What Frank Ocean’s Bombastic Blond Moment Tells Us About The Future Of Artists And Labels

When Frank Ocean’s latest album ‘Blond’ dropped, it did so like a nuclear bomb, sending shockwaves throughout the music industry. In one of the audacious release strategies of recent years Ocean and his team at 360 fulfilled the final album contractual commitment to Universal Music by ushering his breaking-the-mold visual album ‘Endless’ onto Apple Music.  Featuring collaborations from the likes of Sampha and James Blake and set as a loose soundtrack to art house visuals, ‘Endless’ looked like the sort of digitally native, creative masterstroke that would win plaudits and awards in equal measure. But no sooner had Universal executives started daydreaming about Grammys then along came what turned out to be the ‘actual’ album ‘Blonde’, self released by Ocean (Universal contractual commitments now of course conveniently fulfilled) and, for now at least, exclusively available on Apple Music. You can just imagine seeing the blood drain from (Universal CEO) Lucian Grainge’s face as the full magnitude of what had just happened came into focus. In truth ‘audacious’ doesn’t even come close to explaining what Ocean pulled off, but where it gets really interesting is what this means for the future of artist careers.

Artist-Label Relationships Are Changing

Quickly sensing the potential implications, Grainge swiftly sent out a memo to Universal staff outlawing streaming exclusives…though voices from within Universal suggest that this diktat had been in the works for some time . A cynic might even argue that it was politically useful for Universal to be seen to be taking a strong stand ahead of the impending Vivendi earnings call. As the ever excellent Tim Ingham points out, in practice Universal could put a streaming exclusives moratorium in place and still have a good number of its front line artists put out streaming exclusives. This is because many of the deals these artists have are not traditional label deals where Universal owns all the rights. And that itself is as telling as Ocean’s bombastic blond moment. Not so much that Universal is probably the major with the highest amount of its revenue accounted for by licensed and distributed works, but that any label’s roster is now a complex and diverse mix of deal types. Artists are more empowered than ever before, and thanks to the innovation of label services companies and next generation music companies like Kobalt, labels have been forced to steal the disruptors’ clothing in order to remain competitive.

Streaming Exclusives Represent Another Option For Artists

Just as labels had started to successfully co-opt the label services marketplace by launching their own – e.g. Universal’s Caroline – or by buying up the competition – e.g. Sony’s acquisition of Essential Music & Marketing – along come streaming services giving artists another non-label route to market. In truth, the threat has remained largely unrealised. Exclusives on Tidal have most often proved to be laced with caveats and get out clauses (e.g. Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ arriving on iTunes 24 hours after landing ‘exclusively’ on Tidal). Chance The Rapper’s (in name only) mixtape ‘Colouring Book’ and Ocean’s ‘Blond’ are exceptions rather than the rule. So all that’s about to change now right? Not necessarily…

Album Releases Require More Time Than Apple Probably Has

As anyone who works in a label will tell you, releasing an album is typically a long, carefully planned process with many moving parts. It’s not something you do in a couple of weeks (Ocean started building the hype and expectation for his latest opus a year ago). If, for example, Apple was going to start doing exclusives routinely, even if it just did 20, that’s still a new exclusive to push every 2 weeks. That might work, at a stretch, for music service retailing promotional pushes but is far short of a fully fledged album release cycle. Which means that even for just 20 exclusives Apple would have an intricate mesh of overlapping release campaigns. This is something that labels do with their eyes closed but would it require new organizational disciplines for Apple. Not impossible, but not wholly likely either.

In practice, exclusives are likely to be limited to being the crown jewels of streaming services, their most valuable players, creative playmakers if you like. Even for Netflix, that pioneering exemplar of the streaming originals strategy, only spends 15% of its $3 billion content budget on originals and probably won’t break 20% even by 2020. What Apple and Netflix have in common is that they are using exclusives as a customer acquisition strategy, achieving their aims by making a big noise about each one. But if you’re releasing exclusives every week or two the shine soon wears off. And suddenly the return on investment diminishes.

Streaming Exclusives Are Unlikely To Turn Into A Flood

None of this means that we won’t see more artists striking streaming exclusives. We will, regardless of what labels may actually want to happen. And most of those will probably be on Apple – the service with bottomless pits masquerading as pockets. But the trickle will not turn into a flood, a fast flowing stream perhaps (see what I did there) but not a torrent.

Although they might not realise it yet, Kobalt might find themselves hurting more than the majors from this latest twist in the Exclusives Wars. Kobalt has probably done more than any single other music company to drive change in the traditional music industry in the last 5 years, showing artists and songwriters that there is another way of doing things. But Frank Ocean has just shown that there is now new another option for established artists looking for options at the end of a label deal.

Most importantly of all though, is that streaming exclusives (and indeed label services deals) work best when an artist has already established a brand and an audience. Most often that means after an artist has had a record label recording career. Apple cannot be relied upon to build anything more than a handful of artist brands. One of the founding myths of the web was that it was going to do away with labels and other traditional ‘gatekeepers’. Now, decades later, labels still account for the vast, vast, vast majority of music listening. Make no mistake, a momentous value chain shift is taking place, with more power and autonomy shifting to the creators, but that is a long journey and ‘Blond’ is but one part of this much bigger shift.

Understanding ’15’: How Record Labels And Artists Can Fix Their YouTube Woes

The artist-and-labels-versus-YouTube crisis is going to run and run, even if some form of settlement is actually reached…the divisions and ill feeling run too deep to be fixed solely by a commercial deal. What’s more, a deal with better rates won’t even fix the underlying commercial problems. Music videos under perform on YouTube because they don’t fit YouTube in 2016 in the way they did YouTube in 2010. The 4 minute pop video was a product of the MTV broadcast era and still worked well enough when online video was all about short clips. But the world has moved on, as has short form video (in its new homes Snapchat, Musical.ly and Vine). Short videos are no longer the beating heart of YouTube viewing and quite simply they don’t make the money anymore. This is why music videos represent 30% of YouTube plays but just 12% of YouTube time. If record labels, publishers, performers and songwriters want to make YouTube pay, they need to learn how to play by the new rules. And to do that they need work out what to do with ‘15’.

There Is A Lot More To YouTube Revenue Than Some Would Have You Think

The recorded music industry gets radio, and it is beginning to get streaming. Both are all about plays. Each play has, or should have, an intrinsic value. They are models with some degree of predictability. But YouTube does not work that way, which is why the whole per stream comparison thing just does not add up. In MIDiA’s latest report ‘The State Of The YouTube Music Economy’ we revealed that YouTube’s effective per stream rates (that is rights holder revenue divided by streams) halved from $0.0020 in 2014 to $0.0010 in 2015.

Sounds terrible right? And make no mistake, there is no way to spin it into a good news story. However, it didn’t fall because of some nefarious Google ploy. It fell because of many complex reasons (all of which we explore in the report) but the 2 biggest macro causes were:

• YouTube pays out as a share of ad revenue (55%) not on a per stream basis. So when the value of its ad inventory goes down (due to factors such as more views coming from emerging markets with weaker ad markets) the revenue per stream goes down too. This is something the labels can do little about, though an increased revenue share will soften the blow as YouTube globalizes.
• YouTube serves its in-stream video ads (the most value ad format) on a time-spent basis, not on a per-video basis. Our research found that the average number of video ads per hour of viewing comes out at about 4. That means if you have 15 minute videos (like many YouTubers do) you will get a video ad every play. But if you have 3 or 4 minute pop videos you may only get 1 video ad for every 4 or 5 plays. Which means 4 or 5 times less video ad revenue. In fact, our research revealed that just 26% of music video views have video ads. This is the underlying issue the industry needs to address, and unlike global ad market dynamics, this is something it can indeed fix.

The 15 Scale

This is where the magic number 15 comes in. Right now music video sits in the same 3-4 minute slot it has done so ever since MTV said it wanted videos that length. Yet video consumption is now polarized between the 15 second clip on lip synch apps like Musical.ly and Dubsmash and 15 minute YouTuber clips. Falling in between these two ends is revenue no-mans land. As I have written about before, labels and publishers need to figure out how to harness the 15 second clip as an entirely new creative construct and shake off any old world concepts that this is actually anything about marketing and discovery. It is consumption, plain and simple…it just happens to look unlike anything we’ve seen before.

At the opposite end of the 15 scale labels and artists need to start thinking about what 15 minute formats they can make. Think of this as a blank canvas – the possibilities are limitless. For example:

• 3 track ‘EP’ videos interspersed with artist narrative and reportage coverage
• Live sessions (recorded by, and uploaded by labels so they get revenue as well as publishers)
• Mini-documentaries such as ‘the making of’s
• On-the-road features

15 Minutes Does Not Have To Break The Bank

And before you cry out ‘but this stuff will cost so much more to make’, it doesn’t have to if more is made out of current assets and processes. For example, ensure that one of the support crew has a handheld camera to film some shoulder footage for reportage. The whole thing about YouTube is that it doesn’t have to be super high production quality, in fact the stuff that does best patently isn’t. YouTube videos that work best are those that are an antidote to the old world of inaccessible glamour. If you really want to do things on the cheap, simply splice three music videos together into a single long form video (e.g. tag 2 older tracks onto the new single). Doing so will nearly treble the video ad income.

And before you think this isn’t what audiences want, ask Apple about ‘The 1989 World Tour LIVE’ and Tidal about ‘Lemonade’.

And (yes another ‘and’) if you can’t get your head around the inescapable need for a completely new music video construct, just think about it this way: 15 minute videos will make you 5 times more video ad revenue. This really is a ‘no brainer’.

Back To The Future

As a final piece of evidence (not that it is needed), cast your mind all the way back to 1982, to Michael Jackson’s landmark video ‘Thriller’. A 13:42 video that is widely recognized as one of the all time music video greats that has also racked up 330 million views on Vevo. So you could say the case for 15 minute video was already made a quarter of a century ago (thanks to MIDiA’s Paid Content Analyst Zach Fuller for pointing that one out).

The 4 minute music video is dead, long live the 15 minute music video.

For more detail on our ‘State Of The YouTube Music Economy’ report check out our blog.

You can also buy the 25 page report with 8 page data set here.

How Apple Music And Tidal Transformed Streaming (And Why Apple May Be Buying Tidal)

 

It is 15 months since the launch of Tidal (which was 2 months after Jay-Z’s Project Panther Bidco bought Aspiro) and it is 12 months since the launch of Apple Music (which was a year after Apple bought Beats Music). The streaming world has changed a lot in that time and both those companies have had a disproportionately large amount on influence on the market’s direction of travel. Their arrivals defined Spotify’s role as incumbent while simultaneously casting Apple and Beats as challengers. They have performed their roles of disruptive entrants well, reshaping the competitive marketplace with a strong focus on brand and artist exclusives. Now reports emerge that Apple is in talks to buy Tidal. First victory in the exclusives war or overspending for market share?

When Is An Exclusive And Exclusive?

In the streaming video world an exclusive means exactly that. If you want to watch ‘House Of Cards’ you need Netflix, if you want to watch ‘Man In The High Castle’ you need Amazon Prime. But in music the rules are far more flexible.

Looking at the flagpole exclusives across Apple Music, Tidal and Spotify, most of these are available on other platforms as downloads, while many are available to stream. For example, Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ is only available to stream via Tidal but was available to download on iTunes within 24 hours of release. Understandably, the exclusive albums of each company’s respective godfather are genuinely exclusive. But Rihanna’s ‘Anti’ was given away by Samsung while Spotify’s rock legends exclusives are streaming only.

Apple is beginning to push the envelope though, pitching creative solutions to labels and artists, resulting in output like videos for The Weekend and Drake. At the same time it is beginning to look suspiciously like a record label with the release of Chance The Rapper’s ‘Colouring Book’ mixtape. The net result of all this clamouring to be seen as the ‘home’ of an artist is resounding confusion and frustration for music fans. An avid TV fan may well accept the need to have both a Netflix and Amazon subscription because no video service claims to have all the TV shows and movies on the planet. However, the central proposition of streaming music services is exactly that…or at least it was until Tidal and Apple Music upset the the apple cart (ahem). The irony is that in scoring a quick win against Spotify, Tidal and Apple may have fundamentally undermined the long term positioning of the entire streaming music product.

Exclusives Cannot Recreate The 1990s

Apple Music’s head of original content Larry Jackson has said he wants to make Apple Music to emulate the success of MTV in the 80’s and the 90’s, creating the sense that artists ‘live there’. It is an admirable goal but the music world of the 2010’s is a dramatically different one. In those days there was scarcity (you had to buy music to listen on demand) and there was a finite amount of radio and TV. It was possible to control both the message and the audience. Now we are in the Era of Distributed Audiences where people are simultaneously in multiple digital places, with artists and labels racing after them in all those places. No amount of exclusive windowing is going to change that. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

The Economics Of Exclusives

Where the streaming video and streaming music markets match up is that content budgets are currently being used to drive user acquisition. While streaming services have a long way to go before they reach Netflix’s $6 billion annual content budget, both types of streaming service will overspend to get market share and will reel budgets back in later. So it should be no surprise that the amounts being spent on artists don’t really add up.

For example, Apple is reported to have spent $19 million on Drake and was rumoured to have bid up to $25 million for Harry Styles. If Styles had signed, even if he had racked up the same number of streams as Drake on Spotify in 2015 (1.8 billion, the highest number of any artist) he would still only have generated gross revenue of $18 million and net revenue of revenue of around $14 million, leaving something like an $8 million loss for Apple when Apple Music’s additional retailer margin is factored in. Apple would however have been able to make up the remainder on album sales, but Styles would have needed to have shifted a good number of albums. (Adele’s ‘25’, the biggest selling download album in the US in 2015 drove around $15 million in label revenue.) So for now, it takes selling albums to make the economics of streaming exclusives add up.

Jay-Z paid $56 million for Aspiro’s 512,000 subscribers, $110 per subscriber. Assuming he’d want a similar per subscriber price, that would put Tidal’s price tag at around $440 million. That’s no small amount of money for around 5% of the global subscriber market. Or to put it another way, Apple could another 23 Drake exclusives for that money which most likely would have a bigger impact on subscriber growth. Indeed, on all growth measures Apple Music has outperformed Tidal over the last 12 months, adding 12.5 million new subscribers to Tidal’s 3.1 million, growing by an average of 1.4 million subscribers a month compared to 0.3 million for Tidal. Apple even has the edge in % growth terms (352% compared to 328%).

So why is Apple in the market for Tidal (albeit reportedly)? Probably more than anything it is about taking an irritatingly threatening competitor out of the market. Tidal has been stealing Beat’s core customer base from right under its nose. It’s no coincidence that Apple Music’s exclusives strategy has had a strong urban bias. Apple wants its Beats customers back, just like it wants its iTunes customers back from Spotify.

Even if Apple does buy Tidal, don’t expect the exclusives wars to go away. Indeed, Spotify just acquired its own exclusives supremo in the shape of Troy Carter, and Apple clearly has its mind set on continuing to spend heavily. So the next few years of streaming will be  defined by streaming services getting closer to artists (with Connect becoming much more important for Apple) which in turn will see the distinctions between what constitutes a streaming service and a record label blur all the more.

As science fiction write William Gibson wrote: the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet…

 

The Problem With Streaming Exclusives

Jay-Z’s ambitions for TIDAL has triggered a lot of discussion about how streaming models can evolve.  One focus has been exclusives with a number of references to TIDAL ‘doing a Netflix’ by commissioning exclusives.  Netflix can attribute much of its growth over the last couple of years to its flagship ‘Netflix Originals’ such as ‘House Of Cards’ and ‘Orange Is the New Black’.  It is an appealing model but the Netflix Originals approach cannot so easily be transferred to music.

There are three main types of exclusives:

1.    Service Window: album is released exclusively to a single music service for a fixed period of time e.g. only on TIDAL for 1 month

2.    Tier Window: album is released across one type of music service tier before others e.g. only on paid subscription tiers for 3 months

3.    Service Exclusive: music service acquires exclusive rights to an album so that it will never appear anywhere else unless the service decides to let it

The first two will become increasingly common components of the streaming landscape over the next couple of years.  Daniel Ek and Spotify fought a brave rear guard action against Taylor Swift and Big Machine to ensure the Tier Window model did not carve out a beachhead with ‘1989’ but it is an inevitability.  If free tiers are to have a long term role alongside paid tiers they have to be more clearly differentiated.

TIDAL and Apple look set to become the heavyweight players in the Service Window, duking it out for the biggest releases.  TIDAL will argue it pays out more to rights holders (75% compared to 70%) while Apple will argue that it can directly drive download sales (which is where everyone still makes their real sales revenue).  Apple will have to play that card carefully though as it stands just as much chance of accelerating download cannibalization as it does driving new sales.

When Is A Label A Label?

The really interesting, and potentially most disruptive, exclusive is the Service Exclusive.  This model would start blurring the distinction between what constitutes a music service and what defines a record label.  If, for example, TIDAL was to buy out the rights of the next Beyonce album or sign a deal for the next two Calvin Harris albums TIDAL would effectively become the record label for those releases.

The irony is that this ‘ownership of the masters model’ by streaming services is emerging just as the next generation labels are distancing themselves from it.  A new breed of ‘labels’ such as Kobalt’s AWAL and Cooking Vinyl’s Essential Music are focussing on providing label services without taking ownership of the masters and in turn putting the label and artist relationship on a more equitable agency / client basis.  But there are far more impactful challenges to the Service Exclusive model for music than simply being out of step with where the label model is heading:

• Scarcity: ‘House Of Cards’ is only available on Netflix (and some download to own stores such as iTunes). It is a scarce asset, which is not something that can be said about any piece of recorded music.  As TIDAL found with the near instantaneous Beyonce YouTube leak, music scarcity is ephemeral in the YouTube age.  As long as YouTube is allowed to hide behind its perverse interpretation of ‘Fair Use’ and ‘Safe Harbour’ there will be no music scarcity.  (Of course true scarcity is gone for good, but if that can be made to only mean P2P then the problem is manageable, as it is for TV content).

• Consumer expectations: Consumers have learned to expect their video experiences to be fragmented across different platforms and services, to not find everything in one place.  For music consumers however the understanding is that catalogues are either near-complete or useless.  So if all music services suddenly started having high profile gaps then subscribers would be more likely to unsubscribe entirely than they would be to take up multiple subscriptions.  Ironically the net result could be a return to download sales at the expense of subscriptions.  Talk about going full circle….

• Industry relationships: Netflix started out as a pure licensee, paying TV companies for their shows.  Now it competes with them directly when commissioning new shows.  It has become a frenemy for TV companies and is finding many of its relationships less favourable than before.  And this is in an industry that is built up the frenemy hybrid licensee-licensor model.  The music industry does not behave this way, so any service that took up the Service Exclusive model could reasonably expect itself to find itself developing tense relations with labels.  Which could manifest in those labels giving competitor services preferential treatment for their own exclusives.  Labels have long feared the disintermediation threat posed by the web.  It is unlikely to materialize any time soon but they are not exactly going to encourage retail partners to kick-start the process.

• Appetite for risk: Buying up the rights to the latest release of an established superstar is the easy part, and we already have some precedents though neither were exactly run away successes (Jay-Z’s ‘Magna Carta Holy Grail’ with Samsung and U2’s ‘Songs Of Innocence’ with Apple).  But being a label, at least a good one, isn’t simply about signing proven quantities, it is about taking risks on new emerging talent.  And that doesn’t simply mean having a DIY platform on a streaming service – though that can act as a great talent identification tool.  If streaming services want to start playing at the label game they need to also start nurturing and marketing talent.

• Limited horizons: Stream is still only a small fraction of recorded music revenue.  There are few non-Nordic artists that rely on streaming for the majority of their sales income.  That will change but not for a few years yet.  So a release that only exists on streaming, let along a single streaming service, is only going to deliver on a fraction of its potential.  TIDAL and Apple especially could easily choose to loss-lead and pay over the odds for Service Exclusives to ensure artists aren’t left out of pocket.  But that only fixes part of the problem.  An artist locked into one single streaming service will see his or her brand diminish.  ‘House Of Cards’ may be one of Kevin Spacey’s most assured performances yet only a few tens of millions of people globally have ever seen it.  If it had been on network TV the audience would have been hundreds of millions.  With touring becoming the main way many artists make money the album is the marketing vehicle and if that album is locked behind the pay wall of one single music service the marketing potential is neutered.

Streaming music services will find themselves locked in total war over the coming years and while Apple’s cash reserves will likely make that warfare appear asymmetrical at times, exclusives of some kind or another will be utilised by most of the services.  Just don’t expect them to deliver them Netflix-like success because that’s not going to happen.

Music Industry Predictions and Aspirations for 2014

2013 was a year of digital music milestones: 15 years since the arrival of Napster, 10 years since the launch of the iTunes Store and 5 years since the birth of Spotify.  Which begs the question, what will we looking back at in 5 years as the success stories of the ‘class of 2013’?   There have been some interesting arrivals with promise, such as WholeWorldBand, Soundwave, O2 Tracks, Bloom.fm, Google Play Music All Access (ahem)…. As is the nature of start ups many of the dozens that started in 2013 simply won’t go the distance.  Indeed many of Spotify’s ‘class of ‘08’ have fallen by the wayside: MXP4, MusiqueMax, Beyond Oblivion, Songbird etc.   If the ‘class of ‘13’ want to emulate collective success then it is the ‘class of ‘07’ they should look at: a bumper crop of success stories that included Songkick, Topspin, Deezer, Songza and Soundcloud (though Spiral Frog and Comes With Music were notable flops).

So what can the ‘class of ‘13’ and the rest of the music industry expect in 2014?  Well here are a few of my predictions and aspirations:

• Label services will grow and grow (prediction): following the lead of the likes of Cooking Vinyl and Kobalt every label and his dog appears to be getting in on the act.  Which is no bad thing.  The choice used to be binary: DIY or label.  Now labels are borrowing some of the clothes of DIY and in turn transforming the artist relationship from one of employee to client.  Expect many established frontline artists coming to the end of their label deals in 2014 being persuaded to opt for a label services deal with their label rather than jumping ship.
• Downloads will be flat globally (prediction): the download is still the dominant digital product globally but in the markets where streaming has got a strong foothold it is eating into downloads.  A key reason is that the majority of paid subscribers are also download buyers and their behavior is transitioning.  But in most of the big markets, and in most of the non-Northern European markets, downloads are the mainstay of digital and will grow further in 2014, cancelling out declines in the US and elsewhere.
• Latin America and Africa will both grow in importance (prediction): these are two regions with hugely diverse national economies but both also contain a number of markets that are ripe for digital lift off, particularly in Latin America.  However the standard solutions for the western markets will only have limited success.  Expect innovative newcomers to do well here.
• The streaming debate will NOT resolve (prediction): expect strong continued growth in streaming.  Spotify should hit 10 million paying subscribers soon – the free mobile offering may even push it to 100 million users.  Deezer should clock up another milestone soon too.  And Beats Music could get really serious scale if it does indeed bundle with headphone sales.  But the nature of the debate means the bigger streaming gets the more artists will perceive they are being short changed, because individual artists will feel the impact of scale more slowly than the market.  Expect things to really hot up if Spotify goes public, does well and the majors do not distribute meaningful portions of their earnings to artists.
• Spotify, Deezer and Beats Music have a good year (aspiration): to be clear, this isn’t me breaking with years of tradition and suddenly jettisoning impartiality and objectivity.  Instead the reason for the inclusion is that the future of investment in digital music will be shaped by how well this streaming trio fare.  Between them they accounted for 70% of the music invested in music services between 2011 and 2013.  These big bets may not be leaving a lot of oxygen for other start ups, but if they do not succeed expect digital music service funding to get a whole lot more difficult than it is now.
• Subscription pricing innovation accelerates (aspiration): regular readers will know that I have long advocated experimentation with pricing so that portable subscriptions can break out of the 9.99 niche.  In addition to more being done with cheaply priced subscriptions we need to see the introduction of Pay As You Go subscription pricing in 2014.  Pre-paid is what the mobile industry needed to kick start mobile subscriptions, now is the time for the music industry to follow suit.
• More innovation around multimedia music products (aspiration): one of the most exciting things about Beyonce’s album last week was the fact it put video at its heart.  Since I wrote the Music Product Manifesto in 2009 depressingly little has happened with music product strategy.  Of course not every artist can afford to make an album’s worth of flashy videos, but hey, they don’t need to all be flashy.   Here’s hoping that a few more labels follow Sony’s lead and start really pushing the envelope for what music products should look like in the digital era.  Here’s a clue: it is not a static audio file.

P.S. If you’re wondering why I am so harsh on Google Play Music All Access it is because they can and should do so much better.  The market needs innovation from Google, not a ‘me too’ strategy.  Come on Google, up your game in 2014.

Beyoncé And The Growing Importance Of First Week Sales

Beyoncé’s team will be rightly feeling pretty pleased with themselves right now, having created a massive buzz around her eponymously titled fifth studio album by deliberately creating absolutely no buzz whatsoever prior to its release on Friday 13^th.  By doing something a little different with digital they have managed to get swathes of media coverage, cutting through in a manner that could only be dreamed of with a traditional music marketing campaign.  Showcasing a big digital gimmick is a reasonably well used trick by established artists wanting to cut through, whether that be Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pay what you like experiment or Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’ iTunes exclusive.  There of course many serious permutations of the ‘Beyoncé’ release, both in terms of product strategy (e.g. the integration of video) as well as marketing (turning the traditional album build-up strategy on its head).  But of most significance is what it says about the growing role of first week sales.

Prior to the release of this album Beyoncé’s sales were in sharp decline, from a peak of 4.9 million US sales for ‘Dangerously in Love’ in 2003 to just 1.4 million for ‘4’ in 2011 (see figure).  The total market decline in album sales was clearly a mitigating factor but the rate at which Top 10 US album sales declined over the same period – 50% – was significantly less than the 71% by which her album sales declined.  Beyoncé’s team needed something clever to ensure that the latest album didn’t continue the downward trend.  Doubling down on first week sales was a smart move.  It combined the novelty of the tactic, the creation of a sense of scarcity by being an iTunes exclusive for one week and the ability to mobilize her core fans into buying in a concentrated manner and thus increase the odds of pushing the album to the number one spot on its debut full week.

First week sales have become a crucial marketing tool for big artists, with efforts focused on concentrating sales to build the platform for the rest of the marketing and sales strategies.  First week sales of ‘Beyoncé’ look set to represent 30% of all sales, a considerable rise from the 6% for ‘Dangerously in Love’.  As impressive as ‘Beyoncé’s expected 600,000 first week sales are though, the record for US first week sales was set last year by Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’ with an impressive 1.2 million.  In many respects Taylor Swift’s album sales trajectory is similar to Beyoncé’s even though she is in an earlier stage of her career.  Again the decline in total music sales plays a key role, but over the period Swift managed to ever so slightly buck the trend, declining by 25% instead of 26%. (Though if the high water mark of her second album ‘Fearless’ is used then the decline is 41% compared to a Top 10 rate of 5%.)

What unites Taylor Swift and Beyoncé is the growing importance of first week sales.  Both are suffering declining album sales as a result of broader consumer trends, and both have concentrated ever larger proportions of sales into the first week of release.  Consequently for Beyoncé first week sales volumes have increased by 89% while total sales declined by 71%.  For Swift first week sales have increased by 218% while total sales fell by a quarter.  Other artists have woken up to the importance of the first week sales springboard too, not least Daft Punk who secured first week sales of 339,000 for ‘Random Access Memories’ representing 44% of all US sales to date. By contrast their last album ‘Human After All’ sold just 127,000 in the US.

As music sales continue to dwindle artists’ release teams have to get increasingly creative about how they get the most bang for their marketing buck. Expect the first week sales focus to sharpen even further now for frontline global scale artists.

Are EMI Censoring the Coldplay vs Joe Satriani Debate on YouTube?

You’ll almost certainly know by now that US ‘axe-hero’ Joe Satriani is suing Coldplay for plagiarism.  He claims that Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’ (an EMI recording) stole from his 2004 track ‘If I Could Fly’ (a Sony recording).  This was becoming a PR disaster for Coldplay and a couple of videos on YouTube comparing the two songs were each getting a couple of million views.  In short the controversy was generating a lot of online buzz.  Some commentators were advising that Coldplay should kick their PR machinery into action.

 

Well it looks like that advice has been heeded.  As of today those videos on YouTube comparing the two songs (and other similar ones) have been removed, in their place is the following message

 

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by EMI Music

 

Because YouTube has licensing relationships with the labels it has to be sensitive and responsive to their requests.  It looks like copyright infringement has been used here as a pretext for removing an awkward embarrassment.  Indeed a quick search finds other non-official copies of ‘Viva La Vida’ available for viewing, some (such as this one) with nearly 1 million views i.e. videos that are infringing copyright on the same song but not including reference to the Satriani controversy.  It’s somewhat ironic that copyright infringement has been used as the reason for pulling a video that discusses a copyright infringement controversy.

 

 

But this isn’t the first time the ‘copyright claim’ has been used to cover up YouTube embarrassments.  Back in July 2007  Beyonce Knowles took a dramatic tumble at a gig and mobile phone video footage spread like wild fire on YouTube.  In a desperate bid to airbrush out history SonyBMG got all the offending videos pulled, under the cover of the same ‘copyright violation’ tactic EMI have used here.  Similarly as now, plenty of other bootleg Beyonce live footage, some from the same gig, remained untouched.

 

What I said in my post at the time about Beyonce’s fall applies here also:

 

 

“What I find particularly interesting about this though is the fact that it is YouTube’s close ties with the record labels that has resulted in them filtering out the footage. To much of its audience this will feel like police-state style censorship and the curious will look elsewhere. Perhaps this an early sign that YouTube is becoming too closely aligned with ‘the establishment’ for ‘the kids’?”

 

 

 

And finally, if you want to judge on the Satriani / Coldplay controversy for yourself, here are YouTibe clips of both songs.  For ‘If I Could Fly’ move in 50 seconds and you’ll hear the part in question.

 

 

 

 

Joe Satriani ‘If I Could Fly’

 

Cold Play ‘Viva la Vida’

 

 

What do you think?