After reading Andrew McMillen’s thoughts on the free track baiting game, I figured I’d throw something in to the mix. I do a class that is heavily focused on this sort of thing. The lecturer is a(n apparently) fairly popular recording artist who got in to music after he finished his marketing degree. He teaches at Griffith, SAE as well as various other music institutions and initiatives. His big crush is the internet and how it is changing “the game”. I love this class. It combines some of my favourite things: the internet, demographic profiling and music. Talk about tickling my fancy.

The first class we had he busted out some good news: music is losing its value. This is no big shock to anyone who has downloaded even one album. Not only is it free to download songs, it is more convenient! You never have to GO anywhere to make the purchase, you do not need shelves and racks for storage and you do not deal with issues of portability because it all fits on a hard drive or in an iPod. Advances in technology have changed “the industry”. The theories on where its going give me more than a girl boner, but that is MOSTLY for another post.

Two basic and relevant premises:
The model for purchase is moving from unit sales towards more subscription-based services.
Music is the final product, but it is no longer what is being sold.

Instead of paying $30 for twelve songs, four of which you probably don’t like, two of which you’re on pretty good terms with but wouldn’t necessarily want to cry to and six of which you totally dig but had already heard, people want the sprawling availability of music to be organised and categorised for them. They want to pay $10 a fortnight to have immediate access to thousands of newly released songs that they can stream at the touch of a button. They will pay an extra $2 if songs can be recommended based on peer review AND their own track history. Premium users will pay $30 if, attached to that streaming music, they can have the digital equivalent of liner/production notes. Want to know who produced the song? Okay. With another touch of your iPhone screen you can read their biography whilst simultaneously listening to a random playlist of their most recent and celebrated work.

The product in its most traditional sense is STILL the music, as that is what people are getting at the end of the exchange and it is what they want. But in world 2.0, the value of that product is found in the immediacy of the access, rather than the access or ownership itself.

Of course we’re still straddling the line between tradition and revolution (forever and ever, amen), but the gains in technology will ensure this doesn’t last long. Once shortfalls like laggy streaming and format incompatibility across devices are addressed, this sort of thing will take off.

So the marketing strategy McMillen cites as being useful is a good tactic*, but I expect we’ll see a lot more of it as people begin to understand just how “worthless” their recordings are. And I expect its effectiveness will be diluted proportionately.

As for his question: “How do you capture the attention of a user who rarely voluntarily visits band websites?”

I think you let them forget the website exists. Have a completely different ploy for that section of your victim pool. Conversion is risky.

Engage with people on their terms.

(Obviously the Cold War Kids had indication that people visited their site.)

Visibility facilitates attention. Intimacy captures it. And interaction seduces its host.

(I personally prefer MySpace pages to websites, and I [like Andrew] will turn to a Wikipedia entry for information rather than hit up a .com. Why is this? Who knows – perhaps the minute sense of isolation from the subject makes engaging with the information less threatening. On band websites you are often bombarded with blatant plays for your loyalty, the lay outs are more likely than not going to be over the top or unforgivably bland, and so on. There is some regulation on those things inherent to sites like MySpace and Wikipedia though.)

Of course, the Cold War Kids’ marketing dudes weren’t giving you that music for free. They are mining the statistics of everyone who accesses that track. Your location (for distributions/psychographics), your browser type and connection speed (for website functionality), how much time you spend on the site after the download (website appeal), the URL you were referred from (media consumption/promotions efficiency), and your return rate are IMMEDIATELY devoured by their statistics machine. So maybe this example doesn’t fit in to my predictions perfectly. But I felt like talking about them.

I personally long for a utopian day when music and its promotion becomes totally transparent, and the catch cry of the marketing team and its SUPERIOR PR consultants is: People, not publics.

Shit, I might make that my catch cry. It can be my first book on the subject.

*It sickened me that I almost changed my use of strategy/tactic as per the PR/Marketing definitions.