Notesale: Turn your study into money

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St Edmund Hall
What are the implications for marketers of the ways in which the structure of
the music industry has evolved?
The 1996 Dictionary of Marketing states that marketing is ‘the process of identifying
needs and satisfying these needs with goods or services, through product design,
distribution and promotion’
...
The huge rise of social media that has
occurred over the last decade and the shift in power away from marketers towards
consumers poses new challenges to marketing, and I think this should be harnessed
both in what is made available to consumers, and a movement towards co-creation
and relationship building rather than going for the ‘hard sell’
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The earliest
music (around 36,000 years ago) was seen to be a communication medium and a
means of individual expression, and in some ways this has not changed over time –
unlike the needs fulfilled by more tangible goods like a bed or a desk, the expressive
and emotional needs met by music make promotional methods less clear, and this is
something that marketers have appeared to learn over the development of the music
industry
...
The sales-orientated marketing which developed began to take account of
what consumers actually wanted before developing products and services, and as
music sales totaled $28
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Essentially, the growing accessibility of music results in a greater opportunity to make
money, but equally consumers gain a rising proportion of power against marketers,
and the necessity of understanding consumer needs has increasingly taken centre
stage
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The internet has made void almost
all conventional business models related to music
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St Edmund Hall
In order to understand how to match consumer needs through music in this new world
it becomes necessary to understand how the internet itself meets consumer needs, and
why we increasingly engage in social media in all aspects of our lives
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The first
major milestone in combining social media and the music industry was MySpace,
which originally developed into an open networking environment for independent
artists and their fans – it was a place where experiencing free music was actively
encouraged, allowing for the discovery of new and unknown artists, where marketers
where somewhat bypassed and self-advertisement became key
...
Its faults however, in terms of meeting the
above consumer motivations, lay in the lack of interaction between members – the
idea of communities was not fully formed – and for marketers, the reach was narrow,
the majority of the user base consisted of consumers already passionate towards
music
...
Social interaction lies at its very core, and as its capabilities grew there
was a movement of music away from MySpace to the artist and event pages found all
over the Facebook site
...

Other sites such as Spotify which have taken the music market by storm rely on
Facebook’s user profiles to set up accounts, share links and mine data, and this web of
social media has resulted in the changed face of music promotion
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It is the combination of these
networkers with the everyday consumer in possession of ‘information based power’
and ‘demand based power’ that lead to the ultimate tool for marketers – ‘crowd based
power’ which if captured and steered can result in huge success, as seen in acts like
Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black whose YouTube videos went viral and ended in top
ten hits
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Traditional brick and mortar music stores stocking only those songs that would sell
well to a local market created the impression of success being made through
mainstream tastes, whereas the removal of manufacturing costs and distribution fees
has taken away popularity’s monopoly on profitability
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The reason for this counter-intuitive phenomenon is a combination of

St Edmund Hall
the aforementioned supply-side factors such as reduced cost of stocking additional
products, and demand-side factors such as active search tools which aid the discovery
of new products, usually using revealed preferences from previous purchases or page
views – data which is now readily publicly available on social networking sites
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Hence marketers are not only facing a new platform to promote music on, but are
having to get to grips with the huge diversity now found in music taste due to the rise
of the long tail
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Marketers must be aware of the better educated, more sophisticated customers they
are now dealing with, and the sales-orientated promotion of mainstream music just
might not cut it anymore
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Today’s marketing in the music industry and, for that matter, in many
other industries, relies on forming and maintaining relationships which meet
emotional needs, and social media is the way to do so to reach a worldwide audience,
where really, there is a market for everything
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For one,
is it really profitable to make money out of the long tail? Does it not simply atomise
spending? Amazon, who offer hundreds of thousands of products to customers
worldwide and almost epitomize the long tail, has been known to make only
microprofits, and sometimes even losses
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Equally there are debates about the negative effects of social media, such as the
dehumanizing nature of ‘reductionism’ (Lanier 2010), where online social
interactions reduce people to fragments of information and the range of selfexpression is continually narrowed
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In conclusion, I believe the evolution of the structure of the music industry from being
controlled by the Church back in the 7th century to being run by powerful consumers
in 2014 has had major implications for marketers
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All we can be sure of is continuous change, and my
suggestion to marketers in the music industry today is to keep discovering word of
mouth patterns, provide feedback loops and constantly develop marketing strategy,
and in staying on top of the wave maybe the next Napster won’t rock the music
industry ship quite so much
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, (2006), The long tail: how endless choice is creating unlimited
demand, Random House
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et al (Summer 2006) ‘From niches to riches: anatomy of the
long tail’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 47 (4); pp
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Labrecque, L
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et al
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Ogden, J
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, et al
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120-125
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, et al
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