Soon there will be no giant music conglomerate to tell us what to listen to.
A new wave of marketing strategy is swallowing the music industry whole and consumers are about to experience a musical revolution. Guerilla marketing, advertisement by the masses, is the future of the music industry and its onset is happily skipping into the present.
In the past, large music corporations, through their glutinous amounts of money, played a large role in what musical consumers were allowed to access. Through promotion and marketing these large corporations exposed new artists to the general masses and helped them rise to the top. Billboard hits, sold-out, cross-country tours, and platinum CD’s were easily facilitated to these large corporations such as Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Virgin Records, and Clear-Channel Communications; they had it down to a science.
Music executives reigned influence over the music-buying customers by means of “taste-makers,” who more or less decide or set the standards for what is popular and stylish. These “taste-makers” through money and connection promoted artists and even influenced the music executives, which resulted in carbon-copied, generic and fabricated artistry being plastered and plugged into every media outlet possible. Flyers, radio plugs, and television commercials bombarded consumers with CD and concert announcements, and loud, “in your face” ads demanding that you immediately head down to your local record store to pick up so and so’s new album that dropped yesterday. It became a vicious cycle of promotion. The consumers were used to utilizing these outlets for musical information, and these same marketers promoted the same carbon-copied artists time and time again.
Luckily this began to fade when the use of the Internet for music came into full swing. Even though Napster broke about ever piracy law possible, when it first made it’s debut, it also set a foundation for the revolution that is hitting its peak now. The record executives never expected this and they were not prepared. Anti-piracy laws began to fall into place, limiting the gathering of music by means of the Internet as much as they could.
Now with the development of iTunes, where you can purchase albums for lower prices digitally, music stores are slowly becoming obsolete. Musicians themselves are becoming aware of the shift in marketing strategy and are utilizing it to their benefit. For example, Radiohead, a popular alternative rock band, released a digital album in December 2007, “In Rainbows.” It was available via Radiohead’s website and the cost was left up to the consumer; one could pay whatever they saw fit. This tactic was the tipping point of a new trend. Other bands such as The Charlatans and Nine Inch Nails have followed suit, and even popular indie-rag, Paste Magazine, let subscribers choose their own price. This approach has benefited them all because the new wave of marketing is morphing into a peer-to-peer, word of mouth type strategy.
Between file sharing via mp3 files, USB drives and those oh so handy CDR’s, sharing music between friends has practically become a daily routine. Many argue that this is what is destroying the music industry, but it is merely changing it. Artists are making much less money off of CD sales than they did in the past, and soon will not be making any money off of CDs. However, due to this shift in marketing strategy, artists will no longer have to make vast amounts of money to get themselves promoted. The consumers are doing it for them.
Specialized marketing is closing the gap between artists and their fans, because it is eliminating the big, bad middleman: the record executives and the “taste-maker.” A recent example of this is the breakdown and selling of Clear Channel Communications. The $19.5 billion sale to two private-equity firms, approved on Feb. 13, 2008. Clear Channel owns over 1,200 radio stations and hosts thousands of live shows across the United States. It is by far one of the largest music conglomerates in existence and its breakdown and selling is a monumental step for the music industry.
The music industry is well on its way to making a complete shift into the consumer’s hands. It is particularly exiting to the musicians who normally fly under the radar. Despite the fact that the indie movement has made great strides in the past few years, especially with the expansion of Sub Pop Records, underground artists are now going to be able to emerge from the backdrop with the help of their fans. With popular social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace in place, it is much easier for artists to get themselves out there. For example the indie-folk rock group Fleet Foxes created a MySpace page for themselves and soon they were headlining the Bumbershoot music festival in Seattle, Wash., in 2007. It was after they played Bumbershoot they received a record deal from Sub Pop Records.
They have now released an EP “Sun Giant,” and their full, self-titled LP is expected to drop on June 3, 2008. The Fleet Foxes are well aware of the switch to guerilla marketing as it shows in one of their MySpace blogs where it states: “I'm sorry there's been some mention of us in the press and stuff lately. That stuff is really annoying I know and we're kinda bummed on that stuff. We don't really want to be one of those bands.”
