Extremely. Social media is key for me. I’ve actually just acquired a social media agency specialising in Twitter.
Well if you employ staff who are specialists in their field that’s okay. We do event activation as well through 360 Agency. We would have spent in excess of $40,000 to $60,000 dollars above the line in advertising, to promote events in some capacity.
With the advent of Twitter and Facebook, we will spend $2,000 this year, and the rest will be free online and word of mouth. Even to the point now if we want to be interesting, we’ll announce tickets for an event are on sale but not tell anyone where to buy them; and if you don’t know where to buy them you can’t come.
So that filters out the friends that are actually so-called followers from who you want to influence. So with our communication now, unless you’ve got something awesome to say, just shut up, because I think in the feed there’s like – it’s not a feed any more, it’s a torrent.
In the last two years, we’ve gone from 2,000 followers to 30,000 followers. There is value in it, for example, we use Facebook as a callout for our Saturday night events and we engage with 5,000 people a week, one-on-one, and we employ someone full-time who just responds to Facebook messages all day.
Clearly I can’t do it myself, but they can. It’s the best opportunity to engage with them. You choose to ignore people at your own peril. If you’re targeting people through Facebook and Twitter, why would you go spend money on radio and TV? With music, if it’s not on sale the day it hits radio, I’ve lost money because someone might go and find it, blog it, rip it, steal it. I think the value attachment to music these days is about zero cents.
It’s pretty damn scary. You either embrace it and get on board or you think of it as a threat. I think true, passionate fans will buy music because unless you’re online on Spotify you’re not going to be able to stream it. So you might as well.
We went straightaway and got our artists a dedicated channel on Spotify and put all our music up on there, because I think you’ve got to let people find it the best way they can. For me, personally, when I sit there at My Mexican Cousin saying, “I want Louisiana jazz”, then great, it’s time for Spotify, and there’s playlists and radio stations from Louisiana, and we say “awesome”. What’s more authentic than having that playing in there?
For me and the people in our office, everyone’s on Spotify. It’s a question of who gets to control the music in the end. It’s the same model that’s happened with all these providers; instead of iTunes, pay a fee and you get our entire collection.
Download whatever you want for a fee per month, because it’s unsustainable to think people will continue to pay for the current format. This is Kazaa, but legal; this model actually revenue shares, and it works.
By the time I pay for managing publishing companies and record companies, the amount of money I get per single anyway is trivial. Unless I get some amazing synchronisation with a movie or an ad which pays hundreds of thousands dollars of which I’ll get some revenue, it’s not about that.
Most artists these days in the long term would suggest that the money they get back from Spotify or iTunes is a bonus. But if they’re promoting a record and get views on their YouTube or fan page, that translates into revenue.
Now there’s millions of new artists and if you’re an emerging 18-year-old artist, apart from putting music up there as everyone else does, what makes you special is if you’ve got radio play that got you discovered – it’s pretty difficult now to get heard.
In the old days when I put a record out, I sent it to record label, they’d send it off to a presser and figure out if it would cost $2 a unit to press this thing. Then they’d say ‘Yeah that sounds good enough for me to buy it’, then the label would ring the artist and say, ‘Yes, we’ve got a deal’.
The quality control was 20 people at a label listening to a record who might say ‘yes’. Now if you’re online, you’re on sale. It doesn’t mean it’s good, just that it’s available.
Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
