Music Ally

Simple answer: the fan. Job done.

Except no, that’s a bit facetious. There is a big debate around who’s responsible for managing artists’ interaction with their fans, as the channels through which they can do it continue to multiply. Is it a label thing or a manager thing? How much should the artist be expected to do, and what happens if they don’t want to get their hands dirty with social media? That kind of stuff.

This is the subject of the key afternoon debate at Music 4.5 today, kicked off by Wingnut Music’s Erik Nielsen – who as co-manager of Marillion, has been doing this band/fan D2C stuff for a long, long time.

Marillion had a 12-15,000 person mailing list back in 2000, and the band asked its fans to help pay for their next album – “would you buy it if it doesn’t even exist?” – five or six thousand people said yes, and thus the band’s self-releasing career kicked off.

“The question here is who owns that relationship? The answer is the artist,” he says. “By maintaining control, you can make sure you hire the right people to do the job. I’m not a carpenter, so I couldn’t put an extension on the side of my house… It’s important that the artist maintains control, but also admits that they can’t do everything.”

Onto the panel discussion, which Nielsen is taking part in. Moderator Nic Howell from New Media Age asks the panel for stories about how music distribution has changed. Billy Grant from TwoPointNine is first up – an independent label that’s also a management company.

“It’s very important to build audience and build communities,” he says. “We made records – this is about 2003 – and before we knew it, we started building on the British Asian scene, picked up on some of the producers and artists in that scene, and found a community around it. We tapped into this and used our Western marketing experience to build communities out of it.”

So for Grant, the big change has been the way fans are able to communicate with artists and labels, and the way they can get music. In a nutshell.

James Proud from Giglocator is next up, saying that the big change for his company has been Ticketmaster opening up to allow ticketing startups like his to sell its tickets.

But from a personal perspective: “When I started listening to music, I bought a cassette. When my little brother started listening to his first music recently, he did it on Spotify…”

Next is Susie Moore from BrandRock. Her background is in branding and marketing, and used to work at O2. She agrees with Feargal Sharkey’s claim earlier that there’s never been a better time to be a fan. “It’s the fans who are driving the distribution of music,” she says. “We should embrace it… rather than try to stop it with traditional ways of doing business.”

Next up is Shamal Ranasinghe from Topspin, which has just opened up an office in London. “Marillion is an example that we cited from the inception of Topspin,” he says, before talking about David Byrne and Brian Eno’s last album in 2008, which Topspin worked on.

They had two options apparently – releasing through a label or going it alone – they chose the latter. David Byrne had a mailing list of 3,000 people at the time – which seems low – but when they let people stream the album two weeks before release, they signed up 30,000 extra people. The stream was also embedded in 160 blogs across the web.

“They made up the advance amount that they were offered [by a label] in 50 days, and they got to keep the rights to their music,” he says.

Now Nielsen, who says he’s here to start a fight. Who are the villains in music distribution? “Everyone who gets in the way,” he says. But then moves on to something else that Marillion did – they had 12 t-shirt designs, and asked fans which ones they liked best before kicking off a tour. And guess what – the ones the fans liked sold better at gigs.

“If you give them a large percentage of what they actually want, they’re gonna buy it,” he says. “But having a large number of people in the way telling you what your fans want, is where the problems lie.”

So is owning customer data as important nowadays as owning the master recordings used to be seen? “Very much so,” says Billy Grant. “It’s very important that the artist is able to communicate directly with their audience.”

Nielsen also says that people mustn’t forget that “it’s the business of the music that’s communicating with the fans” – artists can choose to be personal if they want, but that’s not the core focus here. Which is interesting – artists can choose to be personally enigmatic when it comes to social media, but as a business they need to be using it to communicate with fans.

Ranasinghe says Topspin’s software was originally designed for artists to “get up every morning and check in” – but actually it’s the digital marketers behind the artists who are using the software day-to-day. “The toolset we provide is a pretty powerful marketing toolset, but 99 times out of 100 it’s the business team behind the artist using it, not the artist themselves.”

Is it easier nowadays to break and achieve success as a new band using all these new tools? “I have to prove that to myself,” says Nielsen, who’s working with a new band called A Genuine Freakshow to do it. “All it is now for me is where do I get the money from?” Back to the investment question from earlier.

Do fans expect it to be the singer or guitarist communicating with them rather than their new media guy or business manager? Nielsen says it depends on the artist – some tweet and Facebook without being asked, while others rely on the people behind them to do it for them.

Moore agrees that the band is the brand. “What fans want is… they buy into the music. The band will be a total business of people, maybe a few people working on that band’s music, what that band believes in, their identity and values. It’s like any brand marketing exercise.”

But yes, it all depends on the artist. Twitter and Facebook are powerful and necessary ways to promote music, but if artists don’t want to get their hands dirty with them, they shouldn’t have to.

“To me it’s like a Darwinian process,” says Ranasinghe, citing the Beastie Boys as an artist who do it themselves, and have had huge success with it. But then other artists copy and paste a press release into emails to their fans, and don’t have much success.

Tags: Music 4.5

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.