Dr Jeremy Silver is an entrepreneur, investor and advisor in digital media. He is Chairman of Semetric, a real time analytics company whose main product is Musicmetric, Chairman of MusicGlue, an artist’s digital services company. He advises on creative industries at the UK Technology Strategy Board. He is a Non-Executive Director at the Bridgeman Art Library. He was CEO of Sibelius Software, a music notation software company he led for six years and sold to Avid Technology. During the first internet bubble, Silver was worldwide Vice President of New Media for EMI Music Group in London and then in Los Angeles. He went on to run the playlist-sharing music service, Uplister Inc, in San Francisco, backed by August Capital. Earlier, at the Virgin Music Group, he worked with Genesis, Brian Eno and Massive Attack. He has a PhD in English Literature. His blog sometimes appears at www.mediaclarity.com
Welcome to the first Canadian Music Week Social Music Summit!
Yay!
Music has always been social – especially when it’s been anti-social
Nothing can be more social than when you’re offending people!
Now when we say social we mean
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook LastFM Weibo Baidu
Virtually social at scale
global responses to music are becoming really powerful
and unpredictable
global trended to local
over the last twenty years, IFPI figures show global superstars selling fewer albums
and local repertoire growing as a proportion
now local is starting to trend global again
but online
so I want to talk about what social music means for us as an industry,
I want to talk about A&R and marketing
I want to talk about charts and data
because they are the means by which we understand and try to influence what’s happening socially
but first let’s go back to gut instinct…
In 2005, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink.
in it he explained how in the first ten seconds of meeting someone
we take a view,
the power of our unconscious fine-slicing he called it
was very rapid and very accurate
Intuition we also call it
very accurate –
In the world of music – that used to be called A&R
But Gladwell goes on
we are also all fallible and highly influenceable –
we can be made to make mistakes, to change our minds
and we get things wrong because of unnoticed outside factors
and when companies try to do that to us – it’s called marketing
Fan behaviour online is volatile, herd-like and suddenly decisive
We’re in a period which really highlights the old tensions between A&R and marketing
there are some key choices for labels and artists today
signing an act and building a career (remember that?) vs X Factor manufacturing vs banking a
heritage brand vs riding on the coat tails of Psy, Baauer internet effects
It’s more complex than ever
The A&R sensibility is still a powerful instinct
Fans are moved by music created with love and passion and authenticity
Read Oliver Sachs – Musicophilia
music takes us by surprise, shakes our emotions, arouses us and stimulates our passions
Totally different from anything else we know and love – even soccer
Online social media driven music has the air of being very democratic
Very much less easy to control
But companies and artists are not entirely powerless to determine a hit –
all sorts of new tools are emerging to try and help make bands stars and tracks hits
and there all sorts of interesting people
to tell you how their solutions will make your artist a hit!
But let’s take a step back and consider where we’ve got to…
This is a moment of transition
Light at the end of the tunnel
IFPI: 2012 overall recorded music sales grew
At just 0.3% (not much to shout about – the margin for error in the data is probably 0.5%)
But Digital sales grew at 9%
But actually, we’re in another kind of transition
a slower – less well developed – less talked about one
Its’ From old school command and control marketing
to more holistic, engaged, conversational marketing
Old school command and control
Create a story to tell
buy a high chart position
convince radio and retail that you were getting behind an act
bought radio airplay
bought encaps and windows at retail
Kablamo!
A mixture of charm, instinct and ruthless spending,
spend $100k on creating a chart
spend $200k on rigging it
welcome to the old world
Labels obsessed with market share
Today they need to be obsessed with fan share
Accurate, real-time data is now key
Global markets are ricocheting with surprising, fun, unexpected shock waves
Knowing, sophisticated take-up by fans
Cleverness of the Harlem Shake meme
– not just the lead dancer, but in the big crowds – the guy on the bike who rides by at the front
Its not just about the number one single or the radio hit anymore
Complexity of success
for individual bands and songs
wildly different sources of revenue
Understand artists who are taking off live,
thriving off their videos,
earning good money from sync
driving massive but passive fan consumption
or creating really interactive, engaged fan actions
we have urgent need to understand the market in the round
both because success can arrive in so many different forms,
but also because the routes to market and the ways to promote have become so varied too
It’s a disintermediated world
Everyone can reach fans direct
By choosing to be a broadcaster, publisher, retailer, promoter
Everyone can perform everyone else’s functions,
But which to choose for your project?
and whether to partner, build or buy
more complex questions
Powerful solutions emerging,
What’s key is
Help super-empower instinct with the data of global fan engagement
in real time
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook LastFM Weibo Baidu
influence massive tsunamis of human passion on a global scale
in ever shorter timescales of volatility
We can see those waves coming if we know where to look
We’re learning how to stimulate the waves
learning how to connect fans all over the world.
driving real dynamic fan interaction – this is the stuff that hits are made of.
21st C Music exec still pays attention to the twitching of his or her thumbs
but she’ll read all the data and act on it decisively too
to make global hits happen faster and longer than ever before.
So in this context – here’s a question
what’s a chart for?
Today’s challenge
sure we want to keep charts accurate and ethical
but what do we need charts for?
and which charts do we need?
do we really know which data points are significant for which artists
Billboard adding YouTube streams is great
But what about Tweets, what about bit torrent downloads, what about SoundCloud adds?
Spotify is currently boasting 20 million users but only 5 million paying subscribers in just 17 countries
How to compare their music influence against
886,950,041 downloaders of bit torrent files in 239 countries
identified by MusicMetric?
These interesting differences have always existed
The UK Official Chart Company chart is sales only – religiously
The Billboard charts has always been sales, plus airplay and now plus youtube streams…
Last week at an event in Austin, Texas
Musicmetric ran a real-time tweet share tracker – refreshed every 2 seconds
It identified Tweet-share of all the artists performing at the event
as the bands hit the stage – their share tended to go up
But Justin Timberlake has such huge share
that most of the time he sat on the top –
only being dislodged by vibrant spikes in bands going live
was it being gamed?
Of course it was
A gamified chart engaged the fans directly in trying to knock Justin off the top spot
It wasn’t less accurate for that
but it was more fun!
My friend and competitor, Alex White came out last week waving a big moral stick
threatening to name and shame
artists and labels who he accused of rigging the charts
I agree that’s to be discouraged
But his comments highlighted a difference in attitude
that marks the marketing transition
One attitude is – create a story for me to tell I don’t care how you do it
The other is – I want to have a conversation with my fans to make them know I care
I’m not sure Alex was really asking the right questions
So I’ll finish with a couple of final questions for you:
Are the charts something as a global industry we should now work on together?
Do we need some kind of collective body that supervises the veracity of data
and keeps a regular global check on which data points are important?
So that no matter what choice of tools you make to check your data (I of course recommend MusicMetric)
you know that they’re speaking a common language and that maybe they’re even not rigged?
(I don’t think this is a good use of our time)
Or should we focus in the market?
Where music fans interact with each other,
recommend marketing strategies to each other,
and engage direct with artists who excite and amuse them?
Social music – or anti-social music –
It’s time for the change in music marketing
command and control is over
Our marketing needs to be about conversations between fans and artists
We need to know where our fans are, encourage the conversations and stop trying to tell fans what to
think!