You Can't Predict What Will Drive Music Business Models... So Be Open To Everything
from the don't-count-it-out... dept
Topspin CEO Ian Rogers has a great post detailing how (contrary to his own beliefs) Twitter appears to be quickly becoming a very powerful channel for promoting music and playing into music business models. He gives two examples of how Twitter provided a huge push in driving sales of products for the bands Jimmy Eat World and Arcade Fire. However, his concluding paragraph is the key:What to conclude from all this? That Twitter is the marketing machinery of the future? Naw. This isn't about "the next big thing". It's about how little we know about how marketing will work and how transactions (not just purchases, but any kind of value exchange) will be earned (and I do mean earned) in the future. Success is highly variable. Execution matters (as James said). Unexpected events can make an impact. People are powerful marketers.This is actually really important. It's why you want to enable others to help promote for you however they're most comfortable promoting your works. Yet, over the past decade, what we've seen is how the music industry has tried, at almost every turn, to limit how people promote music to others, and to funnel fans into a very limited set of options for how to interact with the music. If you want to capture the biggest possible bang for the buck, you have to step back and let the community figure out the best way to help promote your works, rather than assuming you can dictate it.
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Filed Under: arcade fire, business models, jimmy eat world, marketing, music
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not managable
I think that may be one of the underlying problems of modern business. The prevailing philosophy in many large businesses is that everything has to be rationally managed. If something cannot be measured then businesses will tend to ignore it. If it can't be controlled then businesses will try to stamp it out. Things like twitter are relatively unknown in terms of their marketing impact, and they certainly are not controllable. Things like Twitter tend to blindside management.
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Re: not managable
More importantly though, the whole reason for tracking anything is to figure out your return on investment. It makes a lot of sense to make that a high priority with most marketing campaigns because they are extremely expensive and logistically complex. But with word of mouth and peer-peer marketing, the investment is usually very low. So the ROI should be worthwhile simply because of how little you have to put in, right? So who cares if you don't know exactly who is saying what? Are people buying your product or hitting your site? That's what's important from a business perspective.
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amazon's twitter feed
http://twitter.com/amazonmp3
Note: I don't work for Amazon or have any stake in this. I just think it's awesome.
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