The Artist Marketing Playbook Needs Rewriting

The whole essence of fandom is being turned upside down. An emerging crop of streaming-native artists is finding its audience in a much more targeted and efficient way than via the traditional music marketing. Instead of blowing a huge budget on carpet bombing TV, radio, print, online artists and their teams are finding their exact audiences, focusing on relevance and engagement rather than reach and scale.

The traditional model is great at creating household brands but so much of that brand impact is wasted on the households or household members that are not interested in the artist. Niche is the new mainstream. Targeted trumps reach. But too many label marketers fear that unless they use the mass media platforms, they will not be able to build national and global scale brands. They might be right, at least in part, but this is how the future will look and new marketing disciplines and objectives are required. Here’s some brand new data to show why.

Since Q4 2016 MIDiA has been tracking leading TV shows every quarter for awareness, fandom, viewing and streaming. Since the start of 2019 we have been doing the same for artists, with viewing swapped out for listening. These metrics provide a rounded picture of an artist’s full brand impact and consumption, while the ratios between these metrics give a unique view of just how individual artists are performing and of the impact of their respective marketing strategies. Later in the year we will be feeding this data into Index for Music,a unique new dashboard tool to combine with data from social platforms, streaming, searches, reviews and other metrics that create an end-to-end view of artist impact. We have already built our Index for Video tool which you can find out more about here.

In the above chart, using the consumer data component of Index, we have taken a contiguous sample of the five artists that represent the mid-point of each third of the rankings (i.e. top, middle and bottom) for two of these ratios:

• Fandom-to-streaming, which we call Streaming Conversion
• Awareness-to-fandom, which we call Brand Conversion

The results show some very clear artist clusters with clear implications for artist success and marketing strategy (remember, these are ratios not rankings of how well streamed or popular they are):

Streaming Conversion

• Rising streaming stars: These artists have twice as many people streaming them as they do fans. These artists are largely younger, frontline artists that are building their careers first and foremost on streaming platforms. These are artists that have not yet built their fanbases but are being pushed hard by their labels on streaming and elsewhere. Their listening is being driven by promotional activity. Pusha-T is the exception, a much longer established artist.
• Established artists: These artists are largely well-established artists whose streaming audience penetration correlates with their fanbases. Their listening is largely organic. Dua Lipa is the exception, still relatively early in her career but already with an established fanbase driving organic streaming.
• Low-streamed superstars: These are artists that built their careers in the pre-streaming era and while are household names, have streaming audiences smaller than their fanbases, not having managed to migrate large shares of their audiences to streaming

 

Brand Conversion

• Heritage superstars: The majority of people who know these big heritage acts like them. In some ways brand conversion is an easier task for such artists than frontline artists. As they have been around so long, it tends to be the very bests of their catalogue that people know. The fact Queen outranks the Beatles is testament to the way in which the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody has created new relevance for the band.
• Big brand artists:This eclectic mix of artists are – Julia Michaels excepted – well established artists that have benefited from years of label marketing support, with about half of all people that know them liking them.
• Over-extended brands: One of the most important changes wrought by streaming and social is that fanbases no longer need to be built via mass media. However, big artists, especially major label ones, still rely upon mass media to become global stars. The result is a lot of wasted marketing budget. In this group, which is dominated by Hip Hop artists, more than half of the people who have been made aware of the artists do not like them. The marketing dollars spent on reaching those people has not converted.

We will be diving much deeper into this data in a forthcoming MIDiA client report and also at our next free-to-attend (depose required) event in central London: Managing Fandom in a Fragmented Content Landscape. Join us at the event to get a sneak peak of MIDiA’s artist data and our Index tool. All attendees will get a free copy of the presentation. In addition to the data key note there is a panel featuring people from Kobalt, TikTok, ATC and more to be confirmed. Sign up now, only limited places remain!

See you there!

Do Not Assume We Have Arrived At Our Destination

Forbes has released its annual Celebrity 100, its list of the top earning media stars. The healthy share of music artists hints at the continued ability to build highly successful music careers. The presence of younger, streaming era artists like Drake and the Weeknd goes further, hinting at how streaming can now be the foundation for superstar commercial success. However, although the superstars are clearly making very good money from streaming in its own right, the dominant school of thought is that streaming is a conduit for success, helping drive artists’ other income streams, live in particular. The ‘don’t worry about sales, make your money from touring’ argument is an old one, but it is as riddled with risk now as when it first surfaced, perhaps more so.

Here are 2 key quotes from Forbes that encapsulate the way in which many artists are now viewing streaming:

“We live in a world where artists don’t really make the money off the music like we did in the Golden Age…It’s not really coming in until you hit the stage.” The Weeknd

“The reason the Weeknds of the world and the Drakes of the world are exploding is a combination of a global audience that’s consuming them freely at a young age [and that] they just keep dropping music…They’re delivering an ongoing, engaged dialogue with their fan base.” Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino

Both quotes imply that live is the place you’re going to make your money. They also argue that streaming can be used intelligently to engage fans because it is not constrained by old world limits such as shelf space and physical distribution considerations. In the old model, artists could go years between album releases, leaving fans hanging, while touring would often be a loss-leading effort to help sell the album. The roles are now reversed.

The rise of live music revenue in 2000s mirrored the decline of recorded music, replacing each lost dollar and adding another one on top. In 2000, recorded music represented 53% of the global music industry, that share is now just 38% while live went from 33% to 43%, though recorded music revenue is now growing again, winning back market share. On this basis, the ‘stream to gig’ argument makes a lot of sense. But things are never as simple as they first appear: 

• Not all live music revenue is created equally: On average, around just 29% of live music revenue makes it back to the artist (after agents, costs etc are factored in) while many artists don’t make any money on live until they’ve reached a certain level of scale. And that’s before considering that the top 1% of live artists (many of whom are aging heritage acts) account for 68% of all live revenue.
• Streaming has fewer middlemen: With streaming there can be relatively few middlemen (e.g. just TuneCore and the streaming service, though in practice many labels use 3^rd party distributors etc). Meanwhile in live there is a multitude of middlemen, many of whom are highly protective of their roles. In streaming, artists have a wealth of data and insights such as Spotify’s artist dashboard and Pandora’s Artist Marketing Programme (AMP). All of which means that artists have to share revenue with more parties in live and they also have less transparency than they do with streaming.
• Resselling is causing friction: All of this is without even considering the corrosive impact on live of ticket resellers such as ViaGoGo and GetMeIn. These business models are incredibly smart from a VC perspective, meeting huge market demand for a comparatively scarce product. But that doesn’t make them good for fans, the live business nor for artists. Most often, though not always, artists do not see a penny of resell revenue. It is money that is taken from music fans and sucked straight out of the industry. Artists lose out, fans lose out. Ticketing companies gain. All that hard work invested in building fan relationships goes out of the window.

The Tide Is Turning

More than all this though, the tide is turning. The 2016 results of Live Nation (parent company of Ticketmaster and one of the largest live companies) point to an industry that, while it is still growing, has cracks appearing. Revenue grew by 15% from $7.3bn to $8.6bn (more than the entire GDP of Haiti) but increased ticket prices drove much of the growth. Ticket prices were up 5% overall and by 10% in stadiums and other big venues. Revenue growth was also driven by in-venue merch spending (up 9%) and sponsorship and advertising (up 13%). Live Nation’s number of ‘fans’ was up 4% in the US but was flat internationally. To be clear, these are strong results for Live Nation but they also reflect a highly mature industry that is squeezing out every last drop of growth through price increases and additional revenue streams. And it is nothing new: Pollstar reports that average ticket prices increased by 22% between 2006 and 2015. Total live revenues grew by 37% over the same period which means that nearly half of all live revenue growth came from ticket price inflation.

Streaming Is Today, Not Tomorrow, Start Treating It That Way

All this comes with streaming revenue growing by $2.5m in 2016 (in retail terms) and overall recorded revenues growing by nearly a billion. The live music business has strong growth left in it, but that revenue is not evenly distributed, will likely slow in the near-ish future and has an underlying core spending trend that is largely flat. Streaming, on the other hand, is booming and will break the $10bn mark this year.

So why are superstar artists still looking to live to pay the bills. Firstly, it’s easier to make really good live money if you’re a superstar, and secondly, streaming still isn’t big enough yet for really strong streaming revenue. The Weekend’s 5.5bn cumulative streams (including YouTube) will have generated the artist around $4 million while if he’d instead sold 5 million copies of Starboy he’d have netted around $10 million.

Streaming simply needs more monetized users in the pot, especially paid subscribers. That will come but rather than just wait, more needs to be done now to help artists get more income from streaming, such as:

• Better rates for artists (many only earn 15% of the label share, which is around 70% of the $0.008 blended rate for freemium services)
• More ways for artists to monetize on streaming services (e.g. artist subscriptions, pay per view live streams and gigs)
• More artist-centric experiences

Add together all the pieces and you start to create an environment in which artists can see a more immediate direct return from streaming. That is how we get to stop artists simply viewing streaming services as a way to market their wares. It is great that streaming can play that marketing role but sooner or later, labels and artists need to focus more on streaming being the destination not just the journey. With so much market momentum, it is tempting to think of streaming as ‘mission accomplished’. In reality we’re just getting going. To move streaming to that next stage, much more work needs to be done and the time to do that is now, not when the market starts to mature (which will happen some time in 2019). It is not in the interest of streaming services to simply be seen as a tool for getting more bums on seats. Nor is it in the interest of labels as they only participate in a small share of live revenue. Is streaming going to become a bigger revenue stream than live for big artists? No, but it can be a much bigger source than it is right now, but only if the model evolves. If streaming cannot break out from its beachhead of being the discovery journey then it will never reach its destination.

 

User Centric Licensing: Making Streaming Work For Everyone

Artist income is one of the most pronounced growing pains of the streaming era.  While there are many contributory factors, such as transparency and non-distributable label payments, the most significant element by far is how much artists get paid.  There are many moving parts to the equation, not least of which is how much labels themselves choose to pay artists, but even if labels doubled their payments to artists (which would be a good starting point for artists on 15% deals) the underlying dynamic would remain unchanged.  Namely that consumers are switching from buying music (which generates large upfront payments) to accessing it (which generates smaller payments spread over a longer period that as things stand look like they could still add up to smaller amounts even in the longer run).  If you’re a big super star artist or a major label this doesn’t affect you much as you get such a large chunk of the headline revenue.  But a new approach is needed for the rest.  Enter stage left the case for user centric licensing.

Under the current licensing model artists get paid on an ‘airplay’ basis i.e. what share of the total plays across the entire service the artist accounts for.  This model can skew the revenue balance to the superstars who will get played by a very large share of the user base of a service.  Under a user centric model an artist would get paid based on the share of an individual’s listening.  So if a user spends half their time listening to an underground techno producer, half of the royalties go to that producer.  In the existing model that producer would only get a tiny fraction of the royalties generated by that user.

Let’s take a look at how this could work (see figure).  If a subscriber listens to Artist B 55% of the time but that artist only accounts for 0.5% of total listening, only 0.5% of the available royalties for that subscriber make it back to the artist.  Whereas Artist A who the user didn’t listen to at all gets 10% of the royalty income.  But in a user centric licensing model the artist would get 55%.  The revenue changes from a paltry $0.004 to a more meaningful $0.49 (assuming a 15% royalty share from the label).  And Artist A gets a fairer zero income for zero listening from that user.

Make no mistake, this model will be very difficult to license and the vested interests would likely resist it.  But until we get to scale with subscriptions, we need to explore all ways of ensuring revenues are distributed on as equitable a basis as possible.  This approach won’t fix all the artist-income ills of streaming but it will help smooth the transition.

I’m not going to pretend to take credit for this concept, it’s been quietly gaining momentum for some time now and the Trichordist has been building the case too.  But now is the time to really start giving this approach some serious consideration.  And if the incumbent streaming services are unable to implement user centric licensing because they are too close to the superpowers, then this is an opportunity for a new streaming service to seize the initiative and start to make some meaningful change.

I’m attaching the excel of this model so please go and stress test it yourself. Let me know your thoughts below.

MIDiA Research – User Centric Licensing Model

The Death of the Long Tail

Today MIDiA Consulting is proud to announce the publication of an important new report: The Death of the Long Tail: The Superstar Music Economy.  The report is available free of charge to Music Industry Blog subscribers.  (If you are not yet a subscriber to this blog simply enter your email address in the box on the right hand column of the home page.)

The 21^st century decline in recorded music revenues continues to send shockwaves throughout the music industry and although there are encouraging signs of digital-driven growth, the impact on artists is less straightforward.  Total global artist income from recorded music in 2013 was $2.8 billion, down from $3.8 billion in 2000 but up slightly on 2012.  Meanwhile artists’ share of total income grew from 14% in 2000 to 17% in 2013.  But the story is far from uniform across the artist community.

The Superstar Artist Economy

The music industry is a Superstar economy, that is to say a very small share of the total artists and works account for a disproportionately large share of all revenues.  This is not a Pareto’s Law type 80/20 distribution but something much more dramatic: the top 1% account for 77% of all artist recorded music income (see figure).

The concept of the long tail seemed like a useful way of understanding how consumers interact with content in digital contexts, and for a while looked like the roadmap for an exciting era of digital content.  Intuitively the democratization of access to music – both on the supply and demand sides – coupled with vastness of digital music catalogues should have translated into a dilution of the Superstar economy effect.  Instead the marketplace has shown us that humans are just as much wandering sheep in need of herding online as they are offline.

In fact digital music services have actually intensified the Superstar concentration, not lessened it (see figure).  The top 1% account for 75% of CD revenues but 79% of subscription revenue.  This counter intuitive trend is driven by two key factors: a) smaller amount of ‘front end’ display for digital services – especially on mobile devices – and b) by consumers being overwhelmed by a Tyranny of Choice in which excessive choice actual hinders discovery.

Ultimately it is the relatively niche group of engaged music aficionados that have most interest in discovering as diverse a range of music as possible.  Most mainstream consumers want leading by the hand to the very top slither of music catalogue.  This is why radio has held its own for so long and why curated and programmed music services are so important for engaging the masses with digital.

Music has always been a Superstar economy and there will always be winners and losers in music sales, with the big winners winning really big.  Over time the improved discovery and programming in digital music services should push the needle for the remainder artist tier but a) it will not happen over night and b) it will still have a finite amount of impact.

The Catalogue Size Arms Race

Matters are worsened by the music services’ catalogue arms race which has become entirely detrimental to consumers’ digital music experiences.  Action needs taking urgently to make sense of 25 million songs, not just through discovery and editorial, but also by taking the brave decision to keep certain types of content, such as sound-alikes, outside of music services’ main functionality.

Until labels, distributors and artists come to together to fix the issue of digital catalogue pollution – sound alikes and karaoke especially – the Tyranny of Choice will reign supreme, hiding 99% of artists under a pervasive shroud of obscurity and giving the Superstars another free lap of the track.