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MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT #47Power Reading for Busy Music ProfessionalsHope you're hungry! MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT is published for musicians, songwriters, managers, label reps, booking agents, entertainment attorneys, studio owners, music publishers, and all others involved in the music business. Its purpose is to help boost your business, find new markets, make the right connections, develop professionally, work smarter and improve your bottom line. As a general rule, the most successful people in life are those who have the best information. —Benjamin Disraeli Written and published bimonthly by Peter Spellman, Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS: Turning Music Business Data into Useful Knowledge. Career-building books, articles, training, consulting and more. P.O. Box 230266, Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123-0266, USA Phone: 888-655-8335 Email: success@mbsolutions.com Web site: http://www.mbsolutions.com © 1997 - 2007, Peter Spellman, MBS Business Media, www.mbsolutions.com Please feel free to redistribute with above credit and copyright notice. IN THIS ISSUE — MBI#47:
NEWS & VIEWS U CAN USEPOP DEMOCRACY The problem with American Idol, says rock critic Dave Marsh, is that all it “really represents is an ever more cleverly manipulated pop culture,” reports Jeff Leeds in The New York Times (2/2/07). “Empowerment becomes a commodity,” says Dave, who adds that music fans don’t need any help spotting talent. “The mob chose Elvis Presley, the mob chose James Brown, the mob chose the Beatles,” he says. When you’ve got Randy, Paul and Simon filtering the process the way they do on Idol, the result is “disposable” singers who are selected because “they stay away from anything that’s personal or controversial.” Or the result is simply “microstars” like Taylor Hicks, the most recent Idol winner whose debut record sold 298,000 copies in its first week, before tumbling off the charts. A pair of other, earlier winners -- Ruben Studdard and Fantasia Barrino -- haven’t done so well in record sales, either. Some observers think this means that “aspiring stars -- even those backed by a bloc of voters -- still need support from old-line media gatekeepers like radio and TV stations.” Daniel Klaus, CEO of Music Nation, a site where fans vote on music videos, admits that any popularity gained by his winners “might help an act sell only 10,000 to 20,000 copies of a song online.” Even Simon Fuller, the American Idol impresario, admits that the crush of contests will cause the novelty of voting to “just burn out, because people will be sick of it. I think it’s got to go to another level.” He says that “80 percent” of experiments in pop democracy “will fail because the motivation for doing them is flawed.” From his perspective, it’s not a simple matter of letting people vote, but also “stimulating viewer interest in the narratives of contestants pursuing the spotlight.” Michael Hirschorn, of VH-1’s acceptable.tv agrees: “Voting is actually incredibly easy and therefore not that meaningful,” he says, “But I do think there’s a desire for a deeper emotional connection to artists.” PIG DIGS CLASSICS A Vietnamese farmer is playing classical music to his pigs to boost productivity. Nguyen Chi Cong plays the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert to his 3,000 pigs while they are eating. The 44-year-old said he started playing recordings of classical symphonies and sonatas over loudspeakers for the benefit of his workers. But he also found the music had a soothing effect on the pigs, reports Sky News. “I saw that my pigs started eating more and that they were gaining weight faster than usual,” he said. He now plays the tunes of the great European composers daily from 7-11am and 2-4pm. “I think I am the first farmer in Vietnam to apply this technique.” Source: http://www.ananova.com/news/ TINY TUNES Forget the drum solo Ð Radio SASS pares songs down to the bone. Why climb the “Stairway to Heaven” when you can take the elevator? That’s the logic behind Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System), an experimental radio protocol currently in development that takes classic tunes and whittles them down to about two minutes. People’s patience for music - even the stuff they like Ð is thin,” Says founder George Gimarc, a veteran programmer and former DJ from Dallas. “Twelve songs per hour won’t cut it.” Gimarc and his team of editor-musicians use what he calls “intuitive editing” to trim pop songs to their catchiest crux, pruning seconds from a guitar solo here, lopping off a chorus there. Musicians are crying foul. “It’s heinous, says Andrew Whiteman, lead guitarist of Broken Social Scene, a Canadian group known for songs that run more than ten minutes. “Music is not meant to be hook after hook” But Gimarc says most listeners don’t miss the snipped bits. Source: Wired, March 2007 You decide: Check out the SASS versions of popular songs at wired.com/extras WHY ARE SUPERSTARS PAID SO MUCH? University of Chicago labor economist Sherwin Rosen has written a short article The Economics of Superstars to explain that high salaries for superstars are consistent with the workings of our economic system. Workers who generate a lot of revenue get high salaries. Rosen contends those top athletes, movie stars, musicians, authors and television personalities command huge salaries because their products can be sold to millions of customers at the same time. “When athletes and entertainers perform, they are reproducing at no cost for each customer,” he said. By definition, service workers’ products cannot be separated from their two hands. Physicians and beauticians can sell their services to only one person at a time. Their income depends on the amount customers will pay, multiplied by the number of times they perform their service during a workweek. The products of athletes and entertainers—a baseball game, a movie, and a concert—can be consumed at the same time by thousands of people in stadiums and theaters. Technology continually enlarges the market for the players or entertainers who possess exceptional skills, making their performances more valuable. Images and sound are reproduced and the size of the audience expands to millions and even billions of people. Before broadcasting, a game could only reach the 50,000 or so fans that sat in a stadium. In the 1930s, radio brought the aural portion of the game to those who weren’t at the stadium. Television in the 1960s, cable networks in the 1970s and satellite dishes in the 1990s expanded the number of people who could watch. Even if each consumer pays just a few dollars or a few cents to watch or listen, it can generate enormous revenue. 403 WAYS TO SLICE A CD An album isn’t just an album anymoreÑit’s an opportunity to dice a dozen songs into ringtones, downloads, blog skins, and more. Warner Music found 23 ways to market one South Korean pop star’s 16-track albumÑfor a total of 403 SKUs (stock keeping units). And that doesn’t include the extended dance remix. Music Form (# of SKUs)
Source: Wired, March 2007 ))) FEATURE (((MARKETING: THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE PARTS (from “Indie Marketing Power” by Peter Spellman) Advertising. Marketing. Sales. Promotions. What are the differences? The following story has circulated the marketing world for decades and offers some good answers for what’s what in the field of marketing communications: If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Coming to the Fairground Saturday,” that’s ADVERTISING. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s PROMOTION. If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flowerbed, that’s PUBLICITY. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s PUBLIC RELATIONS. If the town’s citizens go to the circus, and you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money there, and answer questions, ultimately, if they spend a lot of money at the circus, that’s SALES. Because marketing involves way more than marketing communications, here’s how the circus story might continue if it went on to show where research, product development, and the rest of the components of the marketing process fit in: If, before painting the sign that says “Circus coming to the Fairground Saturday,” you check community calendars to see whether conflicting events are scheduled, study who typically attends the circus, and figure out how much they’re willing to pay and what kinds of services and activities they prefer, that’s MARKET RESEARCH. If you invent elephant ears for people to eat while they’re waiting for elephant rides, that’s PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT. If you create an offer that combines a circus ticket, an elephant ear, and elephant ride, and a memory-book elephant photo, that’s PACKAGING. If you get a restaurant named Elephants to sell your elephant package, that’s DISTRIBUTION. If you ask everyone who took an elephant ride to participate in a survey, that’s CUSTOMER RESEARCH. If you follow up by sending each survey participant a thank-you not along with a two-for-one coupon to next year’s circus, that’s CUSTOMER SERVICE. And if you use the survey responses to develop new products, revise pricing, and enhance distribution, then you’ve started the marketing process all over again ))) ILLUMINATING TRIVIA (((Did you know… …that before 1966 the Beatles were getting 6 cents per sale per album and 1 cent per single? From 1966-69 it was 39 cents per sale per album. Source: beatlemoney.com
TO SUBSCRIBE to MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT: send email with the message in the body, "subscribe" to success@mbsolutions.com It's not an autoresponder so feel free to include any other comments, ideas, suggestions, etc. you may have. About the Publisher PETER SPELLMAN is Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS, a business and marketing consultancy to the music industry, and Director of Career Development at Berklee College of Music, Boston. He is the author of several books for music entrepreneurs and teaches music industry courses at Northeastern University (Boston) and the University of Massachusetts (Lowell). A musician since he was ten, Peter continues to spin riddims in the improvisational collective, Friend Planet and sing Cat Stevens' songs to his kids every night before bed. BLOOM WHERE YOU'RE PLANTED! Quote of the Month— Most of you out there are better than us, but you’re too fucking lazy! Written and published bimonthly by Peter Spellman, Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS: Turning Music Business Data into Useful Knowledge. Career-building books, articles, training, consulting and more. P.O. Box 230266, Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123-0266, USA Phone: 888-655-8335 Email: success@mbsolutions.com Web site: http://www.mbsolutions.com © 1997—2006, Peter Spellman, MBS Business Media, www.mbsolutions.com Please feel free to redistribute with above credit and copyright notice.
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