The
Battle For Coca-Cola
Rages On.
Ain't
Nothing Like
The Real Thing, Maybe.
I
Don't Mean To Say
I Told You So, But...
Are
Consumers Smarter
Then We Are?.
The
Four Great Myths
Of Global Branding.
Mr
Bevis Butts Heads
At Mitsubishi
The
Best Laid Plans
Of Mice And Men.
Dare
to Be Great:
The Mad Genius of "The Matrix""
Mitsubishi's
New Marketing Boss
Out Of The Frying Pan.
Concept Is Stronger Than Fact.
Value
Perception In A World
Gone Mad With "Cool"
The
Future of Advertising
The Brand
The
Future of Advertising
The Targets
The
Future of Advertising
The Grid
The
Future of Advertising
The Swarm
Technology
Making The Message
Meaningful
The Only Business That Matters Is The One You're In.
What
Ever Happened To The
Big Idea?
The Post-Advertising Era Is Here
Confessions Of A" Liar For Hire"
Good, Bad and Ugly At the Moment of Truth
A Post-Advertising "Big Idea".
The Value Of A Paying Pustomer.
Emergence Of the "Empire of One".
All customers Are Created Equal
Playing God An Other Atrocities
the
City That Spawned
The Age Of Advertising..
Fear And Self Loathing In Advertising.
The Greatest Success Metric Is Sales.
Foot In (Word Of) Mouth Disease
In the Begining, There Was The End.
The Rise And Fall
Of The Creative Class
What's Love Got To Do With It?
Champagne Brand
Beer Marketing Budget
Amtrak: Third World Nation On Wheels. .
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New Music Means New Marketing. Once upon a time there was something called the "music business." This is how it worked. You had some talent. A voice. Fairly good looks (not mandatory) and if you were a guy, you looked good in a purple suit. First thing you did was go out and find yourself a "producer". If you lived in a major music market like New York, Philly, DC, Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland or Los Angeles, a producer was not hard to find. In fact, anybody who could afford a business card and a sharkskin suit was allowed to call himself a "producer." |
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Most of these "producers" claimed to have the mystical power to get the would-be American Idol a "deal." As in "record deal." More often then not, the only "deal" that got made was the deal between a local 8-track recording studio and the producer to separate the would-be singing sensation from their hard-earned cash, or their Mom's life savings. |
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I'm really interested in this "Post Advertising' you keep talking about. Where can I see some of it? - Josh D, Las Vegas. As soon as some client is dumb enough to hire me to do it for them without an NDA, I'll show it to you. – hw |
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For the few thousand or so "artists" who were persistent enough to make it through wave after wave of these grifters in sun shades, the real sharks were waiting. The Record Labels. One Sunday afternoon, my dear friend (RIP) Melvin Franklin, legendary bassman of the mighty Temptations drove me around Beverly Hills and Bel-Air and pointed out the dozen or so mansions that had been built on the record sales and performances of the Temptations over the span of their thirty-some year career. At the time Melvin and his wife Kimberly lived in a two bedroom apartment in a not-too-cool section of Sherman Oaks. Motown founder Berry Gordy, however, is the largest single property owner and the true "Prince of Bel-Air." That was the way it used to go in the music business. That is before the advent of the mp3 algorithm that changed everything forever. Time was, you got your record deal and the guy who signed you said, "Here's the deal kid. Your producer gets 12 points (12% of the 90% the record company claims as income. They take 10% off the top for "breakage.") Of the producer's 12 points, the artist...that's you..gets 3 points. The label gets the rest." So there it was. "The Record Deal" that everybody from Fats Domino to Madonna was willing to sell their soul for. The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, Napster and the mp3/ file sharing/ internet phenomena changed all that in a heartbeat. Those events, and something called SDMI. The Secure Digital Music Initiative. Remember that 88 cents the record companies were pocketing on every dollar they collected? How could they do that and get away with it, you're probably asking right now. Simple. The music business has it's own private branch of that global organization known as "da Mob." Do the names Otis Redding, Richie Valens, or Jackie Wilson ring a bell? For a great many years, the power behind that power was the infamous Morris "Mo" Levy. Back in the mid-50s, "Mo" Levy of the Bronx was also the proprietor of Birdland, New York's fabled jazz shrine. He was also founder of Roulette Records, where he recorded the likes of Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, among others. According to Vanity Fair, "Levy was not just a hipster patron of black music; burly and unburdened by couth, he was also an entrepreneur of high wattage and low scruple. Among other things, Levy had listed himself as writer of many Roulette tunes, most notably Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers' giddy 1956 hit, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" Levy's other key role in music history was as manager of Alan Freed, the seminal rock 'n' roll disc jockey. But when Freed was crucified in a 1960 payola scandal, Levy slipped away into the shadows. It was widely known that Levy owed much of his power to some serious connections within the Sicilian business community, and in particular with New York's Genovese family." Guys like Mo Levy were how the record companies got away with it. So when Napster, Morpheus, and mp3.com started "file sharing" music over the internet for FREE, people got upset. The "natural order of things" had been breached. So the record industry dropped the hammer. The Secure Digital Music Initiative was their hammer. In one fell swoop the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) crushed the idea of portable devices that would allow "their" music to travel. They called all of the consumer electronics manufactures together in one room and laid down the law. MP3 would NOT become the next CD-ROM or DVD. Not until it could be rights managed so they could get their 88 cents on the dollar. That's where the Artist Formerly Known As Prince came in. His record label (Warner Music) was threatening to drop him. He dropped them (and his managers) instead and went directly to the web with his next album. Only the IRS knows how much money he made, but that let the smoke out of the bottle. Public Enemy and Dire Straights quickly followed suit. There was literally a run on the bank. Within two short years the record industry suffered a 19% slide in revenue. Time for the SDMI hammer to start making things happen instead of planting stop signs all over the place. And they did. MP4 was born. And Microsoft saved the day with their CD quality, rights-managed Microsoft Media version of the MP4, the music business version of a "killer app." And right on the heels of Mr. Gates invention...Mr. Jobs invention...The Apple iPod MP4 player was born. Brand new ballgame. But it wasn't until this year that the music biz roared back. And ironically the company whose high-handedness caused Prince to flip them off, now under new ownership, is leading the charge. With none other than the comeback Queen, "Madonna". Who ironically, was "discovered" by Mo Levy protege, Irv Schacter's Prelude Records. Madonna's "Confessions On The Dance Floor" literally reinvented the way the music business will operate in the digital age. The first single from the album, "Hung Up" was released a month before the album as a 20-second telephone ringtone in France. A 90-second streaming audio clip of the single was downloadable for FREE if you pre-ordered the digital album. Then came the digital dance mix of the entire album. The follow-up; a premium-priced bundled album with a digital booklet, bonus track and video. The results. 7 million CDs netting Warner Music $100 million bucks. And Warner Music now has a 23% share of the digital music market worldwide. Warner's is projecting year end revenue of $1.4 billion on digital music alone. That's a full third of their total revenue this year. They are definitely the ones to beat. We raised this topic for conversation at our regular weekly "Square Table In The Red Room." That's the invitational industry gab session we hold in the offices of GASP, our newly formed post advertising agency in Long Beach every Friday after work. Dave Mealer from Genex gave us a lively debate on why he felt the record companies will never fully stamp out so-called illegal downloading. He cited the success of apps like BitTorrent, a free, open source file-sharing application effective for distributing very large software and media files. Teresa Chang, our resident brainiac here at GASP, quickly challenged Dave's assumption, stating that the cost of downloading tunes from iTunes was negligable compared to buying an album. Especially for tweens using daddy's credit card digits. Rich Vollaire from Designory thought all of this was interesting, but challenged us to come up with a way of using these developments to earn ourselves some cash. I concur. And as soon as we do, you will be the first to know. Stay tuned.
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