Music Industry and Digital Marketing.

Music Industry and Digital Marketing.

According to Nielsen SoundScan’s latest report, more than 70% of the music consumed in the first six months of 2014 in the U.S. was either downloaded or streamed — and streaming services are the only part of the recorded music business that's growing. Digital's influence on the music industry has driven consumption and provided immense opportunity for new business, like Spotify and Pandora, to moves from veteran players, like Apple, and Google. But these competing services have paved the way for a highly fragmented landscape, and it’s become a maze for artists and labels to understand — and capitalize on — fan behavior.

Nowadays, music industry struggle with a disjointed digital ecosystem made up of social networks, and other digital media platforms. Therefore, consumers have the potential to get lost in the mix for marketers.

Fortunately, standardized tracking tools now exist that enable marketers to understand how consumers behave across platforms and devices with increasing accuracy. But, music is a breed of its own, thus cookie-like tracking tools simply don't exist yet.

In this regard, artists don’t know their true reach and can't discover comprehensive insights into their listeners, as fans travel from one platform to the next.

In short, labels and artists struggle to map the lifecycle of a fan, determine when a listener first heard a song, who the listener even is, and how to nurture the artist relationship and create a fan for life

The author of the article has pointed out three approaches that music marketer needs to consider, including:

1.     Marketing technology. 

Deeper insight into user behavior is crucial for music industry that bears the brunt of every new disruptive technology.

àTraditional marketers implement sophisticated tools to support marketing initiatives at every stage of the funnel. They qualify leads, nurture prospects and maintain relationships with existing customers. However, there are even solutions to map offline behavior and online activity courtesy of new technology

2.     Real-time reporting. 

In case of offline radio, there’s no real-time or detailed tracking of that music consumption. Services like Pandora operate under a statutory license from the U.S. government, and they are only required to provide the number of plays of a certain track on a monthly basis 45 days after the month ends, with no demographic information about the listeners. In contrast, digital marketers are optimizing marketing initiatives, like paid media and site optimization, in real time thanks to mounds of data.

--> Need to build measure audience behavior and create benefits for artists and fans to understand who’s listening to what music across which platforms.

3. Building relationships on social. -As always, when we talk about digital marketing, its success all depend upon how strong we build relationship with the consumer. As Taylor Swift pointed out in her recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, artists are starting to get record deals because they have fans (not the other way around). With social platforms like Instagram and Twitter, musicians can take ownership of their relationship with fans and directly learn about their likes, dislikes, favorite songs and and interests. However, artists and labels face the same problems that traditional marketers face with social marketing. what ROI does a like or a follow yield? How many unique fans do I have between my Facebook friends and Twitter followers? 

<Source: Digital markeitng and the music industyr: Trends for 2014.>  

https://econsultancy.com/blog/64051-digital-marketing-and-the-music-industry-six-key-trends-for-2014#i.16i0020dm1f9ju