Piece in today's NYT entitled
"American Brandstand" focusing on brands stepping into the sucking void left by the "whipsawing" of the music business by "digital technology" completely misses the point. The bigger story isn't about brands underwriting music - it's about traditional command and control distribution models being exposed as costly barriers to innovation and emotional connection rather than facilitators. It's about a digitally-enabled new playing field and new players popping up in
industries where they weren't expected. That's a story - and one that
will rewrite a lot of marketing playbooks.
Which should all be burned anyway.
This "whipsawing" crap is an excuse you hear in a lot of industries facing the digital tsunami and chosing to go down in their cellars rather than get out the boards and surf - the music industry industry didn't just "miss" the digital distribution revolution - they ignored it because their financial self-interest was wedded to another model. When Hurricane Fanning hit the music business, the klaxons shouldn't have sounded only in the lawyers' suites - the business brains and creative hearts needed to sit down and ask themselves what their industry proposition was. Maybe they'd have realized they weren't in the "music" business, they were printing houses whose medium of delivery was being eclipsed. The future, now presently emergent, business is "music experience" or "music supply" - regardless of format - and still offers phenomenal opportunity.
And then a couple of folks go on record in the article saying it's "not
about the money". Bilge. Of course it is. This isn't the corporate
responsibility group doing these deals - the intention is to associate
and by association drive sales. Or you don't do it. And for the
bands, it's promotion. And distribution. And ultimately...oh right -
revenue.
Richard Bishop of Cornerstone had a nice sound bite:
“I think in the world today, it doesn’t make a difference to the
consumer if a record comes out on Warner Music, EMI, Red Bull or Diesel
Jeans. Artists may be better advised to put their
music out with a brand to get better reach and bigger advertising.”
Damn straight.
Smart artists are using every loophole they can to explore new possibilities. They are trying to extricate themselves from the burning building of the old music industry, while the record business is still running room to room trying to douse the flames with single-serve Evian bottles.
The story for me here is that while the lame end of the music business is floundering through a slow motion car wreck trying to maintain their command and control CD-printing model, new music experience/music supply players - iTunes, brands, movies, video games, you name it - are stepping in.
So where will this happen next? Well...what's another command and control production distribution model? Oh...how about...movies? TV? Books? Games? Advertising?
Brands with money to spend to create powerful emotional connections have the world at their fingertips. But it's a messy world, to put it mildly. Some will execute well, becoming new gatekeepers and kingmakers. More will tank this thing, with their delicious brand mismatches and missteps excrutiatingly well documented.
We are all experimenting. The brand lab is huge. Music is just one tool - look for brands in more businesses than you'd expect.