SONG CONTEST 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.

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.

Related Post: SeeqPod

In 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.