Tailwinds of Music Marketing: Navigating Techification and the Obsolescence of Like-Share-Subscribe CTAs
Edition 10
Hi folks
Happy Wednesday! Welcome to The Industry Playlist 🎵
This week is exciting because this is the first edition published on Substack. Fingers crossed this doesn’t land in your spam folder. 🤞🏽
This week I dive into the tailwinds of music marketing - how to navigate the techification of music marketing thought leadership and why like-share-subscribe CTAs might soon be obsolete.
If you haven’t subscribed already, here is your chance:
Finally, this week I came across a track on a viral reel of Bieber & Orry dancing at the Ambani sangeet. Turns out it was a fake video (full points for ingenious marketing) ….but the track hit the spot. Kunal Ghorpade is a DJ and producer creating something he calls M-House (Marathi + house music). This particular track is a collab with a Marathi rapper and I can’t stop listening to it. Check out Taamdbi Chaamdi 🎵
Now, let’s get to it.
🪁 SONIC SHIFTS
Efficacy of Podcasts (or any other tech product) for Music Marketing - Navigating the Deepening Techification of Music Marketing and Not Drinking the Kool Aid
Podcasts have been hailed as music’s biggest missed opportunity. The future of fandom is often touted as being offline, yet you keep hearing music marketing thought leadership increasingly recommending online channels, in this case, podcasts.
The current landscape of music marketing is heavily influenced by the need to maximize an increasingly stagnant share of listeners' attention ('earshare'). As a result, many recommendations focus on extracting value from yet another digital space, which are essentially DSP's ever expanding playground to control.
'The house always wins' as the axiom goes - so always take such recommendations with a pinch of salt. For podcasts, there is potential for small wins (podcasts are essentially another meaningful access point for creators with their audience), but true fandom is unlikely to be cultivated there.
A good way to think about marketing for your brand when considering leveraging any tech product, is whether your net effort is in favor of building direct relationships with fans vs building a relationship via an intermediary. The former is key to long-term success. Podcasts present an intermediary platform that can help bridge this gap by allowing artists to connect with listeners in a more intimate and engaging manner. However, the ultimate goal should be to leverage podcasts to drive fans towards direct engagement channels, such as artist websites, mailing lists, and live events, ensuring long-term success and deeper fan loyalty.
Related: How DistroKid can leverage its podcast partnership to help artists tell their stories
Myth Building vs. Narrative Building in Music Marketing - Like-share-subscribe CTAs are becoming obsolete
YouTube’s Culture Trends 2024 Report [PDF] is out and the TL;DR version is that creation and consumption are merging. Sourabh Pateriya (Founder & CEO, Soundverse AI) was one of the few people making this point at last year’s All About Music’23 conference.
YT’s report says 65% of Gen Z describe themselves as video content creators; how long are we before the creators’ like-share-subscribe CTA becomes passé? For Gen Zs, the lines between creation and consumption are blurring, which is why myth-building has to become an important part of an artist’s marketing strategy.
Myth building is driven by fans who create content around an artist, adding layers of meaning and engagement beyond the artist's original work (this is not limited to reels, but everything from reaction videos, teardowns, commentary etc.; think more Easter Eggs, less remixed content). On the other hand, narrative building is the artist's domain, where they craft their own story through music, interviews, and direct communication.
Myth-building enhances your cultural footprint, transforming listeners into active participants; leading them to a virtuous flywheel that is powered by the artist’s narrative.
📚 CURATED INSIGHTS
The new model for building crazy fandom: 8 lessons from Fred Again - There’s no formula, only lessons. These lessons are more at a values level than a commercial lens. That difference is everything.
Meet the Guy Behind the World's Biggest Playlists - Short interview with Head of Global Music Curation and Discovery at Spotify. I can’t imagine it to be an easy job, here’s him talking about how he thinks of curating playlists that are known to make artists into stars.
Rethinking Music Festivals - Will Page is a former Spotify economist, writing about what’s ailing the UK festivals. He raises a good point about supply (festival goers reducing going to multi-genre fests) - these fests confuse the today’s algo-trainer consumer (“an empty field of niches”). We’ll likely see unbundling of music festivals in the future.
“a genre-unfocused festival-poster lineup starts to just look like a playlist that has been made and personalized for somebody else”.
Related: The Story of India’s Music Festival Boom good article on the origin story and evolution of music festivals in India
Explained: What does it mean to own your Masters? - Purely educational but helpful explanation in one place (with memes)
Battle for America’s last Live Nation-free city - Portland has somehow managed to keep its grassroots music culture thriving without the corporatisation that has taken over the live music business, but that might not be true for long. Live Nation is a monopoly (the DoJ wants to split it up), something the music business is better without.
Taking The Music Industry Monopoly Seriously - Virtually every corner of the music industry is now controlled by a choice few companies. Time to break them up?
🔥 KEEP TRACK OF
MIT Forms An Advisory Committee Of More Than 50 Music Industry Experts To Consult On Live Entertainment & Climate Change - Apart from hosting ‘green’ festivals, India is quite far from the climate action in live entertainment. As a platform, Coldplay has been at the forefront of climate action and they’ve got a coalition together to make it a global conversation which is great to see, though Euro-centric by design. As with any climate conversation, the Global South must be involved for it to work. If anyone is talking about these ideas at a policy level, I’d love to chat.
LinkedIn for [Europe’s] Music Professionals - Someone in Europe has built a Music People Map tool as a way for networking for music professionals to unlock new opportunities. The music industry is highly gate-kept so I wonder if this will work in the long-run. But definitely interesting for outsiders to get a sense of who’s who of the scene in Europe.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Rohit