‘Music marketing needs to be audience not artist led’
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The record industry has done a “poor” job at marketing in the past by focusing on artists and not audiences, according to one of Sony Music’s top marketers.
Michael Jackson, who appears on Sony’s roster
Speaking at commercial radio body RadioCentre’s member conference earlier this week, vice president of marketing services at Sony Music Fred Bolza said declining sales of high-margin CDs and the drift towards single track downloads and streams has presented music industry marketers with the “challenge of reinventing the industry”.
In more buoyant times for music sales, Bolza added, the industry had taken an artist-first approach to marketing with little regard for the needs of the audience, “unit based and not consumer based”, he said.
Previously, he continued, music industry marketers’ primary relationship was with retailers, with campaigns not progressing beyond ads that declared that the artist’s latest was “out now”.
“We have struggled because as a business we were obsessed by charts - an unholy, seething mess - but we are going to a place where you plan by audience and not by artist”.
Sony - which has Labrinth, Usher and Michael Jackson on its roster - now takes an “audience backwards approach”, Bolza said, employing the kind of marketing tools - consumer data analysis, segmentation, targeting - familiar to marketers in most other sectors but previously under used by the music industry.
A data-led approach should not come at the expense of “gut feeling” about an artist’s appeal, however, but should “go hand in hand with a passion for audiences”, Bolza added.
Readers' comments (3)
Anonymous | Fri, 6 Jul 2012 12:41 pm
I'm confused....is this an article from five years ago?
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László Reszegi | Mon, 9 Jul 2012 9:55 am
That's the point. Nothing changed in the past 5 years. Good article, I totally agree with it.
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Anonymous | Wed, 11 Jul 2012 4:10 pm
Absolutely agree with the point that the industry HAS to move away from its obsession with chart positions and unit targets if it is to survive and remain relevant in its role as marketing and promotional arm rather than manufacturer/distributor. Too many a decent, talented band has been left by the roadside for not hitting notional sales forecasts which, had analysis been done on the potential audience demographic, would have been seen to have been utterly inappropriate (targets which often served only to fill gaps in labels' financial forecasts rather than adequately reflecting the true 'value' of that artist and their audience). Whether its still too little too late to be adopting this 'audience backwards' approach remains to be seen.
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