"In the Music Industry, the power of marketing online is the most useful asset in the promotion of music products." To what extent do you agree with the statement?

It’s without a doubt that connecting with fans through marketing techniques is essential in today’s music industry, with high levels of competition where you are competing with experienced, trained individuals with huge record labels and household names used in their marketing. However, that being said, it’s undeniable that connecting directly with fans is one of the strongest and undefeated forms of marketing in all industries, particularly in that of the music world.
          On the small scale, we have people such as the Poison Control Center who run a Tumblr blog where fans can follow the band whilst on tour, seeing what they’re doing and where they’re going. This creates a personal connection between the fan, sitting in their bedroom, and the artist, sitting in their private jet, and because of this, the fan buys their music because they’re not buying from an unreachable star set aside from the public, but a friend.
          Another success of marketing through online mediums is that of Arcade Fire. Like the Poison Control Center, they create a personal rapport between artist and fan, but in an innovative and creative way. Arcade Fire utilized HTML5 to create an interactive music video for “We Used to Wait.” Users enter the address of their childhood home at the start of the video. Throughout the video, videos and pictures of your old neighbourhood are pulled in using Google street view.  This triggers the nostalgia in every single viewer, and ensures that no matter what the video is guaranteed to be enjoyed by everyone, no matter who your audience is, or at least engraves the video and the artist in their minds.
          Both of these artists, and almost every artist that you will find, except your odd ‘indie’ band who are too ‘retro’, will use technology in their marketing. With around 56% of website visits coming from mobile in the US, internet advertising and online interaction is undeniably effective and irresistible to the money tycoons in Sony Offices.
          Along with this comes visual media. A small artist getting featured in a Vine that goes viral overnight is akin to Dorothy going over the rainbow- and with the creation of YouTube, Vine and Twitter fame, “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” Despite this, its important to remember that one of, if not the, most important form of marketing is infact non-digital. The importance and impact of gigging is so unbelievably large that it is sometimes forgotten, or even swept aside. Meeting fans face-to-face and selling merchandise, that most fans need to take out a few mortgages to buy, is the biggest money maker in today’s music industry, by making everyone in the area of the artist’s tour aware of them. Take, for example, Rudimental. Flashback to 2013, when they played the Odyssey Arena. February 2013 was the first and last time I heard mention of their name, and for that short lived month they were the only band that Belfast talked about. And did I buy a ticket? Of course I did.
          On a much larger scale, we have a household name that will make your inner teenage girl screech: One Direction. Mock these preppy boybands with their moussed hair and sparkling eyes that match their glowing smile all you want, but under Harry Styles’ mop of curly hair, he surprisingly does have a brain, and it certainly knows what its doing.
          The admirable simplicity of Simon Cowell and his label’s marketing technique of this world wide sensation is so simple that it almost leaves you thinking: “I could quite literally walk down my street right now, whack a few pre-teen boys from the local park onto the telly, add some autotune and some teeth whitening, maybe a bit of Head and Shoulders, and cook myself up a fortune.” One Direction really are the best example of a simple marketing technique aimed at the right market sector  (which just happens to be 12 year old girls that are at well, you know, that stage in their life where the only person who could ever understand them is international male pop sensation who spends his life touring the world, just like them!).
The five-now-four-piece performed what was supposed to be a one-off gig in Madison Square Gardens which explosed it into a three-month global adventure called “Bring me to 1D”. Fifty-five of these lucky girls won a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” with the boys in New York, and each ticket was won in a completely different creative way. The band and its label used its constant presence on Facebook, Twitter and the official 1D site, where an interactive Bring Me to 1D map enabled fans to follow what was happening around the world, to reach their highest ever volume of online following, doubling all of its following on social media. Even more beneficial to the boys (and their bank accounts), their new album shot straight to Number 1 in 32 out of 40 countries within its first week of release.
Genevieve Ampaduh, Head of Digital Marketing at Sony Music, who masterminded One Direction’s social media campaign says: “Social media has changed the face of music marketing forever. The ability for artists to reach out to their potential fans in every corner of the globe in real time is incredibly powerful and cannot be replicated by traditional media.
“Early advocates of an artist have become an extension of the label’s marketing teams and play an invaluable role in breaking artists in their local countries. Empowering super-fans should be a staple of any music marketer’s strategy, as should entertaining fans. Why shouldn’t a marketing campaign be exciting, memorable and fun? It should be. And if it is, fans will stay with you for the journey ahead.”
On the other end of the spectrum, in an almost entirely different world than One Direction and Sony records, we have First World Records. This record label gives music away for free in order to increase their number of newsletter subscribers by growing their mailing list from people who download their music. Twice each year, they release a compilation of music featuring only artists from their own roster on Bandcamp, for completely free. However this method is to be used very sparingly; perhaps only when launching a new artist or hoping to attain new email addresses, or else fans will be of the impression that everything the record label puts out into the world is free. This is a simple, but effective method, however it is also dangerous.
          But where is the line between pushing a consumer towards your product, passively being aware of the message you are sending them and giving them the choice, and pulling them towards your product, passively - but knowing what you are doing - you are in control of your entire campaign. Push Marketing is certainly on its way out of many industries in such a highly competitive world where companies simply cannot afford to lose a single customer. “Generally the shift from push to pull has been viewed as a shift in power to the consumer away from advertisers and so is bad news for marketers.”
With the increase of social media, the tyranny of music labels has gained complete and total control of their artists’ fans by engaging them on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and even Vine, the customer is unwillingly in the palm of their hands. Long gone are the days of a customer being able to escape the never ending marketing campaigns by switching off the telly, when you’ve already increased Bruno Mars’ internet traffic when you only clicked on his page to unfollow him.
Another form of Pull Marketing is when streaming services like Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music not only allow users to curate their own playlists, but discover new music and choose what they want to listen to without being forced into it by an over-enthusiastic Scott Mills buzzing in your ear on the car ride home from work. Every. Single. Evening.
Sometimes we may question pull marketing- where fans willingly stand outdoors on muggy, freezing afternoon in central London waiting for ‘Odd Future’ to arrive. The proud father of this group is a ‘sadistic yet compelling’ Tyler the Creator, who is, well, Tyler the Creator of Odd Future. The group gives away their music for free, so they make almost all of their revenue from pop up stores selling one off garments to represent the band and its generation of rebellion and adversity to conformity. It consists of Earl Sweatshirt, Domo Genesis, Mike G, Frank Ocean, Left Brain, Syd, Jasper Dolphin, and Taco Bennett, and its lack of marketing technique is never seen before but is sure to be seen again. They have completely disintegrated the intangible wall built between artist and fan by initially giving around 20 albums away for free online, then continuing to tour whilst selling hand designed garments bu Tyler, their founder, in pop-up stores around cities preceding their shows. They have completely transformed the meaning of tour merchandise from a t-shirt sold at £50, worth 50p, to as much of a personal and intimate experience between artist and fan as the concert itself. The group’s co-manager, Christian Clancy, has said, "There's no marketing [doing finger quotes]. It's exposing it at the right place at the right time. So when you have kids that are completely themselves, you don't necessarily market because you just take who they are and expose it. Right? So it's not like a push,” and he is completely proven right by the awards and titles won by the group and its individual members.
Another stand-out success story of 2016 is that of Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade. Her lack of marketing beforehand - no album since December 2014, no word of any new projects and simply a mysterious name, ‘Lemonade’ - is the best Lemonade recipe she could have ever created. With fans patiently waiting until April 23rd 2016 to find out what ‘Lemonade’ was, a film? An album? A music video?, Beyoncé was also patiently waiting to unlock her careers biggest secret, and one of music’s biggest success stories of the decade, and like Kim Kardashian, she certainly broke the internet. With 4.1 million tweets in under 48 hours, Entertainment Weekly states that Lemonade’s twitter mentions “soared from 1.8 thousand tweets per minute to 9.2 thousand from roughly 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. The uproar has declined in recent days, but holds steady at 450 tweets per minute nearly 48 hours later.”
The timing was right for everyone. With a Super Bowl performance following the jaw-dropping release of an artistic vision, where Beyoncé would announce her world tour, which made a whopping $96,938,247 from just 18 shows, and where she addressed the controversial and topical racial injustices of America. The timing was just as right for HBO, who premiered Lemonade and offered all viewers a free weekend of their HBO Now service which gave people access to HBO from Friday-Sunday for the series premieres of shows like “Game of Thrones” & “Silicon Valley”.
The only flaw in a flawless woman’s plan, however, was her exclusive streaming with Tidal. Fans had to subscribe at a steep price of £9.99 a month minimum in order to listen and download Lemonade. Whilst Tidal pay 75% of rights to holders compared to a regular 70%, Beyoncé has limited her horizons to a smaller number of fans compared to the large majority if she had chosen to make her album available on all platforms, including Apple Music and Spotify, however, it should by now be clear to consumers that with any and all streaming services, it is part and parcel of their packages that their library will have gaps such as Frank Ocean’s Blond or Beyonce’s Lemonade.
That being said, as TIDAL found with the near instantaneous Beyonce YouTube leak, music scarcity is ephemeral in the YouTube age.  As long as YouTube is allowed to hide behind its perverse interpretation of ‘Fair Use’ and ‘Safe Harbour’ there will be no music scarcity.
Like TIDAL, it is undeniable that streaming services make mistakes. One of the infamous mistakes is that of Apple Music and U2. Ah yes, the unwanted musical virus that was U2’s Songs of Innocence that was such a big marketing mistake that it quite literally warranted an apology from Bono. You see, listeners want push not pull. We don’t want to be screamed at (unless you’re a fan of Pierce the Veil or Black Veil Brides which, let’s be honest, not many people are), but infact we want the offer of the music to be there, for us to take it or leave it. Marketing is simply raising awareness of a band and their music, not bombarding every single iTunes user with an unsolicited download which not only consumes valuable digital space but also disables the use of shuffling all music without going from your usual Drake and the Weekend to an out-of-date, officially-trying-too-hard, old man group.
The final form of marketing that is ever-present in technologically drowned society, is gamification.
          From licensing to games featuring musicians, the music industry is taking its grasp on the gaming world, by thinking of games as simply offering new revenue streams and marketing tools. Given the explosion of games on the open web, on Facebook and on mobile platforms, more money is a comforting concept in an industry struggling to survive decreasing sales.
Gamification in its most obvious form involves "adding simple game mechanics like points, badges and leaderboards to websites and apps. But if you think it ends there, you're simply wrong.
As Albin Serviant put it, "Today's fan wants more than just a track. They want a participative, personalised experience in a social environment.”
But the question on everyone's minds is: is gamification truly effective towards the drive in increasing fan loyalty?
           turntable.fm allows players to collect points when people rate the songs they are listening to, and points can in turn be used to unlock new DJ avatars. The point of these avatars is to indicate who are “super-users”, which is a sign of status. .
TastemakerX, which is a full-blown social game approach to music. The site allows users to buy/sell shares of musicians and based on the user’s “portfolio”, they are given a score showing their influence. The site allows people to discover artists, trends and inspiration, compete with other users, and share experiences through location and photo sharing.
          So why is it so hard to find “gamification gold” for the music industry? It could possibly be because music is an essential humans look towards to support or alter emotions. Incorporating “cheap” game elements to music takes away from the quality and functionality that music plays in our lives. When it comes to music, people just want it to be good and accessible, regardless of other strings attached.
The bottom-line is, online marketing may have the biggest impact on consumers that an artist or label could make today, but it's quintessential to use online marketing power sparingly; simply but effectively. Be Beyoncé, not Bono. Despite that, success can't be found solely online. Touring will firstly, make most revenue, and secondly spread word of any artist, whether they sell out Croke Park or their own garage. Marketing is a precise and delicate minefield, so make sure you know exactly what you're doing before you step out.