Marketing Recorded Music

How Music Companies Brand and Market Artists

Tammy Donham, Amy Sue Macy, Clyde Philip Rolston

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367693947
• eBook ISBN: 9781000585148
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acoustical Engineering

This fourth edition of Marketing Recorded Music is the essential resource to help you understand how recorded music is professionally marketed. Updated to reflect the digital era, with new chapters on emerging media, streaming, and branding, this fourth edition also includes strategies for independent and unsigned artists. Fully revised to reflect international marketing issues, Marketing Recorded Music is accompanied by a companion website with additional online resources, including PowerPoints, quizzes, and lesson plans, making it the go-to manual for students, as well as aspiring and experienced professionals.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003153511-1

CONTENTS

• Why Artists Might Want to Sign With a Record Label
• Revenue Streams
• Music Everywhere
• The New Deal
• Publishing
• Touring and Merchandise
• Bibliography

Do you need music? Based solely on the fact that you are reading this, it is a safe bet that you answered that question, “Yes!” Do you really need music? If you still said yes, then you might just have the right attitude to succeed in the music industry, but the truth is none of us need music in the Maslovian sense. It is not necessary to survive, like food and water. There are other ways to express our emotions or our artistic side, make us feel better or earn a living. But we love music and fill our days with it. Music definitely makes life better, and it is everywhere – movies, television, radio, grocery stores and even our telephones. We listen to music from the time we wake up in the morning until we go to bed at night. We can’t imagine doing anything else to make a living.

Why Artists Might Want to Sign With a Record Label

So, you’ve made up your mind. You want to be a working musician, writing, recording, and performing your songs for the fans. How many fans? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? What does success in the music business mean to you? Will you be content performing locally on the weekends and paying the bills working full-time as an accountant? How about living in a van and cheap hotels, driving from city to city to play in bars and small venues? Or do you have to have the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle – the one that allows you to own a thirty thousand–square foot mansion with a pool and a five-car garage with a different exotic car in every bay? To do that, you are going to need a record label.

But if I do that, I’ll have to give up creative control of my music, won’t I? I don’t want to do that. Besides, I can record my songs on my laptop and distribute them world-wide on Apple Music and Spotify. I don’t need a record label. Chance the Rapper did it without a record label, didn’t he? And he won a Grammy!

Yes, it is true that Chance the Rapper was not signed to a record label, but he did have an exclusive deal with Apple’s iTunes. According to iSpot.TV and Phillips (2017), that two-week exclusive on iTunes was in exchange for $500,000 and appearing in an ad that Apple paid for and aired for 10 months on media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, generating over 4.6 million impressions with music fans. That would kickstart anyone’s career.

Of course, Chance is the exception and not the rule. In 2018, Spotify claimed over three million creatives on their site, but at the end of 2020, fewer than 900 were making more than $1 million per year (from publishing and recordings) and about 7,500 were making more than $100,000 per year (Ingham, 2020). That means about 0.28% of the creatives on Spotify were making a living there.

And the competition is getting worse. New tracks are being added to Spotify at the rate of 60,000 songs a day (Ingham, 2020). In 2017, zmonline.com reported that 20% of all the tracks on the site had never been streamed (“Spotify releases playlist”). Still want to get into the music business without a label?

Record labels have the money, the personnel, and the experience to help an artist navigate the complexities of the industry. Being signed to a legitimate label gives the artist instant credibility. It is a vetting process that few get through. With a recording advance, the artist can afford to hire a top-notch producer, and the experienced marketing team will make the artist stand out from the crowd (5 Reasons, 2020).

Revenue Streams

Because record labels provide most of the musical recordings, they play a role in every revenue stream in the music business. If the artist is a songwriter, then they sit atop all three revenue streams, increasing their chances of more income. In this simplified representation of the industry, the revenue streams may appear to be siloed, but in reality, they are very much interconnected. For example, the songwriter in the publishing stream provides the song used by the artist in both the recording stream and the live stream. Recorded music is used by broadcasters and others, generating income for the writer and the publisher, and so on.

FIGURE 1.1 Music Industry

Without the song, there isn’t a sound recording. Without the sound recording, there isn’t the radio exposure, the download, or the stream. Without that exposure, there isn’t the demand for the tour tickets,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Authors
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 Introduction
• CHAPTER 2 Marketing Concepts and Definitions
• CHAPTER 3 Market Segmentation and Consumer Behavior
• CHAPTER 4 Marketing Research
• CHAPTER 5 Artist Branding
• CHAPTER 6 The U.S. Industry Numbers
• CHAPTER 7 Label Operations
• CHAPTER 8 The Marketing Plan
• CHAPTER 9 Music Distribution and Music Retailing
• CHAPTER 10 Streaming
• CHAPTER 11 Radio
• CHAPTER 12 The Charts
• CHAPTER 13 Publicity
• CHAPTER 14 Digital Marketing
• CHAPTER 15 Paid Media
• CHAPTER 16 Artist Support and Tour Sponsorship
• CHAPTER 17 Merchandise
• Index