Music Marketing

Music Industry Lessons From Marketing Guru Seth Godin

Sethgodin
Best selling author and marketing guru Seth Godin set his sights on the music industry recently and created a must read manifesto for Music 2.0 that both buries the past (DRM) and points the way forward with permission marketing interactivity and building community. Some highlights:

"Copy protection in a digital age is a pipe dream"

"Permission is an asset to be earned. The ability (not the right, but the privilege) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. For ten years, the music business has been steadfastly avoiding this opportunity…(But) many musicians have understood that all they need to make a (very good) living is to have 10,000 fans. 10,000 people who look forward to the next record, who are willing to trek out to the next concert. Add 7 fans a day and you’re done in 5 years. Set for life…"

"The best time to change your business model is while you still have momentum." 

Bobdylan
"Remember the Bob Dylan rule: it’s not just a record, it’s a movement…
Bob and his handlers have a long track record of finding movements. Anti-war movements, sure, but also rock movies, the Grateful Dead, SACDs, Christian rock and Apple fanboys. What Bob has done…is seek out groups that want to be connected and he works to become the connecting the point."

"Don’t panic when the new business model isn’t as ‘clean’ as the old one."

"The biggest opportunity for the music business is to combine permission with subscription. The possibilities are endless…"

  • WHAT DO YOU THINK OF GODIN’S MANIFESTO?  Right on or simplistic pipe dream?
  • VOTE IN OUR GODIN POLL (AT TOP OF OUR MIDDLE COLUMN)
  • TOMORROW: My reaction, your comments and reaction from around the web.
  • READ Godin’s full article here.

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4 Comments

  1. Seth Godin is one of the reasons we scrapped our first licensed music product and waited a year to build a “Purple Cow” (something worth talking about in GodinSpeak).
    We also dug his manifesto and used it as a challenge and launching pad for 2008… As we mention in our post on the topic, another great book to inspire and challenge all of us in the music industry is Jim Collins’ Good To Great.

  2. The misplaced idea that copyrights are now part of the public domain is pure nonsense. Inevitably the abusers will become the abused; it is only a matter of time before the ISPs start policing the traffic passing through their information pipelines.
    The day of wine and roses, petty theft and grand larceny will shortly be a thing of the past. Has the established record business handled change well? Clearly not. Can it make back what it has lost? Doubtful. Music publishers and collectives will, however, become the new power brokers.
    As for micro-marketing, it works to some degree, but like any small business, there’s a growth curve followed by a decline unless one is smart enough to understand that audiences/customers are fickle and one needsto expand one’s horizon(s).

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