A Music Primer 2 on Independent Music Sales and Niche Markets

Nov. 16, 2014 - PRLog -- With the advent of digital music sales, came the ability to sell your music one song at a time.  This effectively makes each song a product.  If you consider each song a product then you will have to devise some sort of product life cycle.  Here history can help us determine what types of songs have long life and what types of songs are flashes in the pan of culture.  If you consider that the song can have a life of its own outside of the popularity of the artist, then it is best to divorce the look and notoriety of the artist from the song.  In this scenario, fame is a risk factor.  Therefore a song must be considered on its merit.  If each song is a product then advertising must be employed to access sales at a rate that brings viability to the music business.  At this time, music is no longer a viable business.  Therefore this primer seeks to explain the current state of music and the need for music advertising as a part of the overall strategy for a music artist.

Let us consider that each song has a life cycle of 7 years, which is a calculus of the quality of the song, the size of the target audience and your ability to inform that audience worldwide.  If we use hard numbers, there is a regression that we can develop which helps you start to think in terms of selling music as a product.  Let us consider how many people have devices which can be used to access digital music stores and download content.  There are currently an estimated 6.9 Billion (Source; Gartner 2013) smart mobile devices sold worldwide.  We estimate 50% of the device users actually have the income and internet access to use these devices for more than just texting or games.  We estimate that about 70% of these users profess to be Christian from a cultural perspective and about 30% of them will actually purchase a Christian product at least once a year.  Therefore we estimate our total market to be 724,500,000 purchasing Christian mobile device owners worldwide.  There are many Christian genres of music most consumed at church, theater or schools.  All of these people are open to further experiencing Christian music of other genres and all must be considered as potential customers.  However, how much does it costs to reach 724 million people and about how many should you expect will be your customer?

That number of people seems enormous.  Remember, we considered our product life cycle to be 7 years so we have some time to reach all of these people online.  This is where you must consider the best methodology to reach so many people.  Not intimating that there is only one way but encouraging the consideration.  Any marketing and advertising campaign today must be “multi-tactical”.  Just using one tactic (ex: Facebook) will not help achieve the goal of reaching 724 million Christian mobile users.  This is where the work starts, because the internet is a marvelous connector, but the price is work.  Social media is a multifaceted world which explores human connections, but it is only one tactic and it demands great amounts of attention.  Google Adwords, Yahoo email ads, Christian email aggregators, Christian magazines, websites, apps and events are all tactics which might make sense for you to invest in for music sales.  However, you must ensure that your investment does not break the bank.  This is the truth of entrepreneurship and business.

Up until 2012, Advertising has demanded an exorbitant investment on the part of the product retailer.  Retail is the dominant model for understanding advertising, but the physical music store is dead.  So there has been no one to pick up the mantle of advertising.  Apple has become the digital music store which has no intention of operating under the same models as brick and mortar retail, and its overall results bear this out.  Therefore who will invest in advertising and why?  The wholesale retail model has been destroyed in the music industry and no one has stepped into the void to reestablish this model.  Rather there have been many music models which do not actually do the work of telling the audiences about new Christian music.  Therefore this all falls on the shoulders of the record label, distributors and artists.  This is the democratization of music, and it will be better because the music industry is widely known for not paying artists and enriching themselves from their work.  So artists and independent music companies must learn the principles of advertising.

Advertising and Sales Principles

1.       Build audiences to which your product appeals

2.       Develop and deploy a sales funnel into which to drive your new audiences

3.       Make the sale

4.       Keep the customer through engagement

5.       Cultivate your audiences

6.       Make additional sales

Summary

Advertising and sales principles go hand in hand.  Marketing and sales principles do the same.  Notice we have not mentioned public relations or promotions.  At this time there is a window for the small business to develop and deploy advertising strategies, but it is closing quickly as larger companies start to employ online advertising.  Net neutrality issues are also poised to limit the ability of an individual to build a business online, pricing the little guy out of the game of online advertising.  However, niche markets are the hope of the individual artists and that will be the focus next time.

The Christian Library on Demand (CLD) offers audience building tactics which specifically target your audiences and use entertainment to build and maintain audiences for further use.  We believe that entertainment builds audience more efficiently than any other tactic.  Entertainment gives superior access to consumers in a manner where advertising is welcomed and not avoided.  The CLD has developed an advanced niche entertainment offering with pricing which gives an independent artist access to millions of users for a reasonable price.  We leverage the efficiencies of the online and app-based networks to deliver content, display and video advertising to our audiences.  We welcome entrepreneurial music artist to advertise their music products at the CLD!

Contact Terrence A. Lovett or Darcey Hutchinson for details

Terrence_Lovett@Christianlibraryondemand.com

Darcey_Hutchinson@Christianlibraryondemand.com

720-275-5387