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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