{"id":106,"date":"2023-02-23T22:09:37","date_gmt":"2023-02-23T22:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/?p=106"},"modified":"2023-03-14T16:24:03","modified_gmt":"2023-03-14T16:24:03","slug":"why-is-the-music-industry-bad-at-digital-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/why-is-the-music-industry-bad-at-digital-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is the music industry bad at digital marketing?"},"content":{"rendered":"
In the early days of the Internet, it could be argued that the music industry was one of the best at digital. One of the first online open communities was Iron Maiden\u2019s early site. MySpace was a massive success in no small part due to the musical presence there, launching careers like OneRepublic and\u00a0eventually selling to Justin Timberlake. Of course, MySpace is now a footnote to Facebook\u2019s history. So what happened?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start by looking at a couple of not so random musical websites.<\/h4>\n<\/figure>\n
There\u2019s no denying that Taylor Swift is one of the biggest pop stars going right now. Her site features four options in the menu. Events, Video, Merchandise and Newsletter. Half of the links end up further down the page, leaving only Events and Merch with their own pages. So other than merch, there\u2019s only two pages. The leading image is her album cover, and a close up of her album cover.<\/p>\n
This makes for really bad SEO. If you search Taylor Swift Albums, for example, her own site is nowhere to be found. Roughly 30,000 people in the US do that search every month. Add in variants (discography) and it\u2019s more like 150K a month. There\u2019s no self controlled news, or anything else for fans for content unless you signup for that news letter. At least it\u2019s kind of pretty.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s look at the site that unseated her a the top of the charts. Tool.<\/h4>\n<\/figure>\n
This at least features a few more user paths and content to consume. The top of the site is dominated by a very extensive video loop, and there are links to more than just the latest video they\u2019ve produced. But it\u2019s virtually unreadable. If you can\u2019t see it in the screen cap, it wouldn\u2019t be surprising. Sure it captures the dark and brooding rock star thing, but doesn\u2019t exactly make it usable.<\/p>\n
Further down the page you\u2019d find this article:<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
If you actually click on the read more you\u2019ll see the cover of the magazine, but on the home page only the link can be seen. The link they posted is only a bare link with the facebook tracking parameter. In addition to looking quite ugly, it\u2019s throwing off the metrics from where ever they took the link. It\u2019s 2019, it\u2019s not that hard to build a link with anchor text.<\/p>\n
So bands don\u2019t care about product sales or websites?<\/h3>\n
Somewhere in time, Napster came along and broke the industry. But it wasn\u2019t really Napster, it was actually iTunes. And Pandora and Spotify Broke it further.\u00a0Digital downloads and physical sales\u00a0are only around 25% of music revenue any more. The remaining 75% is streaming. Rather than potentially thousands of retailers for sales, the bulk is now on a few platforms. Musicians care about\u00a0SEO. It\u2019s just that that S stands for Spotify rather than search. They\u2019ve ceded control to the big streaming platforms and they know it.<\/p>\n
The same might be said of ticket sales for concerts. It\u2019s pretty much ticketmaster or secondary market places. The marketplace tacks on plenty of \u201cconvenience fees\u201d which help the company but not the musician.\u00a0Somewhere upwards of 20% on average\u00a0for the convenience of buying a ticket in the only place you can get one.<\/p>\n
That means the sites are left for superfans, not acquisition. It\u2019s made opportunities for sites that specialize in lyrics or setlists, so you can find out which artist sings that song with a single line you remember. Google\u2019s recognized this and is pretty good at matching the entity of a single line from a song to the actual song<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
What should a budding artist do?<\/h2>\n
We\u2019ve looked at big artists, and poked holes in the work they\u2019ve done. For every superstar, there\u2019s thousands of struggling bands trying to make a go at music for a living. What should they do to get noticed?<\/p>\n
We\u2019d recommend some of the\u00a0classic tactics for marketing and PR. Getting noticed in an industry like music is hard, but there are pros that expressly exist to help with this. People have to hear a song somewhere to start the interest cycle. The era of self made artists isn\u2019t over, it\u2019s just shifted to getting noticed on platforms like YouTube and Spotify from traditional radio and record shops. Social media can help too, as long as you\u2019re making your music\u00a0easy to share\u00a0and find.\u00a0Social media influencers\u00a0are as real in this space as the recommendation engines. If anything the splintered landscape of digital has made the possibility to get discovered from anywhere, instead of just music towns.<\/p>\n
And of course if you like this, don\u2019t forget to check out my soundcloud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the early days of the Internet, it could be argued that the music industry was one of the best … <\/p>\n
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