• New singles to go 'on air, on sale' simultaneously• Record labels target X Factor generation
Jessie J’s Do it Like a Dude went on sale as it was launched on radio last month. Others are following suit. Photograph: Purple PR/PA
Ten years after piracy first began to ravage the music industry, Britain's two biggest record labels will finally try to play their part in stopping it, by making new singles available for sale on the day they first hit the airwaves.
Universal and Sony Music – home to Take That and Matt Cardle, respectively – hope the effort will encourage the impatient X Factor generation to buy songs they can listen to immediately rather than copying from radio broadcasts online.
David Joseph, the chief executive of Universal Music, said: "Wait is not a word in the vocabulary of the current generation. It's out of date to think that you can build up demand for a song by playing it for several weeks on radio in advance."
Songs used to receive up to six weeks radio airplay before they were released for sale – a practice known as "setting up" a record. But the success of selling the winner's single immediately after the X Factor final has made record bosses think again.
"What we were finding under the old system was the searches for songs on Google or iTunes were peaking two weeks before they actually became available to buy, meaning that the public was bored of – or had already pirated – new singles," Joseph added.
Sony, which will start the "on air, on sale" policy simultaneously with Universal next month, agreed that the old approach was no longer relevant in an age where, according to a spokesman for the music major, "people want instant gratification".
Cardle, who signed to Sony via an agreement with Simon Cowell, sold 439,000 copies of When we Collide when it made the Christmas number one, the track having gone on sale just as the X Factor final ended on television.
Industry insiders believe instant sales will make it easier for records to climb the charts as excitement about a new song builds, developing a trend first seen when download sales joined the mainstream.
In the past, heavy pre-release marketing had tended to mean a new single crash-landed at its peak position on its first week of release – making the top 40 a dull narrative of short-lived new entries leavened by falling songs and fading glamour.
Jessie J's Do it Like a Dude went on sale and on radio at the beginning of December, and the 22-year-old's R&B single climbed steadily to reach number 5 last week. As more singles follow suit, the charts will briefly become uneven as songs adopting the old and the new marketing policies mix.
Piracy remains a crippling problem for the British music business, where the overall market fell by nearly 6% in 2010 and album sales slumped 7%, despite the success surrounding Robbie Williams's rejoining Take That and Simon Cowell's television-fuelled hits factory.
Although pirating songs from the radio is as old as tape recorders, the record companies believe the move will show ministers that they are playing their part in fighting copyright theft.
Universal and Sony have both notified Ed Vaizey, the minister for culture and the creative industries, of their plans.
Monday, 25 April 2011
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
For the past ten years sales of recorded music have declined so steeply as to become a cautionary tale about the disruptive power of the internet. The rise of illegal file-sharing and the end of the digital “replacement cycle”, in which people bought CDs to replace tapes and records, caused spending to collapse. Sales of CDs, tapes and records have slid by 40% in Britain since 2001, according to the BPI, which represents record labels. In Japan, the world’s biggest CD sales market, the number of discs sold fell by 6% in 2008 and 24% in 2009. Price cuts meant that revenues dropped even more steeply.
The rise in digital music-sales is scant compensation. People tend to buy tracks, not albums, from sites like Apple’s iTunes. They can obtain their favourite music much more cheaply than they could in the CD era. And even digital sales are now stalling. In Japan, mobile and online single-track sales rose only a shade during 2009. So far this year Americans have bought 841m digital tracks, mostly from Apple’s iTunes, according to Nielsen Soundscan—down from 847m at this point last year. Apple now offers plenty of other opportunities to spend money, from iPads to more than 250,000 apps. Music executives believe the company is cannibalising the musical part of its own business.
Yet the music business is surprisingly healthy, and becoming more so. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties on behalf of writers and publishers, has added up the entire British music business. He reckons it turned over £3.9 billion ($6.1 billion) in 2009, 5% more than in 2008. It was the second consecutive year of growth. Much of the money bypassed the record companies. But even they managed to pull in £1.1 billion last year, up 2% from 2008. A surprising number of things are making money for artists and music firms, and others show great promise. The music business is not dying. But it is changing profoundly.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
The longest, loudest boom is in live music. Between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled in value, from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion (see chart 1). Ticket sales wobbled in America during the summer of 2010, but that was partly because some big-selling acts took a break. One of the most reliable earners, Bono, U2’s singer, was put out of action when he injured his back in May. Next year many of the big acts will be on the road again, and a bumper year is expected.
It is not that more people are going to concerts. Rather, they are paying more to get in. In 1996 a ticket to one of America’s top 100 concert tours cost $25.81, according to Pollstar, a research firm that tracks the market. If prices had increased in line with inflation, the average ticket would have cost $35.30 last year. In fact it cost $62.57. Well-known acts charge much more. The worldwide average ticket price to see Madonna last year was $114. For Simon & Garfunkel it was an eye-watering $169. Leading musicians have also, by roundabout means, seized a larger share of the mysterious “service” charges that are often tacked onto tickets.
Fans complain bitterly about the rising price of live music. Yet they keep paying for concerts. One reason is that the live-music experience has vastly improved. Lots of shiny new venues have been built since the mid-1990s, many subsidised by governments in the hope that they would revitalise decayed downtowns. And musicians are much more enthusiastic about performing live. The misery of touring was once a familiar musicians’ gripe, inspiring songs from the Rolling Stones’ “Torn and Frayed” to Ice-T’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous”. But those songs were written in the days when touring was a way of marketing recorded music. Now it is a direct source of profit.
However much fans pay to get into a venue (and thanks to ticket touts they often pay more than even the greediest artists charge) they tend to have cash left over. This they spend on merchandise. “We have grown along with the touring business,” says Tom Bennett, the head of Bravado, which sells T-shirts and other paraphernalia. Bravado’s revenues have more than doubled since 2007, when it was acquired by Universal Music Group—although that is partly because it has signed up new acts. And merchandise has moved well beyond the arena. Nearly all Bravado’s turnover used to come from sales at concerts. Now about half comes from retail stores.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
The re-release of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 album “Exile on Main Street” in May was accompanied by a merchandising blitz that illustrates how far the business has evolved beyond selling black T-shirts. Bravado released more than 100 items, from baseball caps to boxes containing signed lithographs. There were not only album-cover T-shirts but also a higher-priced “as worn by” collection, featuring reproductions of clothes that members of the band happened to be wearing in the early 1970s. The huge range of items at different prices meant products found their way into budget stores like Target as well as dearer ones like Bloomingdale’s.
Music’s cachet and emotional pull also make it a potent weapon for businesses that want to build their own brands. The Rolling Stones (again) led the way in recruiting tour sponsors, from Sprint, a phone company, to Ameriquest, which sold mortgages. Sponsorship can lead to musicians wearing a company’s clothes and naming songs after it: Rascall Flatts, a country music band, has done both for American Living, a label carried by JCPenney. IEG, a firm that tracks the market, estimates that the value of tour sponsorships in North America will reach $1.74 billion this year, up from $1.38 billion in 2006.
Music’s best business customer is television. “Watch an evening’s worth of TV and count how many times you hear music in the background,” says Jeremy Lascelles, chief executive of Chrysalis. Your correspondent tried, and found that a new tune appeared, on average, every 40 seconds. Many necessitated payments to songwriters and the music publishers, like Chrysalis, that represent them. Publishers have become increasingly adept at hawking their wares to programme-makers. And music is not always in the background of TV programmes. Some of the most popular shows of the past few years—“American Idol”, “Glee” and “The X-Factor”—have been music shows.
Because it derives revenues from business as well as consumers, publishing is much more stable than recording. Record companies’ publishing departments, which once seemed rather dowdy next to sexy, talent-spotting A&R, have become vital cash machines. Publishing supplied 29% of EMI’s revenues and 45% of its profits in the year to March 2010. The outfit’s new boss, Roger Faxon, comes from that side of the business—a reflection of how the economics of music have shifted.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
On television, music is either supported by advertising or bundled invisibly into the cost of pay-TV subscriptions. That model is spreading from the box to the web.
Free music-streaming services like We7 and Spotify have proliferated in Europe: the latter claims 10m users. America has Vevo, a music-video website linked to YouTube and owned in part by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.
Because Vevo’s content is consistently professional, it draws advertisers. Rio Caraeff, who runs the outfit, says companies pay $25-30 to reach 1,000 viewers. That is more than television networks tend to get, although Vevo reaches fewer people and runs many fewer ads (just 15 seconds every six-and-a-half minutes).
In 2009 ad-supported digital music earned just £8.2m for British record companies, less than 1% of total revenues. But some have started charging fans for tunes on mobile phones—charges that may be bundled into monthly voice tariffs. Some music executives view the streaming services as the industry’s best hope.
Whether they are or not depends on where the new users of free streaming websites come from. If Spotify and Vevo are drawing people away from the CD racks and the iTunes store, they are undermining the industry. If, on the other hand, people are streaming music online rather than downloading it illegally from a BitTorrent site, the industry gains. It has converted a user who is worth nothing to someone who is worth a little. And the pool of pirates is so huge at present (IFPI, an international trade group, reckons that 19 out of every 20 tracks downloaded are illegal) that it ought to be possible to make serious money from persuading people to make the switch. The growth of legitimate streaming services has driven overall revenues up in South Korea and Sweden.
The possibility that music-streaming websites will turn CD buyers into freeloaders is a concern only in countries where people still buy music. That is not the case everywhere. Rampant piracy means just $19m-worth of CDs were sold in China last year—about the same as in Hungary. In such countries it makes sense to give away music, surrounding and interspersing it with advertisements. Websites like Top100.cn and Google are doing that. Record labels have also licensed music to Nokia, which bundles it into the price of its mobile phones.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
The proliferation of FM radio and multichannel television in emerging markets is also driving revenues from copyrights. At the same time, restaurants and clubs are being strong-armed into paying for the music they play. CISAC, an umbrella organisation for collection societies, has reported steady or rising receipts in the past decade (see chart 2). But there is still a long way to go before collections reach European levels in emerging markets or elsewhere in the rich world. In America, for example, radio stations do not pay performance rights, although there have been legislative efforts to change that.
Rising income from live performance, merchandising, sponsorship, publishing, online streaming and emerging markets has come to counterbalance losses from declining CD sales. As a result, some musicians are singing a different tune. Last year a new group, the Featured Artists Coalition, objected to government plans to punish file-sharers by suspending their broadband connections. Its leaders, including established artists such as Billy Bragg and Annie Lennox, argue that file-sharing is a useful form of promotion. But not everybody agrees.
The sharpest rebuke came from Lily Allen, a songwriter and pop singer who was then 24 years old. File-sharing was fine for long-in-the-tooth bands that “do sell-out arena tours and have the biggest Ferrari collections in the world”, she noted. But for new acts it is a calamity. As revenues dry up, record companies are becoming unwilling to invest in young artists, apart from those who have built an audience by winning talent shows on television.
Ms Allen’s intervention went down badly with the digital libertarians who dominate discussion of file-sharing on the internet. She was nonetheless right—and she could have gone further. Music piracy is fundamentally a generational issue. Polls have consistently shown that teenagers and young adults are the most likely to acquire music online illegally. They naturally prefer music made by people of their own age (such as Ms Allen), who write about the sort of things they experience. So the young steal from the young, while middle-aged fans continue to buy CDs put out by middle-aged musicians.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
In a sense, the recorded-music market is not so much dying as greying. In 2002 people aged 12 to 19 accounted for 16.4% of all spending on albums in Britain, according to TNS Worldpanel. That was almost double the share of people aged 60 or over (8.8%). The two groups have now switched positions. By 2008 teenagers accounted for just 12% of spending on albums, whether digital or physical. By contrast, the older fans’ share had gone up to 13.8%. The over-60s do not just spend more on music albums than teenagers. They spend more on pop-music albums.
The consequences can be seen in the pop charts. America’s bestselling album since 2000 is “1”, a collection of Beatles hits from the 1960s. At one point last year four of the top ten albums in Britain were Beatles recordings and the number-one album was a collection of songs by Vera Lynn, who was then 92 years old. The bestselling album worldwide last year was “I Dreamed a Dream” by Susan Boyle, a middle-aged Scot. Universal Music’s bestselling album in Japan in the first half of this year was “Vocalist 4” by Hideaki Tokunaga, Japan’s answer to Harry Connick Jr. If most of your fans are middle-aged, CD sales are holding up well.
The ageing of the recorded-music market has been accelerated by trends in retailing. As independent record shops and specialist media stores like Zavvi (formerly Virgin) have closed, supermarkets have emerged as leading outlets for music. Britain’s four big supermarkets—Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons—accounted for 24% of all music sales in the country last year. By comparison, Amazon.com had 13% of the market and iTunes only 11%.
Supermarkets are patronised disproportionately by the middle-aged and the old (see chart 3). People aged 40 and over account for 62% of spending on music in Tesco, according to Kantar, a research firm. Partly because of their clientele, partly because supermarkets are mass-market enterprises, they tend to stock mainstream fare. “People who are shopping for Midlake or The National won’t find them in a supermarket,” says Geoff Taylor of the BPI, referring to two American indie bands. “But I bet Kylie Minogue’s album is there.”
The rise in digital music-sales is scant compensation. People tend to buy tracks, not albums, from sites like Apple’s iTunes. They can obtain their favourite music much more cheaply than they could in the CD era. And even digital sales are now stalling. In Japan, mobile and online single-track sales rose only a shade during 2009. So far this year Americans have bought 841m digital tracks, mostly from Apple’s iTunes, according to Nielsen Soundscan—down from 847m at this point last year. Apple now offers plenty of other opportunities to spend money, from iPads to more than 250,000 apps. Music executives believe the company is cannibalising the musical part of its own business.
Yet the music business is surprisingly healthy, and becoming more so. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties on behalf of writers and publishers, has added up the entire British music business. He reckons it turned over £3.9 billion ($6.1 billion) in 2009, 5% more than in 2008. It was the second consecutive year of growth. Much of the money bypassed the record companies. But even they managed to pull in £1.1 billion last year, up 2% from 2008. A surprising number of things are making money for artists and music firms, and others show great promise. The music business is not dying. But it is changing profoundly.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
The longest, loudest boom is in live music. Between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled in value, from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion (see chart 1). Ticket sales wobbled in America during the summer of 2010, but that was partly because some big-selling acts took a break. One of the most reliable earners, Bono, U2’s singer, was put out of action when he injured his back in May. Next year many of the big acts will be on the road again, and a bumper year is expected.
It is not that more people are going to concerts. Rather, they are paying more to get in. In 1996 a ticket to one of America’s top 100 concert tours cost $25.81, according to Pollstar, a research firm that tracks the market. If prices had increased in line with inflation, the average ticket would have cost $35.30 last year. In fact it cost $62.57. Well-known acts charge much more. The worldwide average ticket price to see Madonna last year was $114. For Simon & Garfunkel it was an eye-watering $169. Leading musicians have also, by roundabout means, seized a larger share of the mysterious “service” charges that are often tacked onto tickets.
Fans complain bitterly about the rising price of live music. Yet they keep paying for concerts. One reason is that the live-music experience has vastly improved. Lots of shiny new venues have been built since the mid-1990s, many subsidised by governments in the hope that they would revitalise decayed downtowns. And musicians are much more enthusiastic about performing live. The misery of touring was once a familiar musicians’ gripe, inspiring songs from the Rolling Stones’ “Torn and Frayed” to Ice-T’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous”. But those songs were written in the days when touring was a way of marketing recorded music. Now it is a direct source of profit.
However much fans pay to get into a venue (and thanks to ticket touts they often pay more than even the greediest artists charge) they tend to have cash left over. This they spend on merchandise. “We have grown along with the touring business,” says Tom Bennett, the head of Bravado, which sells T-shirts and other paraphernalia. Bravado’s revenues have more than doubled since 2007, when it was acquired by Universal Music Group—although that is partly because it has signed up new acts. And merchandise has moved well beyond the arena. Nearly all Bravado’s turnover used to come from sales at concerts. Now about half comes from retail stores.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
The re-release of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 album “Exile on Main Street” in May was accompanied by a merchandising blitz that illustrates how far the business has evolved beyond selling black T-shirts. Bravado released more than 100 items, from baseball caps to boxes containing signed lithographs. There were not only album-cover T-shirts but also a higher-priced “as worn by” collection, featuring reproductions of clothes that members of the band happened to be wearing in the early 1970s. The huge range of items at different prices meant products found their way into budget stores like Target as well as dearer ones like Bloomingdale’s.
Music’s cachet and emotional pull also make it a potent weapon for businesses that want to build their own brands. The Rolling Stones (again) led the way in recruiting tour sponsors, from Sprint, a phone company, to Ameriquest, which sold mortgages. Sponsorship can lead to musicians wearing a company’s clothes and naming songs after it: Rascall Flatts, a country music band, has done both for American Living, a label carried by JCPenney. IEG, a firm that tracks the market, estimates that the value of tour sponsorships in North America will reach $1.74 billion this year, up from $1.38 billion in 2006.
Music’s best business customer is television. “Watch an evening’s worth of TV and count how many times you hear music in the background,” says Jeremy Lascelles, chief executive of Chrysalis. Your correspondent tried, and found that a new tune appeared, on average, every 40 seconds. Many necessitated payments to songwriters and the music publishers, like Chrysalis, that represent them. Publishers have become increasingly adept at hawking their wares to programme-makers. And music is not always in the background of TV programmes. Some of the most popular shows of the past few years—“American Idol”, “Glee” and “The X-Factor”—have been music shows.
Because it derives revenues from business as well as consumers, publishing is much more stable than recording. Record companies’ publishing departments, which once seemed rather dowdy next to sexy, talent-spotting A&R, have become vital cash machines. Publishing supplied 29% of EMI’s revenues and 45% of its profits in the year to March 2010. The outfit’s new boss, Roger Faxon, comes from that side of the business—a reflection of how the economics of music have shifted.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
On television, music is either supported by advertising or bundled invisibly into the cost of pay-TV subscriptions. That model is spreading from the box to the web.
Free music-streaming services like We7 and Spotify have proliferated in Europe: the latter claims 10m users. America has Vevo, a music-video website linked to YouTube and owned in part by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.
Because Vevo’s content is consistently professional, it draws advertisers. Rio Caraeff, who runs the outfit, says companies pay $25-30 to reach 1,000 viewers. That is more than television networks tend to get, although Vevo reaches fewer people and runs many fewer ads (just 15 seconds every six-and-a-half minutes).
In 2009 ad-supported digital music earned just £8.2m for British record companies, less than 1% of total revenues. But some have started charging fans for tunes on mobile phones—charges that may be bundled into monthly voice tariffs. Some music executives view the streaming services as the industry’s best hope.
Whether they are or not depends on where the new users of free streaming websites come from. If Spotify and Vevo are drawing people away from the CD racks and the iTunes store, they are undermining the industry. If, on the other hand, people are streaming music online rather than downloading it illegally from a BitTorrent site, the industry gains. It has converted a user who is worth nothing to someone who is worth a little. And the pool of pirates is so huge at present (IFPI, an international trade group, reckons that 19 out of every 20 tracks downloaded are illegal) that it ought to be possible to make serious money from persuading people to make the switch. The growth of legitimate streaming services has driven overall revenues up in South Korea and Sweden.
The possibility that music-streaming websites will turn CD buyers into freeloaders is a concern only in countries where people still buy music. That is not the case everywhere. Rampant piracy means just $19m-worth of CDs were sold in China last year—about the same as in Hungary. In such countries it makes sense to give away music, surrounding and interspersing it with advertisements. Websites like Top100.cn and Google are doing that. Record labels have also licensed music to Nokia, which bundles it into the price of its mobile phones.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
The proliferation of FM radio and multichannel television in emerging markets is also driving revenues from copyrights. At the same time, restaurants and clubs are being strong-armed into paying for the music they play. CISAC, an umbrella organisation for collection societies, has reported steady or rising receipts in the past decade (see chart 2). But there is still a long way to go before collections reach European levels in emerging markets or elsewhere in the rich world. In America, for example, radio stations do not pay performance rights, although there have been legislative efforts to change that.
Rising income from live performance, merchandising, sponsorship, publishing, online streaming and emerging markets has come to counterbalance losses from declining CD sales. As a result, some musicians are singing a different tune. Last year a new group, the Featured Artists Coalition, objected to government plans to punish file-sharers by suspending their broadband connections. Its leaders, including established artists such as Billy Bragg and Annie Lennox, argue that file-sharing is a useful form of promotion. But not everybody agrees.
The sharpest rebuke came from Lily Allen, a songwriter and pop singer who was then 24 years old. File-sharing was fine for long-in-the-tooth bands that “do sell-out arena tours and have the biggest Ferrari collections in the world”, she noted. But for new acts it is a calamity. As revenues dry up, record companies are becoming unwilling to invest in young artists, apart from those who have built an audience by winning talent shows on television.
Ms Allen’s intervention went down badly with the digital libertarians who dominate discussion of file-sharing on the internet. She was nonetheless right—and she could have gone further. Music piracy is fundamentally a generational issue. Polls have consistently shown that teenagers and young adults are the most likely to acquire music online illegally. They naturally prefer music made by people of their own age (such as Ms Allen), who write about the sort of things they experience. So the young steal from the young, while middle-aged fans continue to buy CDs put out by middle-aged musicians.
The music industry is finding other ways in which to make money
In a sense, the recorded-music market is not so much dying as greying. In 2002 people aged 12 to 19 accounted for 16.4% of all spending on albums in Britain, according to TNS Worldpanel. That was almost double the share of people aged 60 or over (8.8%). The two groups have now switched positions. By 2008 teenagers accounted for just 12% of spending on albums, whether digital or physical. By contrast, the older fans’ share had gone up to 13.8%. The over-60s do not just spend more on music albums than teenagers. They spend more on pop-music albums.
The consequences can be seen in the pop charts. America’s bestselling album since 2000 is “1”, a collection of Beatles hits from the 1960s. At one point last year four of the top ten albums in Britain were Beatles recordings and the number-one album was a collection of songs by Vera Lynn, who was then 92 years old. The bestselling album worldwide last year was “I Dreamed a Dream” by Susan Boyle, a middle-aged Scot. Universal Music’s bestselling album in Japan in the first half of this year was “Vocalist 4” by Hideaki Tokunaga, Japan’s answer to Harry Connick Jr. If most of your fans are middle-aged, CD sales are holding up well.
The ageing of the recorded-music market has been accelerated by trends in retailing. As independent record shops and specialist media stores like Zavvi (formerly Virgin) have closed, supermarkets have emerged as leading outlets for music. Britain’s four big supermarkets—Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons—accounted for 24% of all music sales in the country last year. By comparison, Amazon.com had 13% of the market and iTunes only 11%.
Supermarkets are patronised disproportionately by the middle-aged and the old (see chart 3). People aged 40 and over account for 62% of spending on music in Tesco, according to Kantar, a research firm. Partly because of their clientele, partly because supermarkets are mass-market enterprises, they tend to stock mainstream fare. “People who are shopping for Midlake or The National won’t find them in a supermarket,” says Geoff Taylor of the BPI, referring to two American indie bands. “But I bet Kylie Minogue’s album is there.”
Helpful websites for research on Convergence
http://www.facebook.com/UniversalMusicGroup - they like ‘Glee’ (see in the likes panel). Universal music’s facebook page is used to promote itself, but also its associated products.
http://www.spotify.com/int/about/press/2008-10-07-spotify-announces-licensing-deals-and-upcoming-launch/ Spotify on Universal: Good quotes from universal about ‘subscription services being the future.
http://www.slideshare.net/guest52ec5f7/universal-music-group-4067653
http://www.slideshare.net/craigwinch/synergy-and-convergence
http://fixed-mobile-convergence.tmcnet.com/topics/mobile-communications/articles/43697-universal-music-group-playphone-team-mobile-music-offerings.htm universal convergence case study
http://www.spotify.com/int/about/press/2008-10-07-spotify-announces-licensing-deals-and-upcoming-launch/ Spotify on Universal: Good quotes from universal about ‘subscription services being the future.
http://www.slideshare.net/guest52ec5f7/universal-music-group-4067653
http://www.slideshare.net/craigwinch/synergy-and-convergence
http://fixed-mobile-convergence.tmcnet.com/topics/mobile-communications/articles/43697-universal-music-group-playphone-team-mobile-music-offerings.htm universal convergence case study
'Glee' Is A 'Goldmine' For The Music Industry, Experts Say
Last month, when "Glee" packed an entire episode with Britney Spears songs (and one Paramore tune), the show not only posted record-setting ratings, but placed a rather formidable stranglehold on the iTunes songs chart too. The following week, they decided to work a selection from the hallowed Lennon/McCartney songbook — "I Want to Hold Your Hand" — into things, a move that was equal parts cross-generational marketing masterstroke and, well, fist-thrusting victory lap.
Because, over the course of two-and-a-quarter seasons, "Glee" has transformed itself from a cult curiosity into to a bona fide sensation. It has spawned sold-out tours and chart-topping albums, but now, it's become something else entirely: the kind of show that can feature songs by the greatest pop star of the past decade one week and the greatest band of all time the next. It's a genuine, market-driving, industry-rejuvenating hit. And how did all this happen? Well, because certain folks realized that there was money to be made in partnering with the show.
"The industry has definitely started paying attention. If you're a songwriter or music publisher, you're definitely promoting your songs to the show," said Jeff Brabec, vice president of business affairs for music publisher Chrysalis, which has landed songs by the likes of Billy Idol and Paul Anka on "Glee." "It's truly something different, because, of course, there are downloads, and the albums, which have been phenomenally successful, especially for TV soundtracks, but ... there are so many other opportunities [the show] presents. For a songwriter or a music publisher, 'Glee' is a goldmine. It touches almost every single source of income that's possible."
"A show like 'Glee' only comes along once in a blue moon, and it's just such a great platform for our copyrights," added Wende Crowley, vice president of film and TV music for publisher Sony/ATV, which controls not only the bulk of the Lennon/McCartney songbook, but also the songs of Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, to name just a few. "It's not only embraced artists like Gaga, who are so huge in the collective consciousness, but it's breathed life into older songs too. It's been an amazing opportunity to work with them, and you wish more shows like it would come out each year. 'Glee' is a total game changer."
And while that may be the case, behind the scenes, the "Glee" machine runs on decidedly old-school fuel — namely, music licensing: a dicey, downright confusing (and supremely profitable) area that the casual Britney fan probably can't even begin to comprehend. But, suffice it to say, when the "Glee" producers decided to use " ... Baby One More Time," they had to pay a lot. And before a single note of the song can be re-recorded, those payments begin with a synchronization license.
"Every time a song is put into a TV show, the producer has to sign a synchronization license to get permission to use [it], and it's a purely negotiated license," explained Brabec, who, along with his brother Todd, wrote an entire book on this very subject, "Music, Money and Success." "[The producers] send you a request that lists the use of the song and, in this case, the scene description, and they give you a number of options, with respect to how they want to distribute the show, and all have various price points. The publisher fills in the blank lines next to the dollar signs. ... You can make a substantial amount of money just in the synchronization fee alone. And that's just step one."
Admittedly, that's a pretty simplified explanation — we glossed over stuff like "five-year, all-TV licenses" and "out-of-context trailer licenses" — but after the sync license is signed, the ball is put in motion. Once an episode of "Glee" airs, the next step of the process begins, because now, a songwriter and publisher are reaping the rewards of not only iTunes downloads and album sales, but international re-airings of the show too. As you can imagine, this is where the real money starts to roll in — and it's all guaranteed under a mechanical license.
"Immediately, you've got the download situation. Under that situation, the songwriters and music publisher, for every single download, will get 9.1 cents. So if a song is downloaded 100,000 times in the first couple of days — and that's not unusual at all — the music publisher will get $9,100 and the publisher will share that with the songwriter," Brabec said. "And then, extend that to the physical albums. If you've got one song on the 'Glee' album, and that album sold 1 million units, that would be $91,000 in songwriter and music-publisher royalty.
"And that's all backend. These things go on and on, years after your initial downloads. ... If a song is sung by the 'Glee' cast, you're probably looking at $900 to $1,100 for one performance on the Fox network. And that's U.S. only. This show is broadcast or repeated worldwide; you collect on that too," Brabec added. "And then you've got the ringtone market. If the 'Glee' version is on a ringtone, the songwriter and music publisher will get 24 cents for each ring tone distributed — and then you've got sheet music, etc. Believe me, for years and years and years into the future, songwriters and music publishers will be making money on this."
So the bottom line is, if you're someone like Max Martin, and you wrote " ... Baby One More Time," well, chances are, you're loving life even more these days (and for the foreseeable future too). But the beauty of "Glee" is, you don't have to be a certified hitmaker (or even the Beatles) to benefit. Business is booming, and it doesn't show signs of slowing down anytime soon.
"When you have a song that appears on 'Glee,' the next day, it's on iTunes, and the number of downloads is astronomical, and it really reawakens people's interest in songs," said Kristin Durie, vice president of film and TV at EMI Music Publishing. "I think hearing these songs — both old and new — from 'Over the Rainbow' to 'Empire State of Mind,' is breathing new life into people's songs."
October 13th 2010 MTV News
Tasks:
Find 5 reasons why Glee has a positive impact on the record industry
Find 3 examples of artists who have benefited from The TV programme ‘Glee’ and explain how it has helped them.
Because, over the course of two-and-a-quarter seasons, "Glee" has transformed itself from a cult curiosity into to a bona fide sensation. It has spawned sold-out tours and chart-topping albums, but now, it's become something else entirely: the kind of show that can feature songs by the greatest pop star of the past decade one week and the greatest band of all time the next. It's a genuine, market-driving, industry-rejuvenating hit. And how did all this happen? Well, because certain folks realized that there was money to be made in partnering with the show.
"The industry has definitely started paying attention. If you're a songwriter or music publisher, you're definitely promoting your songs to the show," said Jeff Brabec, vice president of business affairs for music publisher Chrysalis, which has landed songs by the likes of Billy Idol and Paul Anka on "Glee." "It's truly something different, because, of course, there are downloads, and the albums, which have been phenomenally successful, especially for TV soundtracks, but ... there are so many other opportunities [the show] presents. For a songwriter or a music publisher, 'Glee' is a goldmine. It touches almost every single source of income that's possible."
"A show like 'Glee' only comes along once in a blue moon, and it's just such a great platform for our copyrights," added Wende Crowley, vice president of film and TV music for publisher Sony/ATV, which controls not only the bulk of the Lennon/McCartney songbook, but also the songs of Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, to name just a few. "It's not only embraced artists like Gaga, who are so huge in the collective consciousness, but it's breathed life into older songs too. It's been an amazing opportunity to work with them, and you wish more shows like it would come out each year. 'Glee' is a total game changer."
And while that may be the case, behind the scenes, the "Glee" machine runs on decidedly old-school fuel — namely, music licensing: a dicey, downright confusing (and supremely profitable) area that the casual Britney fan probably can't even begin to comprehend. But, suffice it to say, when the "Glee" producers decided to use " ... Baby One More Time," they had to pay a lot. And before a single note of the song can be re-recorded, those payments begin with a synchronization license.
"Every time a song is put into a TV show, the producer has to sign a synchronization license to get permission to use [it], and it's a purely negotiated license," explained Brabec, who, along with his brother Todd, wrote an entire book on this very subject, "Music, Money and Success." "[The producers] send you a request that lists the use of the song and, in this case, the scene description, and they give you a number of options, with respect to how they want to distribute the show, and all have various price points. The publisher fills in the blank lines next to the dollar signs. ... You can make a substantial amount of money just in the synchronization fee alone. And that's just step one."
Admittedly, that's a pretty simplified explanation — we glossed over stuff like "five-year, all-TV licenses" and "out-of-context trailer licenses" — but after the sync license is signed, the ball is put in motion. Once an episode of "Glee" airs, the next step of the process begins, because now, a songwriter and publisher are reaping the rewards of not only iTunes downloads and album sales, but international re-airings of the show too. As you can imagine, this is where the real money starts to roll in — and it's all guaranteed under a mechanical license.
"Immediately, you've got the download situation. Under that situation, the songwriters and music publisher, for every single download, will get 9.1 cents. So if a song is downloaded 100,000 times in the first couple of days — and that's not unusual at all — the music publisher will get $9,100 and the publisher will share that with the songwriter," Brabec said. "And then, extend that to the physical albums. If you've got one song on the 'Glee' album, and that album sold 1 million units, that would be $91,000 in songwriter and music-publisher royalty.
"And that's all backend. These things go on and on, years after your initial downloads. ... If a song is sung by the 'Glee' cast, you're probably looking at $900 to $1,100 for one performance on the Fox network. And that's U.S. only. This show is broadcast or repeated worldwide; you collect on that too," Brabec added. "And then you've got the ringtone market. If the 'Glee' version is on a ringtone, the songwriter and music publisher will get 24 cents for each ring tone distributed — and then you've got sheet music, etc. Believe me, for years and years and years into the future, songwriters and music publishers will be making money on this."
So the bottom line is, if you're someone like Max Martin, and you wrote " ... Baby One More Time," well, chances are, you're loving life even more these days (and for the foreseeable future too). But the beauty of "Glee" is, you don't have to be a certified hitmaker (or even the Beatles) to benefit. Business is booming, and it doesn't show signs of slowing down anytime soon.
"When you have a song that appears on 'Glee,' the next day, it's on iTunes, and the number of downloads is astronomical, and it really reawakens people's interest in songs," said Kristin Durie, vice president of film and TV at EMI Music Publishing. "I think hearing these songs — both old and new — from 'Over the Rainbow' to 'Empire State of Mind,' is breathing new life into people's songs."
October 13th 2010 MTV News
Tasks:
Find 5 reasons why Glee has a positive impact on the record industry
Find 3 examples of artists who have benefited from The TV programme ‘Glee’ and explain how it has helped them.
Convergence
Definition:
The coming together of two previous separate media technologies to form one.
The coming together of two previous separate media technologies to form one.
Technological Convergence
Example: THE IPHONE /IPAD
There is no need to leave the house to buy music any more as your home computer also functions as your CD collection and online shop (iTunes).
Risk or benefit?
Media theorists agree that convergence enriches and expands our experience and usage of the media.
For example the internet = an example of converging technology
BUT although it has several benefits, what are the disadvantages of this converging technology?
Benefits of convergence
Risks/disadvantages of convergence
How can convergence affect institutions?
Positive benefits: The internet serves more than one function: Not only can audiences listen to and purchase music, labels can distribute music on the internet and it can be used to market music:
Youtube: unsigned artists are putting their music videos on websites where their music can be spotted by scouts from Record Labels.
Negative risks: Napster in 1999 saw the start of music sharing on the internet. At its peak in 2001, there were as many as 1.5 million people simultaneously sharing files worldwide by using Napster’s software.
Music was bought from the internet due to technologies converging and resulting in one device (the home computer/the internet) being used for a variety of purposes including buying and making music.
Universal Music Group
Universal’s revenue streams now include money gained from cross-promotional marketing (synergy) with programmes such as Glee and The X factor produced by Syco Music.
Domino Records
Domino uses its website as an effort to exploit the opportunities provided by the internet: http://www.dominorecordco.com/.
In includes Downloads, Dominocast (monthly podcast), Domino Mart (fans can buy music on vinyl, CD or MP3), Domino Player, Video and promotional content, Mailing list and is regularly updated with news on releases, tour dates and new artists.
Alternative Revenue Streams
Vevo
Universal Music Group co-developed Vevo, a site designed for music videos inspired by Hulu.com, which similarly, will allow for free, ad-supported streaming of music videos and other music content. The music videos are shown in better quality than the original ones on Youtube.
Vevo, stylized as VEVO, is a music video website. It is a joint venture between Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Abu Dhabi Media with EMI licensing its content to the group without taking an ownership stake. The service was launched officially on 8 December 2009. The videos on VEVO are syndicated across the web, with Google and VEVO sharing the advertising revenue.
VEVO offers music videos from three of the 'big four' major record labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and EMI. Warner Music Group was initially reported to be considering hosting its content on VEVO[7], but subsequently formed a rival alliance with MTV Networks. There are currently around 23,000 videos available on VEVO.
Imeem.com
In December 2007 UMG announced a deal with Imeem which allows users of the social network to listen to any track from Universal's catalogue for free with a portion of the advertising generated by the music being shared with the record label.
In the end this deal was unsuccessful and Imeem is now a defunct website that diverts traffic to MySpace. On December 8, 2009, imeem was bought out by MySpace Music in a firesale for an undisclosed amount.
The online service imeem was a social media Web site where users interacted with each other by streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos.
The company was founded in 2003 by Dalton Caldwell (formerly of VA Linux) and Jan Jannink (formerly of Napster), and many of its core engineering team came from the original Napster file-sharing service.[1] The company takes its name from "meme", a term coined by biologist Richard Dawkins to describe the ideas and cultural phenomena that spread as if they had a life of their own.
Helping to pioneer the free, advertising-supported model for online music, imeem permitted consumers to legally upload, stream and share music and music playlists for free with the costs supported by advertising. In 2007, imeem became the first-ever online music site to secure licenses from all four U.S. major music labels to offer their music catalogs for free streaming and sharing on the web.[2]
The company also created the web's first embeddable music and video playlists. People could use imeem's widgets to embed songs and playlists from imeem virtually anywhere on the web, including on their MySpace and Facebook profiles or on their personal blogs.
YouTube
In May 2007, UMG was accused of abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in order to squelch criticism, by forcing YouTube to remove a Michelle Malkin video critical of singer Akon. Eventually, UMG backed off its claims after being challenged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the same year, UMG was accused of using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to indiscriminately remove content related to the artist Prince, most notably a twenty-nine second home video in which children danced to one of Prince's songs.
YouTube is also used for A&R scouts of major labels such as (UMG) scout artist to sign. There has been criticism and labels have come under fire in regards to labels using YouTube to scout Talent. This can start label wars when different labels are pitching for the same artist or band.
Universal's Music Group channel was the first to get 1 billion views. It also got 1 million subscribers, the 4th channel to receive that number.
In certain countries (like Germany), UMG forbids YouTube to deliver videos containing works from its artists.
Spotify
is a music streaming service offering unlimited streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group and Universal with virtually no buffering delay. The system is currently accessible using Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and mobile devices such as the iPhone and those running Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile or Palm's HP web OS.
Music can be browsed by artist, album, record label, genre or playlist as well as by direct searches. On desktop clients a link allows the listener to purchase selected material via partner retailers. Launched in October 2008 by Swedish startup "Spotify AB", the service has approximately ten million users as of September 15, 2010; about 650,000 of these are paying members.
Users can register either for free accounts supported by visual and radio-style advertising or for paid subscriptions without ads and with a range of extra features such as higher bitrate streams and offline access to music. A "Premium" account is required to use Spotify on mobile devices.
Spotify is currently available only in certain parts of Europe, with paid subscriptions restricted to people with credit/debit cards or PayPal accounts registered in particular countries.
Glee
Glee is a musical comedy-drama television series that airs on Fox in the United States. It focuses on the high school glee club New Directions competing on the show choir competition circuit, while its members deal with relationships, sexuality and social issues.
Songwriters and music publisher, for every single download, will get 9.1 cents. So if a song is downloaded 100,000 times in the first couple of days — and that's not unusual at all — the music publisher will get $9,100 and the publisher will share that with the songwriter," Brabec said. "And then, extend that to the physical albums. If you've got one song on the 'Glee' album, and that album sold 1 million units, that would be $91,000 in songwriter and music-publisher royalty.
"And that's all backend. These things go on and on, years after your initial downloads. ... If a song is sung by the 'Glee' cast, you're probably looking at $900 to $1,100 for one performance on the Fox network. And that's U.S. only. This show is broadcast or repeated worldwide; you collect on that too," Brabec added. "And then you've got the ringtone market. If the 'Glee' version is on a ringtone, the songwriter and music publisher will get 24 cents for each ring tone distributed — and then you've got sheet music, etc. Believe me, for years and years and years into the future, songwriters and music publishers will be making money on this."
Universal Music Group co-developed Vevo, a site designed for music videos inspired by Hulu.com, which similarly, will allow for free, ad-supported streaming of music videos and other music content. The music videos are shown in better quality than the original ones on Youtube.
Vevo, stylized as VEVO, is a music video website. It is a joint venture between Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Abu Dhabi Media with EMI licensing its content to the group without taking an ownership stake. The service was launched officially on 8 December 2009. The videos on VEVO are syndicated across the web, with Google and VEVO sharing the advertising revenue.
VEVO offers music videos from three of the 'big four' major record labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and EMI. Warner Music Group was initially reported to be considering hosting its content on VEVO[7], but subsequently formed a rival alliance with MTV Networks. There are currently around 23,000 videos available on VEVO.
Imeem.com
In December 2007 UMG announced a deal with Imeem which allows users of the social network to listen to any track from Universal's catalogue for free with a portion of the advertising generated by the music being shared with the record label.
In the end this deal was unsuccessful and Imeem is now a defunct website that diverts traffic to MySpace. On December 8, 2009, imeem was bought out by MySpace Music in a firesale for an undisclosed amount.
The online service imeem was a social media Web site where users interacted with each other by streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos.
The company was founded in 2003 by Dalton Caldwell (formerly of VA Linux) and Jan Jannink (formerly of Napster), and many of its core engineering team came from the original Napster file-sharing service.[1] The company takes its name from "meme", a term coined by biologist Richard Dawkins to describe the ideas and cultural phenomena that spread as if they had a life of their own.
Helping to pioneer the free, advertising-supported model for online music, imeem permitted consumers to legally upload, stream and share music and music playlists for free with the costs supported by advertising. In 2007, imeem became the first-ever online music site to secure licenses from all four U.S. major music labels to offer their music catalogs for free streaming and sharing on the web.[2]
The company also created the web's first embeddable music and video playlists. People could use imeem's widgets to embed songs and playlists from imeem virtually anywhere on the web, including on their MySpace and Facebook profiles or on their personal blogs.
YouTube
In May 2007, UMG was accused of abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in order to squelch criticism, by forcing YouTube to remove a Michelle Malkin video critical of singer Akon. Eventually, UMG backed off its claims after being challenged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the same year, UMG was accused of using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to indiscriminately remove content related to the artist Prince, most notably a twenty-nine second home video in which children danced to one of Prince's songs.
YouTube is also used for A&R scouts of major labels such as (UMG) scout artist to sign. There has been criticism and labels have come under fire in regards to labels using YouTube to scout Talent. This can start label wars when different labels are pitching for the same artist or band.
Universal's Music Group channel was the first to get 1 billion views. It also got 1 million subscribers, the 4th channel to receive that number.
In certain countries (like Germany), UMG forbids YouTube to deliver videos containing works from its artists.
Spotify
is a music streaming service offering unlimited streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group and Universal with virtually no buffering delay. The system is currently accessible using Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and mobile devices such as the iPhone and those running Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile or Palm's HP web OS.
Music can be browsed by artist, album, record label, genre or playlist as well as by direct searches. On desktop clients a link allows the listener to purchase selected material via partner retailers. Launched in October 2008 by Swedish startup "Spotify AB", the service has approximately ten million users as of September 15, 2010; about 650,000 of these are paying members.
Users can register either for free accounts supported by visual and radio-style advertising or for paid subscriptions without ads and with a range of extra features such as higher bitrate streams and offline access to music. A "Premium" account is required to use Spotify on mobile devices.
Spotify is currently available only in certain parts of Europe, with paid subscriptions restricted to people with credit/debit cards or PayPal accounts registered in particular countries.
Glee
Glee is a musical comedy-drama television series that airs on Fox in the United States. It focuses on the high school glee club New Directions competing on the show choir competition circuit, while its members deal with relationships, sexuality and social issues.
Songwriters and music publisher, for every single download, will get 9.1 cents. So if a song is downloaded 100,000 times in the first couple of days — and that's not unusual at all — the music publisher will get $9,100 and the publisher will share that with the songwriter," Brabec said. "And then, extend that to the physical albums. If you've got one song on the 'Glee' album, and that album sold 1 million units, that would be $91,000 in songwriter and music-publisher royalty.
"And that's all backend. These things go on and on, years after your initial downloads. ... If a song is sung by the 'Glee' cast, you're probably looking at $900 to $1,100 for one performance on the Fox network. And that's U.S. only. This show is broadcast or repeated worldwide; you collect on that too," Brabec added. "And then you've got the ringtone market. If the 'Glee' version is on a ringtone, the songwriter and music publisher will get 24 cents for each ring tone distributed — and then you've got sheet music, etc. Believe me, for years and years and years into the future, songwriters and music publishers will be making money on this."
Convergence and alternative revenue streams
Universal Music Group
Universal’s revenue streams now include money gained from cross-promotional marketing (synergy) with programmes such as Glee and The X factor produced by Syco Music.
How is this an example of converging industries?
Domino Records
Domino uses its website as an effort to exploit the opportunities provided by the internet: http://www.dominorecordco.com/.
In includes Downloads, Dominocast (monthly podcast), Domino Mart (fans can buy music on vinyl, CD or MP3), Domino Player, Video and promotional content, Mailing list and is regularly updated with news on releases, tour dates and new artists.
How is this an example of online convergence?
The Glee Effect
How might this be an example of converging industries?
What are the benefits for the music industry of a TV show like Glee?
Find 5 reasons why Glee has a positive impact on the record industry
Find 3 examples of artists who have benefited from The TV programme ‘Glee’ and explain how it has helped them.
Alternative Revenue Streams
VEVO
UTUBE
IMEEM.COM
SPOTIFY
Universal’s revenue streams now include money gained from cross-promotional marketing (synergy) with programmes such as Glee and The X factor produced by Syco Music.
How is this an example of converging industries?
Domino Records
Domino uses its website as an effort to exploit the opportunities provided by the internet: http://www.dominorecordco.com/.
In includes Downloads, Dominocast (monthly podcast), Domino Mart (fans can buy music on vinyl, CD or MP3), Domino Player, Video and promotional content, Mailing list and is regularly updated with news on releases, tour dates and new artists.
How is this an example of online convergence?
The Glee Effect
How might this be an example of converging industries?
What are the benefits for the music industry of a TV show like Glee?
Find 5 reasons why Glee has a positive impact on the record industry
Find 3 examples of artists who have benefited from The TV programme ‘Glee’ and explain how it has helped them.
Alternative Revenue Streams
VEVO
UTUBE
IMEEM.COM
SPOTIFY
Feedback from Mock exam
How you are marked:
Explanation/analysis/argument (20 marks)
} • Excellent understanding of the task
} • Excellent knowledge and understanding of institutional/audience practices - factual knowledge is relevant and accurate
} • A clear and developed argument, substantiated by detailed reference to case study material
} • Clearly relevant to set question.
Use of examples (20 marks)
} • Frequent evidence from case study material and/or own experience
} • Examples which are clearly relevant to the set question.
Use of terminology (10 marks)
} Use of terminology is relevant and accurate.
} Complex issues have been expressed clearly and fluently. Sentences and paragraphs, consistently relevant, have been well structured,
} Appropriate technical terminology.
WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF QUESTION I COULD BE ASKED IN THE EXAM?
What are the issues raised by media ownership in contemporary media practice?
What is the importance of cross media convergence and synergy in production, distribution and marketing?
What are the technologies that have been introduced in recent years at the levels of production, distribution, marketing and exchange?
What is the significance of proliferation in hardware and content for institutions and audiences?
What is the importance of technological convergence for institutions and audiences?
What are the issues raised in the targeting of national and local audiences (specifically, British) by international or global institutions?
What are the ways in which the candidates own experiences of media consumption
Explanation/analysis/argument (20 marks)
} • Excellent understanding of the task
} • Excellent knowledge and understanding of institutional/audience practices - factual knowledge is relevant and accurate
} • A clear and developed argument, substantiated by detailed reference to case study material
} • Clearly relevant to set question.
Use of examples (20 marks)
} • Frequent evidence from case study material and/or own experience
} • Examples which are clearly relevant to the set question.
Use of terminology (10 marks)
} Use of terminology is relevant and accurate.
} Complex issues have been expressed clearly and fluently. Sentences and paragraphs, consistently relevant, have been well structured,
} Appropriate technical terminology.
WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF QUESTION I COULD BE ASKED IN THE EXAM?
What are the issues raised by media ownership in contemporary media practice?
What is the importance of cross media convergence and synergy in production, distribution and marketing?
What are the technologies that have been introduced in recent years at the levels of production, distribution, marketing and exchange?
What is the significance of proliferation in hardware and content for institutions and audiences?
What is the importance of technological convergence for institutions and audiences?
What are the issues raised in the targeting of national and local audiences (specifically, British) by international or global institutions?
What are the ways in which the candidates own experiences of media consumption
The record industry fights its corner in the download age
Far from facing extinction, the record industry is still a vital cog in the music-making machine, claims a report. But will the working relationship between artist and label ever be the same?
A time for reflection … major labels such as EMI insist they still have a role to play in the internet era. Photograph: Martin Argles
Record labels have been on the receiving end of much criticism lately. They've been criticised for heavily lobbying those involved in passing the digital economy bill, accused of greediness, of being dinosaurs, of being unwilling to embrace the internet, of treating artists unfairly – even of being obsolete. Now they're fighting back in an attempt to justify their existence.
A report published this week by IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), claims that record companies invest $5bn (£3.3bn) a year worldwide in artists, and that the "ripple effect" of this investment helps generate a broader music sector, including live music, radio and publishing, worth around $160bn annually. The report also estimates that more than two million people are employed globally in the broader music economy.
In an apparent response to those who claim that, with the internet's ability to connect artists directly with their fans, record labels will become obsolete, John Kennedy (chairman of IFPI) says: "Even artists who are typically described as having broken through the internet, the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, or Sandi Thom, all ended up combining with conventional record labels." The IFPI's report says that there are more than 4,000 artists on major record label rosters, with thousands more on independents. Around one in four of these artists were signed in the last 12 months. The report points out that, in the UK, record labels spend 23% of their total revenue on A&R (the average worldwide is 16%), comparing that to the pharmaceutical industry, which spends 15% on research and development.
Mike Smith, the MD of Columbia Records, comes from a music publishing background and said he had no idea how much it costs to break an artist before he started working for a record label. "It costs us £10k-£20k for our artist to perform on The X Factor – up to £100k for them performing on the Brits." He says that retail value dropping by 40%, piracy and a la carte downloading has forced the label to work a lot smarter. How? By signing better artists, he says. "You have to overcompensate for average artists. With good artists you don't have to buy expensive advertising." He claims this has brought the hit rate of signed artists down from 1 in 10 to 1 in 4. "Our job is to reduce the random element to a minimum."
According to the report, called Investing In Music, breaking a UK or US pop artist typically costs more than $1m (£660,000): $200,000 for artist advance, $200,000 for recording costs, $200,000 for three videos, $100,000 for tour support and $300,000 for promotion and marketing. Both Kennedy and Smith says this is a conservative figure. It's not only pop artists that need tour support. Dickon Stainer of Decca Records says that his label spent £1m on tour support for jazz artist Melody Gardot to break her globally. Yes, investing in new talent is a hugely risky business, a fact Guy Hands can surely now testify to. "It takes a lot of money and a lot of balls," says Kennedy. This is why record labels need to have multi-album deals to allow a return on their investment, states the report.
As much as the anti-label crusaders paint a very black-and-white picture, unfortunately, so does this IFPI report. Both parties seem to ignore facts in an effort to fight their corner. One side says that record labels became obsolete when recording gear became affordable for the bedroom musician and with the invention of social networking sites. They also claim that touring and merchandising will be how future artist will make a living and pay for recordings. This ignores the fact that there are literally millions of acts on MySpace and that, for the majority of artists, it actually costs money to tour. The IFPI report quotes Nina Persson, lead singer of the Cardigans and A Camp, saying: "It would be very difficult for me to have made a living just from live music. I would have to travel alone with a guitar and no band or crew to make that work."
The record label side uses international pop stars as examples to illustrate the cost and commitment it takes to develop a successful career. The truth lies somewhere in between. This, as artist manager Jon Webster (CEO of the Music Managers Forum) points out, is an issue that can't be subject to generalisation. A niche singer/songwriter would most likely cost a lot less in terms of touring. Today, a business-savvy artist can make a decent living, though spending a vast amount of time on the internet to develop and sustain a hands-on career takes a lot of time; time that should, one can argue, be used to practice and write songs.
Yes, good record labels still supply a service that venture capitalists don't. Good A&R people will push artists to write better songs. They provide promotion and marketing teams with contacts and experience, which, along with advances, allows the artist to focus on the music. But the IFPI report omits to mention that their investment comes at a pretty high price (though, notably, it only does so if the artist becomes successful). One could say that it's a loan with a very high interest rate. The report states that the advance is recoupable from an artist's sales, but fails to acknowledge that much of the other costs often are, too. Tour support is sometimes recouped from merchandising. A manager I spoke to said his band's major label refused to provide £20k in tour support (a lot less than the £100k mentioned in the IFPI report) unless they received 50% of all merchandise for the length of the rest of the contract. The band chose to borrow money from their parents to cover the bill instead. If a label decides to spend money on TV advertising campaign for a record, they'll often recoup that cost from the artist – either by adding 50% of the cost to the artist's "recoupment bill" or by reducing the royalty rate due to the artist for the record by 50% for a whole year.
The manager of a big international pop star (who wants to remain anonymous for this piece), who has signed to a major, says that his biggest wish is that the artist/record label relationship becomes a partnership in the future. Today, he says, there's a tangible lack of trust. The fact that artists now have a choice of not signing a record deal will, hopefully, make record labels operate in a much more transparent manner.
March 2010
A time for reflection … major labels such as EMI insist they still have a role to play in the internet era. Photograph: Martin Argles
Record labels have been on the receiving end of much criticism lately. They've been criticised for heavily lobbying those involved in passing the digital economy bill, accused of greediness, of being dinosaurs, of being unwilling to embrace the internet, of treating artists unfairly – even of being obsolete. Now they're fighting back in an attempt to justify their existence.
A report published this week by IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), claims that record companies invest $5bn (£3.3bn) a year worldwide in artists, and that the "ripple effect" of this investment helps generate a broader music sector, including live music, radio and publishing, worth around $160bn annually. The report also estimates that more than two million people are employed globally in the broader music economy.
In an apparent response to those who claim that, with the internet's ability to connect artists directly with their fans, record labels will become obsolete, John Kennedy (chairman of IFPI) says: "Even artists who are typically described as having broken through the internet, the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, or Sandi Thom, all ended up combining with conventional record labels." The IFPI's report says that there are more than 4,000 artists on major record label rosters, with thousands more on independents. Around one in four of these artists were signed in the last 12 months. The report points out that, in the UK, record labels spend 23% of their total revenue on A&R (the average worldwide is 16%), comparing that to the pharmaceutical industry, which spends 15% on research and development.
Mike Smith, the MD of Columbia Records, comes from a music publishing background and said he had no idea how much it costs to break an artist before he started working for a record label. "It costs us £10k-£20k for our artist to perform on The X Factor – up to £100k for them performing on the Brits." He says that retail value dropping by 40%, piracy and a la carte downloading has forced the label to work a lot smarter. How? By signing better artists, he says. "You have to overcompensate for average artists. With good artists you don't have to buy expensive advertising." He claims this has brought the hit rate of signed artists down from 1 in 10 to 1 in 4. "Our job is to reduce the random element to a minimum."
According to the report, called Investing In Music, breaking a UK or US pop artist typically costs more than $1m (£660,000): $200,000 for artist advance, $200,000 for recording costs, $200,000 for three videos, $100,000 for tour support and $300,000 for promotion and marketing. Both Kennedy and Smith says this is a conservative figure. It's not only pop artists that need tour support. Dickon Stainer of Decca Records says that his label spent £1m on tour support for jazz artist Melody Gardot to break her globally. Yes, investing in new talent is a hugely risky business, a fact Guy Hands can surely now testify to. "It takes a lot of money and a lot of balls," says Kennedy. This is why record labels need to have multi-album deals to allow a return on their investment, states the report.
As much as the anti-label crusaders paint a very black-and-white picture, unfortunately, so does this IFPI report. Both parties seem to ignore facts in an effort to fight their corner. One side says that record labels became obsolete when recording gear became affordable for the bedroom musician and with the invention of social networking sites. They also claim that touring and merchandising will be how future artist will make a living and pay for recordings. This ignores the fact that there are literally millions of acts on MySpace and that, for the majority of artists, it actually costs money to tour. The IFPI report quotes Nina Persson, lead singer of the Cardigans and A Camp, saying: "It would be very difficult for me to have made a living just from live music. I would have to travel alone with a guitar and no band or crew to make that work."
The record label side uses international pop stars as examples to illustrate the cost and commitment it takes to develop a successful career. The truth lies somewhere in between. This, as artist manager Jon Webster (CEO of the Music Managers Forum) points out, is an issue that can't be subject to generalisation. A niche singer/songwriter would most likely cost a lot less in terms of touring. Today, a business-savvy artist can make a decent living, though spending a vast amount of time on the internet to develop and sustain a hands-on career takes a lot of time; time that should, one can argue, be used to practice and write songs.
Yes, good record labels still supply a service that venture capitalists don't. Good A&R people will push artists to write better songs. They provide promotion and marketing teams with contacts and experience, which, along with advances, allows the artist to focus on the music. But the IFPI report omits to mention that their investment comes at a pretty high price (though, notably, it only does so if the artist becomes successful). One could say that it's a loan with a very high interest rate. The report states that the advance is recoupable from an artist's sales, but fails to acknowledge that much of the other costs often are, too. Tour support is sometimes recouped from merchandising. A manager I spoke to said his band's major label refused to provide £20k in tour support (a lot less than the £100k mentioned in the IFPI report) unless they received 50% of all merchandise for the length of the rest of the contract. The band chose to borrow money from their parents to cover the bill instead. If a label decides to spend money on TV advertising campaign for a record, they'll often recoup that cost from the artist – either by adding 50% of the cost to the artist's "recoupment bill" or by reducing the royalty rate due to the artist for the record by 50% for a whole year.
The manager of a big international pop star (who wants to remain anonymous for this piece), who has signed to a major, says that his biggest wish is that the artist/record label relationship becomes a partnership in the future. Today, he says, there's a tangible lack of trust. The fact that artists now have a choice of not signing a record deal will, hopefully, make record labels operate in a much more transparent manner.
March 2010
What have institutions done to combat illegal downloading?
Use the websites BPI.co.uk and http://www.guardian.co.uk/media
to find case studies (examples or evidence) and more information about each of the following. Post findings on revision blog:
} CDs were encoded so they could not be converted to MP3
} Tracks uploaded to YouTube were taken down
} PirateBay has recently been shut down
} Napster and other peer-to-peer filesharing sites were taken down
} Illegal downloaders were fined: The Digital Economy Act was passed in 2010
Now labels are turning to Alternative Revenue Streams
- secondary licencing of music through publishing the rights to the music
- viral marketing
- using social networking sites and the online revolution to their advantage
- synergy
- making use of convergence both technological and between companies
- (independent lables like Domino) are exploiting the use of their website and web 2:0
Use the blog: musicindustrysectionb.blogspot.com for all alternative revenue streams
to find case studies (examples or evidence) and more information about each of the following. Post findings on revision blog:
} CDs were encoded so they could not be converted to MP3
} Tracks uploaded to YouTube were taken down
} PirateBay has recently been shut down
} Napster and other peer-to-peer filesharing sites were taken down
} Illegal downloaders were fined: The Digital Economy Act was passed in 2010
Now labels are turning to Alternative Revenue Streams
- secondary licencing of music through publishing the rights to the music
- viral marketing
- using social networking sites and the online revolution to their advantage
- synergy
- making use of convergence both technological and between companies
- (independent lables like Domino) are exploiting the use of their website and web 2:0
Use the blog: musicindustrysectionb.blogspot.com for all alternative revenue streams
Music to Mobile marketing and Spotify
Mobile usage a rare highlight in music biz
Mon Sep 28, 2009
By Antony Bruno
The mobile music landscape is very much a study in good news, bad news.
The bad news is that mobile music has failed to live up to the expectations that the early success of ringtones had inspired. Combined ringtone and ringback tone sales have fallen almost 23 percent so far this year, according to Nielsen RingScan. And Forrester Research analyst Sonal Gandhi estimates that only one-third of mobile subscribers with music-capable phones use their devices to listen to music.
"That's not very big in the grand scheme of things, considering how long we've had MP3-capable phones," she says. "Compare that to iPhones users. Almost 60 percent of them are listening to music on their phones, and it's only been around two years."
But it's not all gloom and doom. The mobile content business is undergoing a dramatic sea change, evidenced by the introduction of downloadable applications for such devices as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android-powered phones. This new app-based distribution model allows developers and service providers to create mobile-specific services and sell them directly to users without interference from mobile operators, which historically have restricted the flow of new services available on their networks.
This, combined with more sophisticated handsets and smart phones, has already had a positive effect on mobile music consumption. According to Gandhi, mobile music usage -- while still low overall -- doubled during the past year. She credits music apps like Pandora and Slacker as driving the bulk of that increase.
And there are more music apps coming. RealNetworks just released an iPhone version of its Rhapsody subscription music service, marking the first time U.S. music fans can access on-demand streaming music from their mobile phones. Spotify just launched a similar app here in Europe as well.
Both require monthly subscription plans, which will certainly affect adoption. But it's only a matter of time before Vodafone or Orange decide to bundle a monthly music subscription into the cost of an unlimited mobile data plan to retain existing customers and attract new ones.
Carriers have avoided doing so because of network bandwidth capacity and cost concerns. But carrier sources say network improvements have addressed those concerns, adding that the remaining hurdle is getting labels to agree to a licensing rate low enough to offer a reasonable price to subscribers.
"Mobile companies have to be really serious about using music as a differentiator," Gandhi says. "They're the best people to do music subscription because they have a billing relationship. They can get people to pay a certain amount monthly without even thinking about it, (and) that can be used as a way to drive data adoption as well."
Of course, this could just be the beginning of yet another round of hype, something the mobile industry is no stranger to. How it responds to the early success of music apps could determine whether the industry will repeat its earlier disappointment with ringtones or finally succeed in developing a larger, more lucrative mobile music market.
"Ringtones and ringback tones have certainly been a really big business and caused artists and the music industry to really pay attention to mobile," says Rob Hyatt, director of premium content at AT&T. "The real challenge for us collectively is -- what's next?"
The Pros:
A fixed fee: If you’re a big music fan, chances are you buy a lot of music. With Spotify I make a saving. I used to spend more than £9.99 a month on a combination of CDs of my favourite bands and iTunes downloads of everything else. Now I know I’ll spend no more than the cost of my subscription every month.
Removing the Piracy temptation: Although I’ve never been a prolific illegal downloader, I know people who are. One such person sent me an SMS three weeks ago announcing that he was ditching BitTorrent in favour of Spotify. He’s not alone; Spotify claims that 80% of users have abandoned illegal filesharing. The choice of music available with no effort at all makes BitTorrent’s risk of prosecution and virus infection seem like a chore.
Saving space: Before I installed the Spotify mobile app, my 16GB iPhone had just 50MB of free space left thanks to all the music squeezed onto it. Now I’ve deleted most of that music as I can just get it from Spotify whenever I choose. Then there’s physical space – all those CDs I have taking up shelf space can be safely packed away, I barely touch them these days anyway.
Trying new things: Not having to buy everything individually means I’ve become a lot more bold about trying new things and exploring music I’ve never got around to in the past. If I read a glowing review of an obscure new band I can be listening to the album on the go within minutes. Meanwhile I have a newly intimate knowledge of the back catalogue of bands like XTC and Public Enemy.
The Cons:
What? You don’t have it?!: While Spotify’s library is now pretty comprehensive when it comes to the past 50 years of popular music, there are still holes. Want to listen to De La Soul’s classic 1989 album Three Feet High And Rising? For the time being you’re stuck. Big names like The Beatles are also missing. You can’t quite throw away your MP3s and CDs yet.
That syncing feeling: Away from home and get the urge to listen to something? Get ready for your phone to become a hand warmer. Yes, streaming music makes your handset incredibly warm and runs down the battery in no time. To get around this, you can sync music to your phone as offline playlists in advance via wifi. This works brilliantly but it does mean you can’t be quite as spontaneous as you might like to be.
Organisation: While Spotify is a great way to listen to music, once you start building up a substantial collection of playlists (all my favourite albums have a playlist each, for example) you start you wish there was a way of organising them. Playlist folders would be a good start but how about a ‘virtual music collection’? You could browse albums and artists that you’re a fan of as if you were browsing a physical collection. Think of iTunes coverflow for Spotify. For now though, you have an ugly and unwieldy bunch of playlists to scroll through.
The little things: As much as “The Spotify Life” may suit you, there is bound to be something that bugs you. For me it’s the lack of Last.fm scrobbling for music you listen to on the mobile app. The desktop app has Last.fm integration and as someone who is obsessive about his scrobbling it would be nice to see that extended to the mobile experience.
Mon Sep 28, 2009
By Antony Bruno
The mobile music landscape is very much a study in good news, bad news.
The bad news is that mobile music has failed to live up to the expectations that the early success of ringtones had inspired. Combined ringtone and ringback tone sales have fallen almost 23 percent so far this year, according to Nielsen RingScan. And Forrester Research analyst Sonal Gandhi estimates that only one-third of mobile subscribers with music-capable phones use their devices to listen to music.
"That's not very big in the grand scheme of things, considering how long we've had MP3-capable phones," she says. "Compare that to iPhones users. Almost 60 percent of them are listening to music on their phones, and it's only been around two years."
But it's not all gloom and doom. The mobile content business is undergoing a dramatic sea change, evidenced by the introduction of downloadable applications for such devices as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android-powered phones. This new app-based distribution model allows developers and service providers to create mobile-specific services and sell them directly to users without interference from mobile operators, which historically have restricted the flow of new services available on their networks.
This, combined with more sophisticated handsets and smart phones, has already had a positive effect on mobile music consumption. According to Gandhi, mobile music usage -- while still low overall -- doubled during the past year. She credits music apps like Pandora and Slacker as driving the bulk of that increase.
And there are more music apps coming. RealNetworks just released an iPhone version of its Rhapsody subscription music service, marking the first time U.S. music fans can access on-demand streaming music from their mobile phones. Spotify just launched a similar app here in Europe as well.
Both require monthly subscription plans, which will certainly affect adoption. But it's only a matter of time before Vodafone or Orange decide to bundle a monthly music subscription into the cost of an unlimited mobile data plan to retain existing customers and attract new ones.
Carriers have avoided doing so because of network bandwidth capacity and cost concerns. But carrier sources say network improvements have addressed those concerns, adding that the remaining hurdle is getting labels to agree to a licensing rate low enough to offer a reasonable price to subscribers.
"Mobile companies have to be really serious about using music as a differentiator," Gandhi says. "They're the best people to do music subscription because they have a billing relationship. They can get people to pay a certain amount monthly without even thinking about it, (and) that can be used as a way to drive data adoption as well."
Of course, this could just be the beginning of yet another round of hype, something the mobile industry is no stranger to. How it responds to the early success of music apps could determine whether the industry will repeat its earlier disappointment with ringtones or finally succeed in developing a larger, more lucrative mobile music market.
"Ringtones and ringback tones have certainly been a really big business and caused artists and the music industry to really pay attention to mobile," says Rob Hyatt, director of premium content at AT&T. "The real challenge for us collectively is -- what's next?"
The Pros:
A fixed fee: If you’re a big music fan, chances are you buy a lot of music. With Spotify I make a saving. I used to spend more than £9.99 a month on a combination of CDs of my favourite bands and iTunes downloads of everything else. Now I know I’ll spend no more than the cost of my subscription every month.
Removing the Piracy temptation: Although I’ve never been a prolific illegal downloader, I know people who are. One such person sent me an SMS three weeks ago announcing that he was ditching BitTorrent in favour of Spotify. He’s not alone; Spotify claims that 80% of users have abandoned illegal filesharing. The choice of music available with no effort at all makes BitTorrent’s risk of prosecution and virus infection seem like a chore.
Saving space: Before I installed the Spotify mobile app, my 16GB iPhone had just 50MB of free space left thanks to all the music squeezed onto it. Now I’ve deleted most of that music as I can just get it from Spotify whenever I choose. Then there’s physical space – all those CDs I have taking up shelf space can be safely packed away, I barely touch them these days anyway.
Trying new things: Not having to buy everything individually means I’ve become a lot more bold about trying new things and exploring music I’ve never got around to in the past. If I read a glowing review of an obscure new band I can be listening to the album on the go within minutes. Meanwhile I have a newly intimate knowledge of the back catalogue of bands like XTC and Public Enemy.
The Cons:
What? You don’t have it?!: While Spotify’s library is now pretty comprehensive when it comes to the past 50 years of popular music, there are still holes. Want to listen to De La Soul’s classic 1989 album Three Feet High And Rising? For the time being you’re stuck. Big names like The Beatles are also missing. You can’t quite throw away your MP3s and CDs yet.
That syncing feeling: Away from home and get the urge to listen to something? Get ready for your phone to become a hand warmer. Yes, streaming music makes your handset incredibly warm and runs down the battery in no time. To get around this, you can sync music to your phone as offline playlists in advance via wifi. This works brilliantly but it does mean you can’t be quite as spontaneous as you might like to be.
Organisation: While Spotify is a great way to listen to music, once you start building up a substantial collection of playlists (all my favourite albums have a playlist each, for example) you start you wish there was a way of organising them. Playlist folders would be a good start but how about a ‘virtual music collection’? You could browse albums and artists that you’re a fan of as if you were browsing a physical collection. Think of iTunes coverflow for Spotify. For now though, you have an ugly and unwieldy bunch of playlists to scroll through.
The little things: As much as “The Spotify Life” may suit you, there is bound to be something that bugs you. For me it’s the lack of Last.fm scrobbling for music you listen to on the mobile app. The desktop app has Last.fm integration and as someone who is obsessive about his scrobbling it would be nice to see that extended to the mobile experience.
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
Half Term Essay Task: due in Tuesday 1st March
Using the case studies given to you, your own research and the notes you have made in lessons, answer the following essay question (approx 1000 - 1500 words). This will be marked and graded after half term.
“Some fear that the media is out of control, others that it is too controlled.”
Who do you think has the most control over the music industry? The record labels who make the music or the audiences that buy the music?
You must cover the following points in your essay:
(a) Introduction: How might the roles of institutions and audiences be changing? Use the wording of the question to summarise what you will be writing about in this essay.
(b) Your knowledge of how an independent and conglomerate record label works and who the target audiences are for these labels. Use case study material to support your points.
(c) What the key issues are in terms of illegal file sharing and online piracy? Use case studies to demonstrate your points.
(d) What is Universal doing to combat illegal file sharing. What are they doing to move with the times? Include your case studies on Pledge Music and Tunited.
(e) What is Domino doing to embrace the changes in how people are listening to music?
(f) Conclusion: Who do you think has the greatest level of control – audiences or institutions. Summarise your argument and refer back to the wording of the question in your answer.
“Some fear that the media is out of control, others that it is too controlled.”
Who do you think has the most control over the music industry? The record labels who make the music or the audiences that buy the music?
You must cover the following points in your essay:
(a) Introduction: How might the roles of institutions and audiences be changing? Use the wording of the question to summarise what you will be writing about in this essay.
(b) Your knowledge of how an independent and conglomerate record label works and who the target audiences are for these labels. Use case study material to support your points.
(c) What the key issues are in terms of illegal file sharing and online piracy? Use case studies to demonstrate your points.
(d) What is Universal doing to combat illegal file sharing. What are they doing to move with the times? Include your case studies on Pledge Music and Tunited.
(e) What is Domino doing to embrace the changes in how people are listening to music?
(f) Conclusion: Who do you think has the greatest level of control – audiences or institutions. Summarise your argument and refer back to the wording of the question in your answer.
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
Essay Question
How has the internet or ‘online revolution’ affected the relationship between audiences and institutions?
What to include:
1. Battle of control between audiences and institutions
2. Birth of new software apps and websites (Hardware and software) eg. Spotify. Vevo, We7, Sunscription services etc.
3. The use of online marketing to replace the need for record labels ef. Viral marketing, social network sites, online piracy
800 - 100 words for next Tuesday 8th March
What to include:
1. Battle of control between audiences and institutions
2. Birth of new software apps and websites (Hardware and software) eg. Spotify. Vevo, We7, Sunscription services etc.
3. The use of online marketing to replace the need for record labels ef. Viral marketing, social network sites, online piracy
800 - 100 words for next Tuesday 8th March
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Independent vs Conglomerate Task - PRESENTING ON TUESDAY 8TH FEBRUARY
In groups of 3 or 4 you will adopt the role of a music institution.
10 of you will act as Domino Records (Independent) and
10 will be Universal Music Group (Conglomorate).
A new artist or ‘@ for Ampersand’ has requested that you produce, market and distribute the music for them. In your group you will have 5 mins to argue that you are the best institution for the job.
What do I include in my presentation?
UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP
- Background and ideology
- Type of audience
- How the label creates revenue for the artist?
- Vertical integration
- Synergistic Marketing
- Secondary Licensing and UMPG
- Your 3 case studies (artists) and find out about 1 other to show how
the label operates
- How is Universal Records listening to the needs of their target audience?
- Your own research
DOMINO RECORDS
- Background and ideology
- Type of audience
- How the label creates revenue for the artist?
- Horizontally integration
- Web presence (marketing through the features on website) and Web 2:0
- Your 3 case studies (artists) and find out about 1 other to show how the label operates
- How is viral marketing used?
- Promotion through radio broadcasting
- How is Domino Records listening to the needs of their target audience?
- Your own research
10 of you will act as Domino Records (Independent) and
10 will be Universal Music Group (Conglomorate).
A new artist or ‘@ for Ampersand’ has requested that you produce, market and distribute the music for them. In your group you will have 5 mins to argue that you are the best institution for the job.
What do I include in my presentation?
UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP
- Background and ideology
- Type of audience
- How the label creates revenue for the artist?
- Vertical integration
- Synergistic Marketing
- Secondary Licensing and UMPG
- Your 3 case studies (artists) and find out about 1 other to show how
the label operates
- How is Universal Records listening to the needs of their target audience?
- Your own research
DOMINO RECORDS
- Background and ideology
- Type of audience
- How the label creates revenue for the artist?
- Horizontally integration
- Web presence (marketing through the features on website) and Web 2:0
- Your 3 case studies (artists) and find out about 1 other to show how the label operates
- How is viral marketing used?
- Promotion through radio broadcasting
- How is Domino Records listening to the needs of their target audience?
- Your own research
Sunday, 16 January 2011
Types of question in the exam
1. What are the issues raised by media ownership in contemporary media practice?
2. What is the importance of cross media convergence and synergy in production, distribution and marketing?
3. What are the technologies that have been introduced in recent years at the levels of production, distribution, marketing and exchange?
4. What is the significance of proliferation in hardware and content for institutions and audiences?
5. What is the importance of technological convergence for institutions and audiences?
6. What are the issues raised in the targeting of national and local audiences (specifically, British) by international or global institutions?
7. What are the ways in which the candidates own experiences of media consumption illustrate wider patterns and trends of audience behaviour?
2. What is the importance of cross media convergence and synergy in production, distribution and marketing?
3. What are the technologies that have been introduced in recent years at the levels of production, distribution, marketing and exchange?
4. What is the significance of proliferation in hardware and content for institutions and audiences?
5. What is the importance of technological convergence for institutions and audiences?
6. What are the issues raised in the targeting of national and local audiences (specifically, British) by international or global institutions?
7. What are the ways in which the candidates own experiences of media consumption illustrate wider patterns and trends of audience behaviour?
G322 Section B: Institutions and Audience exam
One essay question
50 marks (the other 50 marks is for Section B Textual Analysis)
You will use two detailed case studies of record labels in the exam.
We will be studying:
(a) Universal Music Group (a conglomerate record label)
(b) Domino Records (an independent record label)
You are awarded marks for:
Explanation/analysis/argument (20 marks)
Use of examples (20 marks)
Use of terminology (10 marks)
50 marks (the other 50 marks is for Section B Textual Analysis)
You will use two detailed case studies of record labels in the exam.
We will be studying:
(a) Universal Music Group (a conglomerate record label)
(b) Domino Records (an independent record label)
You are awarded marks for:
Explanation/analysis/argument (20 marks)
Use of examples (20 marks)
Use of terminology (10 marks)
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