::Originally Posted on MI Blog 7/20/11::
This morning Music Think Tank posted an interesting article contributed by Bas Grasmayer, head of online communication for official.fm and contributor to @techdirt and @hypebot. The article is a summation of his thesis “The Answer is in the Ecosystem: Marketing Music Through Non-Linear Communication,” which offers excellent insight into the changed ecosystem of music marketing that must account for the way the internet has changed the way music is shared and sold. He claims that one of the main motivations for his thesis was the piracy debate, “I found it a waste of time,” he writes, “Partly because I’m a so-called ‘digital native’ who grew up with the internet and I’ve never really seen piracy as a huge problem compared to the massive opportunities the internet created. When I recently interviewed French electro-producer Para One, he echoed my opinion about the internet: ‘it would be unfair to hate it.'”
His skepticism over the piracy debate led him to investigate the topic further and speculated that the issue of internet piracy had to be a symptom of a larger problem. He says,
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| Graph Courtesy of Bas Grasmayer (basbasbas.com) and Ryan Van Etten (ryanvanetten.com) |
“The web has allowed for non-linear communication through networks on a massive scale. The music industry’s first introduction to this was probably Napster (oh yes I said the N-word). To me, Napster symbolizes the music industry’s near total loss of control over the distribution of their product. The industry’s unwillingness or inability to adjust to this new reality of non-linear communication only made things worse (perhaps a lack of understanding has been the problem).
Other symptoms of the web’s non-linear communication are social networks (including the music industry’s darling MySpace), ‘word of mouse’, music like water and there are even people who say it has changed young people’s thought processes.” See the ‘Problem’ section of his thesis for a more detailed explanation, this is very much an abbreviation.
What Bas wanted to figure out was how artists and labels could fully adapt to this changed reality.
So the solution? Well, I’ll direct your attention back to the title of the thesis: the ‘answer’ is apparently in the ecosystem, but let’s investigate this assertion a bit further. Bas says thinkers like Derek Sivers and Mike Masnick gave him ideas about “do’s and dont’s,” but it wasn’t until he had coffee with Dutch music manager Niels Aalberts that he was able to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. Aalberts described his artists’ fanbases as ‘ecosystems,’ which gave Bas the insight to make the following conclusions:
“To me, fanbase suggests a certain distance between artists and fans. It comes from a more linear age where one-to-many was the norm. You would communicate to fans through your music, interviews in magazines, appearances on the radio, music videos and perhaps you would return fanmail every now and then. Now the artist can be placed at the center of the network and is the unifying factor of fans who can now get interconnected. One of my favourite examples of this is deadmau5’ Minecraft server, where fans and artist literally immerse themselves in a world composed of fan art.”
He hypothesizes the formula for the digital age to be explained this way:
“Be remarkable: whatever you do, whoever you are has to be a story worth talking about. Without that you’re never going to be able to leverage non-linear communication. There are a lot of very skillful musicians and artists out there, but how many are really worth talking about?
Be easy to discover: pretty basic, but you’d be surprised. Be on YouTube, be on Facebook, be on Twitter, have a homepage that unites them all. Publish in as many different places as possible and let your content be your marketing. If your content is truly remarkable, you should make it easy for fans to let it go viral. My favourite example here is The Ugly Dance.
Turn your fanbase into a party: this is where you will really start witnessing the ecosystem’s dynamics. We’ve all been to house parties where everyone was bored, standing around, waiting for the host to come talk to them whilst figuring out an exit strategy and how much food and drinks to consume to make the trip to the party worth it. What a huge difference that is with a great house party where the host makes sure everybody’s connected and having a good time; the type of party where people wouldn’t really notice if the host went for a 30 minute walk. The internet works the same way!
Connect: at the same time, one needs to deepen their connection with fans. Fans have to feel involved with you, make them care. People are more likely to buy music after connecting with them.
Listen: your fans listen to your music and you should listen to them. If you’re really interconnected with your fans, you can more accurately pick up the non-linear communication and jump in whenever people want something. From this listening the business opportunities arise. They go way beyond selling digital or physical copies of music. People want to spend money on music, truly, but you need to give them a reason: don’t offer them something you want them to buy, offer them something they want you to sell.”
“Be remarkable, be easy to discover, turn your fanbase into a party, connect, listen.” It’s that simple. You can read the entirety of Bas Grasmayer’s thesis here. For the article posted on Music Think Tank, click here. To stay up to date with other writings by Bas Grasmayer, we suggest following him on Twitter: @Spartz.
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| Photo Courtesy of Bas Grasmayer (basbasbas.com) and Ryan Van Etten (ryanvanetten.com) |
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