Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Who Needs A Label?

The music industry remains fascinating from a marketing perspective as the distribution networks driven by its fans become increasingly influential and start to supercede the structures of the Big Labels.  This interview at TorrentFreak with a young musician gives a great flavour of what radical change looks like from the Y-Gen perspective.  “'Labels will complain and sue their very core audience just to make a dollar. I can’t blame them, it’s the way they’ve built their company. Change scares them, especially when they don’t control it. I honestly believe that I wouldn’t be a musician today if Napster hadn’t appeared. I think Napster fostered the incredible current musical culture and nobody gives them credit for it. I find it very hard for an upcoming artist to get any exposure without being willing to promote their music on p2p networks.'  The clash between artist and labels, and the ever increasing piracy statistics are forcing the big labels to rethink their business models. Nowadays, BitTorrent has the power to promote artists based on their music, not on the advertising budget. It is hard to deny that the music labels are in a crisis, however, music itself is more alive than ever before."  As Doc Searls says, 'in networked economies the demand side supplies itself'.

Metrics-22

There is a wonderful irony in the current debate about marketing metrics.  For a long time the marketing and media world has used measurement techniques which are far from precise.  However, the industry knew they weren't definitive and established workarounds, whilst calling for greater accuracy.  Now networked media has arrived in full effect and we can measure everything to the nth degree.  But no one can agree on anything - because there is too much detailed data!  And thus the commercial growth of networked media is restricted because people are sticking to the traditional media metrics which aren't as confusing because everyone knows they are inaccurate!  Solving the problem may take a shift in the way we view the market because impressions and page views make less and less sense.  Google changed the game when they moved to CPCs because everyone agrees that paying for the right type of traffic, ie people who have demonstrated an intention, is a good idea.  And now Microsoft and Yahoo are trying to change the rules again to behavioural targeting where by people's clickstreams are constantly analysed to understand what they might be in the market for.  But for now, the old system doesn't work and the new one is too good!

Reboot - It's All About The Social

Back from Rebooting in Copenhagen.  This year's event was more workman-like and a little less idealistic than last year - no bad thing.  Blogs were hardly mentioned and the bigger picture was addressed.  There was a sense that social media has arrived - now it's just a question of working it all out.  We have moved beyond the software to the social - that is where the excitement, the action and the value is emerging.  Johnnie and I did a couple of mini sessions into which we managed to introduce samurai and hells angels - as well as getting everyone to make a fantastic racket.  Pushing the chairs back was probably the highlight for me ;-)  One way and another we gathered a fair amount of material for the Co-Creation Rules manifesto which we will write up soon.  But feel free to review and change the draft here in the meantime.

Off To Reboot A Renaissance

I am greatly looking forward to Reboot 8, having had such a good time last year. It's a seriously distributed format this year which sounds like the focus will be more on the social than the seminar - all with a Renaissance theme.  Johnnie and I are doing a couple of little sessions entitled Co-Creation Rules in which we will encourage some saucy collaboration and share a few observations from the brands we've been working with in the last year.  We are also going to try and gather some examples and opinion about co-creation to build into a changethis manifesto.  Here's the first draft - feel free to add, edit or leave a comment in the 'speak your brains' section at the bottom.