored web page for every nine unsponsored web-pages, the promotional value of this scheme is not absolute: “If you get 50 positive ratings, your song starts playing for free in general rotation on Jango. If your song continues to get good ratings, it will be played more and more often and in more and more stations.” For $30, Jango Airplay offers 1000 plays, each track linked to its distributor (i.e. Amazon, iTune).
Pay-to-play may be an unpopular paradigm among musicians but this is actually an unprecedented opportunity for artists and labels to reach a new audience and guarantee some rotation. For not much more than pocket change, bootstrapped musicians can gain some insight on who is most likely to listen to them, rate them up, and perhaps even purchase something. Assuming that Jango Airplay plugs sponsored tracks appropriately, this is a truly awesome marketing platform for the music industry.
“This is a very sad day for Pandora, and for me personally. Today we reduced our staff from 140 to 120 employees. Like virtually every company, Pandora is not immune to the challenges presented by the current economic turmoil. We are trying to react quickly and responsibly to the new environment…
There are tough times ahead for the economy, but our listenership is growing rapidly, the Internet radio royalty rate resolution seems finally near, and the explosion of mobile devices like the iPhone are opening up a world of opportunity for internet radio to expand off the desktop. Moreover, our ad sales are growing so well that, not only did we not make any reductions there, we need to continue to hire more.”
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