Honestly though, a great viral marketing campaign!

I do feel for the artist that simply must accept that people, probably their fans, are stealing their music. I would probably be pissed off too.

Some people within and without the music business argue that giving away your music for free is great publicity. I couldn’t agree more, but the fact is, artists have no choice. There is a big difference between giving and taking.

So I say “give it”. Give all the studio recordings away. It’s over. Let it go.

Stop trying to sell your marketing.

It used to be that the labels would spend a bundle on a recording, and then use music videos and tours to sell the song on disc.

Now, the reality is that the studio recording is the marketing of the band experience. “Listen to our music, share our music, visit our website, get addicted, then pay!”

• For high-quality versions of awesome video set to the band’s music. Serj Tankian is drip-feeding his fans super-cool videos for all his songs on his required-viewing-for-labels website. Who’s his label, anyway? Granted, he isn’t charging for it, but he could (read on)…
• Concert appearances. You have to be good, very good these days to be a successful musician. Good. It’s about time we went back to the pre-autotune days (sort of).
• Merch
• Fan club. Join for $30/year and get the album and tons of free content. With a shipping and handling fee, send them the CD and a t-shirt. A fan in a t-shirt is more marketing.
• Keep the content coming. Moblog from the road, shoot some back-stage video, twitter… Upload to the site daily. Let people send concert pics right to the fan site.
• Pollute the social networks with your music. It’s the new radio, and it listener-programmed. Free advocacy.
• Use Filemobile to do all this stuff (shameless)

Artists need to create long-lasting relationships with each and every fan. Who’s responsibility is this part of the business of artist development? I would think that the future role of the big labels would be as digital marketing agencies. If that’s the case, why don’t artists get a regular digital marketing agency to do this for them? I might think its because the labels are savvy of the public’s consumption of music and have the necessary technical acumen to provide a comprehensive digital strategy.

The last line of The Age article really sent my head shaking:

“[Missy Higgins' manager] believes that due to the lack of resources within labels, it is incumbent upon artists and managers to work on marketing and promotion independently and be more directly accountable for turning people on to new music” (Murfett, 2008)

Maybe next year.

Full hypocrisy disclosure: I have downloaded my share of music.

I have also just bought the Protest the Hero album from iTunes which included the special edition instrumental version. It was not special enough, however to include lyrics, etc and Canada does not get the HQ downloads yet. Good record, though. I also bought my Killswitch tickets for May 10th with Poison the Well and The End. I was notified that they were on pre-sale to fan club members.

Although “Digital Tech Consulting expects online media stores to generate $7 billion in revenues by 2008, up from under $250 million in 2003”(IT Facts, 2004), the digitally distributed product requires additional marketing, promotion and technology spending and there is no evidence that digital sales will produce enough revenue to cover these new expenses. It has also been suggested that since “record companies are taking such a large cut from tracks sold online that many of the burgeoning online music stores will go out of business”(Andrew Orlowski and Charles Arthur, 2004). This is not sustainable and hence, not beneficial to any of the players in the long term. This will become more significant if major labels decide to raise the wholesale prices of songs that they claim “were originally set artificially low in a bid to stimulate demand.” (CNN Money, 2005)

The authors make subjective claims and provide no supporting bibliographical references therefore affecting the reliability of their conclusions. Two sentences in particular stand out: “Audiophiles claim there is loss of quality, but most people hear no difference in quality with digital music vs. a physical CD.” There is no qualitative evidence of audiophiles ‘claims’ and no definition of ‘quality’. Within the same paragraph, the authors claim that “recording or “ripping” digital music at 96kbs or higher provides similar audio quality as a physical CD”, again with no references to listening tests or that “similar quality” in this case, is lower quality. According to a PC World double-blind listening test, “the lowest rate that is really usable for MP3 is 128 kbps; any lower, and the quality begins to suffer significantly.” (Baguley, 2001)

The basis for much of this future model is the successful implementation of digital rights management (DRM). It remains to be seen how effective these encryption schemes will be. Technology experts believe that DRM for digital music, however applied, is fallible. One such expert believes that “given a functioning implementation of [DRM] technologies, we are confident we can defeat them”. (Felton et al, 2001) There is also always the possibility that anything that can be heard of seen can be rerecorded using a high quality signal path and digitized free of DRM with minimal loss of quality. The articles conclusions also lack practicality due to assumptions related to the creation of an IP Rights Enforcement Body. This fictitious group is described as “legal bodies [who] contribute to the value chain by enforcing IP rights and fighting piracy”. Whether the RIAA suing Napster creates value or not, is debatable.

“The Move to Artist-Led Online Music Distribution” which was chosen to be part of the Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference of System Sciences, fills a need within the music industry for a description of potential roles in the future for both music and technology players. The explanation uses specific, real-life examples to illustrate the application of abstract business proposals. However, the validity of the conclusion is put in question by the use of highly subjective interpretation of evidence and editorial. The arbitrary inclusion and exclusion of actors within the model, such as P2P as a viable marketing platform and the addition of a non-existent IP Rights Enforcement agency described as “legal bodies [who] contribute to the value chain by enforcing IP rights and fighting piracy”, suggests significant bias toward RIAA interests and hence, impacts the reliability of the conclusion.

Since 2006, we have seen the majors pulling out all the stops on the Internet.  They have married and divorced iTunes, ripped down and posted content to YouTube, and generally throwed everything at the kitchen sink to see what sticks.  The sticky question: “How do we get money from these free-loading deadbeats?”

One of the more recent endeavours is trying to sell DRM-free music.  I believe that this is a subtle way for the labels to admit that what sounded sensible a few years ago simply didn’t work and annoyed people with limited device interoperability.  It’s not that they have given up, but that they have realized that the recorded track is now a loss leader; most practically for the youth demographic most likely to steal their wares.  MP3s are now the perfect viral marketing vehicle for the product: the artist.