This one’s dated a bit because it was written 20 years ago. The points about music monoculture still apply. The agency is trying to connect with the current audience. So is the industry. Sound familiar?
It was more a question of principle than work. They were sitting in a penthouse overlooking Sydney Harbor. The topic was the recording industry, The Home Of The Subhuman Dung Addicts. The topic was stagnation. Sales were down, the industry had never solved the download issue, new acts were dying at an alarming rate. Al was talking to the very tired CEO of a semi-prosperous label. This was John Still, a guy Al had known in the States in the 90s. Still was a music fanatic. He ate and breathed his love of it. He’d taken a violent dislike to his boss over a deal and had to emigrate soon after. Personalities sometimes need a few thousand miles between them. Particularly when one of them is still in therapy. John was brief and blunt.
“The problem is market monotony. They kill enthusiasm by enforcing a sort of musical monoculture. The promotions are all the same, too. It’s hard to get a market ID for the acts. They just will not market something as unique. Therefore they operate like they’re selling used cars; all much the same, some with more or less mileage. Everything has to have this anonymous vibe to it. The MTV effect; find out what they like and give ‘em more of the same.”
Al had strong feelings on the subject. He’d had enough of the business in the 90s to know he just didn’t like people like that. He’d seen plenty of the music industry. He thought it was unprofessional, from a marketing perspective, to merely create a formula and call it a sales pitch. He also remembered that substance was almost totally absent from a lot of those accounts. Parkers had found that a lot of “record labels” were very flimsy as paying customers. Stone Gold just didn’t touch them.
“Yeah, pretty dull stuff. Very predictable. Even the good things seem to get unnoticed, even when they sell. They hit saturation with rap a long time ago. Some of those patches are older than the people using them. No wonder they’re living on sampling. If they weren’t a pack of criminal jerks I’d feel sorry for them.”
“The Celebrity thing isn’t helping, either. Like the film industry. Too much promo on something or someone that’s already sold, not enough on new product. Millions in contracts for something that hasn’t been done, nothing for existing or new product. It’s like spending a fortune on your photo album and nothing on food,” said John, remembering his history of desperate efforts to get some money to move really promising acts, and the resulting chronic apathy.
“One thing about Australia is that you don’t have to play by the US rules here, everyone on an overloaded totem pole trying to get their cut. It’s a small market, and they have to go offshore to make money. Australian acts get taken up in the most unlikely places, like France, Japan and The Czech Republic. Fortunately for you, good product sells despite the market. Good music will always get a hearing. People don’t have to be persuaded about things they like.”
“So how do I plug this new band High Power? You’ve heard them, they’re great, but should I do a massive hype or a simple “This is High Power” spiel?
“TV is best. About a 20 second play of their single should do it. Just a caption with the band name, no spiel unless you want to sell gigs, and you can do the spiel in text. “Wandering Through Love” is a very strong song; it doesn’t need any help. You don’t want to sound like just another ad. That’s fatal. People turn their heads off in droves. 20 seconds is long enough for a hook and some expression. For the download market I know a company, Musical Mass, they’re Australian, who are wholesaling downloads; thousands of good quality recordings, no messing about with ponderous databases, you do it all on order, you name it you get it, and cheap. You can do this through the local phone company, it’s that easy. They sell a sort of subscription to people. They’re being called a category killer in the financials, and they’re getting a lot of business because people are sick of having to chase downloads. Apparently the record companies are also tired of trying to get royalties out of email addresses, too, so they’ve settled for something realistic as alternative.”
“I heard about them. I think I actually got a brief schpritz of one of their promos. Put it that way and it at least makes sense. I have been listening to my lawyers and my artists’ lawyers for years on that. It is unrealistic. Nothing can stop people re-recording material and selling it. I wouldn’t have thought that this was a whole lot better, though? Don’t the people just buy the same thing a bit cheaper and a bit better?”
“No. They do a full job on it. You can get the songs, the visual stuff, even special nowhere-else material. Custom made. One band did an entire high density album DVD with really tough conceptual performance art to go with their songs……it’s twelve hours long…..and you can buy that as part of your $100-$200 annual subscription, which is less than the thing costs retail. Musical Mass made about 90 million US last year, profit after tax. They did something like 400 million downloads. Very happy customers, too; it’s so simple and so quick that retail is ridiculously complex by comparison.”
“How do they figure out subscription costs?”
“Unit cost. They have a costing for every byte of download, it’s accurate to the fiftieth decimal place or something, and they make money on every byte. Their dedicated servers work at about a million GB an hour, something huge, anyway. They also now own their ISP, so that’s all theirs. I’m no expert on computers, but they’ve managed to do all this and the only complaint they’ve had so far is that people run out of space to save the downloads.”
“How did they get started?”
“Word of mouth. Ironically, In the communication age, it seems credibility is finally starting to mean something. They were originally a server with a few thousand songs. They got onto the music publishers and explained the idea. The publishers explained to the record companies that this was a lot better than debt collection as a way of life. The record companies took the hint and also took the opportunity to put their entire archives up for sale, old stuff that would be too expensive to do hard copies in commercial quantities. They got swamped. Collectors aren’t just collectors. They buy that stuff because they love it. Result, cash flow. It also shut up the lawyers. The really impressive thing is that big sales are being generated by smaller labels. David tells me the major labels are sufficiently interested in solving the problem to be getting interested, too.”
“Can’t these downloads be just on-sold?”
“Yeah, but they already can. This is like buying direct from the broadcasters, like a radio or TV station. You can record from them, too, but nobody’s talking about shutting them down. Interestingly the customers don’t see why they should bother with bootlegs when they can get better quality easier, and cheaper, and regularly. The best way to prevent property crime is to make it worthless to steal the property. At the price people pay for them the downloads are cheaper to buy than they are to swipe.”
“What about the greedy little artists and their entourages of hangers-on?”
“They still get their money, so do the labels, and the overheads are so low it’s obscene. Strangely enough, if you happen to know that nothing costs….or ever has cost… a million to record, it’s easy to adjust. This kind of cash flow makes a big difference. People pay for what they want, and you don’t have gigantic production costs of manufacturing things you can’t sell, too. It seems that some of them have wised up about the hangers-on, too. The only losers are the middlemen everyone’s always trying to get rid of, and the sort of people that launder money through the media. No loss. Gets rid of the money launderers, because there are too many ways of checking receipts and outgoings.
It’s also a merchandiser’s dream; low cost copies, heaps of opportunities to add things, like a web site, sub-plugs for other acts…. People actually get to play around with the records, too. Someone did a remix contest and got about two hundred thousand entries. Crashed the email.”
“One thing I don’t get; you don’t think a big hard sell campaign would work? What happened to all the big promo mystique?”
“Everything about commercial musical product is already an ad. Image, packaging, names, clothes, all part of the obvious process. Hitting people with more of the same isn’t information. It’s affirmation. You won’t sell more on the basis of random pounding on the drum. An all-out national campaign would result in a sort of market blink or so. You may be aware that one of the big hurdles of the advertising industry is proving that ads actually sell more. It’s easy enough when you have sales figures. Some ads do sell more product. Others go nowhere.
You’d swear that the Coke/Pepsi wars were nothing to do with anything but advertising. It never seems to have occurred to anyone that people actually drink the stuff and know what it tastes like. Secondly it’s an impulse buy most of the time. Some ads do make you like a product by association; others just annoy you. That’s one of the pitfalls of a hard sell; the reaction is likely to be in direct proportion to the degree of sales pitch. You could literally spend millions on something that will get a truly fatal reaction.
There was once a merchandising spiel for a big set of movies, a really successful series. They were selling fast food with some sort of toy in it. They had a really clumsy hook that was pitched at kids, spoken by someone who was at least 40. It died. It never had a chance; it invaded people’s childhood. It was an alien voice, an intruder in that market. Same thing applies to popular music; tell them they have to like it and you’ll lose them forever. In that case ads are threats, and hype is worse. Music means something to people. It’s part of their lives that they like. It has a place in their identities. They never got a “next Beatles” because nobody ever needed one. You don’t go and get another God because you’ve worn out the original.
Then there’s the reaction between generations; Generation A loves it; Generation B tries desperately to get away from it; Generation C rediscovers it and reinterprets it. Generation D only notices it if it’s fashionable, like Bauhaus or Dada, or it clicks with them. Eventually all that’s left is the surviving substance, something history can be bothered keeping.”
“So this whole download thing is pretty much part of the natural process. Actually if I wasn’t trying to sell hard copies at a cent or so above cost I’d really be making money. It’s a really inefficient way of doing business.”
“Anything digital can be reworked into any format. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need decoders and all that crap. All you need is media you can use. If nothing else, that’s now been proved. The whole of human art, every recorded performance in history, can easily be made available to anyone, forever, when it’s data and not just objects. The arts work better when the support processes are effective. Talented people don’t have to battle their way through an industrial obstacle course. Look what happened to the film industry. Of all possible things to finally change it; security cameras. Someone worked out that you don’t need a billion dollar production if you just set up a few digital security cameras. You can even run active storyboards on them. Now all you need to make a movie is a decent edit program, and high resolution cameras. Somebody told me that all they needed was a few lines of code to make the computers run the shots together, pan, and zoom.”
“They’re still making crappy movies, though.”
“Yeah, but they also got a lot of people who weren’t barricaded into scenes by tons of gear and crews. Performances became pretty free flowing, very fast, very natural. A lot of production companies managed to stay in business because their costs dropped to almost zero. You know Dan Adams, that guy who used to do sets for us? He told me that a 3D set using the new camera setup is about a million times more efficient than the old style theatre-backdrop sets. All the production side became so much easier. Suddenly there was a profit margin again. The old system didn’t just price itself out of the market, it buried itself in overheads. People adapted, fast. The cameramen got their jobs made a lot simpler, and maybe more interesting, too, because now they could work with literally thousands of shots, not just a few angles and an insane director trying to have a heart attack. Editing couldn’t get any easier. Production became more profitable, and a lot less wasteful.”
“I would have thought that market wisdom was to get people psychologically involved, not just let them enjoy themselves. There’s so much “us” about everything you see these days. Everyone’s supposed to be part of a group. Fun by numbers.”