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Tantillo’s Branding Bite: An Industry in Trouble!
People are always asking me: when’s a good time for a Brandover!
There are a lot of good times for a Brandover –but one time that absolutely demands it is when your business model is broken! Take the music industry. I remember back in the early eighties when I was teaching marketing and I was alerting my students to the CD revolution and how they would soon be replacing vinyl. One of my students told me that this would never happen because CDs were simply too costly to make. He might have been right, but ultimately that technology was unstoppable and things changed!
Now, the music industry faces an even bigger change and it’s obvious that things will never be the same again –the days of the Platinum selling album setting up a musician for life are over. The Internet’s killed music selling … though, speaking from history and looking at Itunes, we might just be heading back to the days of the pop single!!!
Truth is, it isn’t clear how even the top talent is going to make it work going forward … but one thing is clear: a musician’s brand is going to be more important than ever. And this brand is probably going to have to do a lot more interacting with its public and constantly learning from it and adapting to it! Merchandising and touring are probably going to be the main way that musicians earn money in the future!
Funny thing is a lot of the problem seems to have come from the music industry itself –an industry that seemed to know a lot about creating brands but spent the last ten years not listening to their customers! Step #1 for them will be to listen to their customers and hope that they can salvage their business (I doubt it). Step #1 for the musicians is to think brand, realize that they’re on their own now and start getting this brand directly out to their fans!
Two musical acts that have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to brand, Madonna and Radiohead, are already doing this in a big way! Madonna’s left her record label and Radiohead had their fans set the price for the music. Given how much record labels and retailers used to take off the top, in the end they probably didn’t do too badly and they showed that for them their fans come first!
And, remember, it’s always easier when you keep branding in mind!
Here are some links that talk about the music industry’s plight and how they got there and might have avoided it –Wow, it shows how a business can change really fast!
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/whats-the-future-of-the-music-industry-a-freakonomics-quorum/
http://mashable.com/2007/11/05/radiohead-music-industry-machine/
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iGQrGApdB8feBUP7vU7tNFi_Y_eA
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9026/Radiohead+Shocks+Record+Industry+With+Free+Download+of+New+Album
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article2602597.ece
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20057685_20057687_20153007,00.html
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