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CMU says: Labels need to better consult journalists over promos
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 15 April 2010
When Sony Music made its announcement regarding the future of its promo CDs last month, our gut feeling was that the music journalist community was split 50/50 on the move to digital promos, but our research shows there is a lot more resistance to the sort of policies being introduced by Sony Music than we first thought.
One of the problems is the stream-based preview services currently being employed by most labels. We’re yet to find any journalists who have anything positive to say about any of the systems being used by any of the major labels, including Share, PlayMPE and the in-house platforms. You get the impression PR chiefs at the labels have briefed digital agencies as to how these preview systems should work, without consulting any actual reviewers.
At the end of the day, the average PR boss simply doesn’t know what happens to a promo CD once it has been placed in a jiffy bag, so isn’t really in a position to scope out a digital service which will work for journalists. The people operating these digital platforms really need to sit down with the reviewers they are expecting to use their services (and journalists and editors working at all levels on all kinds of media) and find out what they need. Though given the feedback we’re getting, when they do, they may find they have to start again.
Another issue labels need to consider is something at least a third of our 100 journalists said: that they’d be more likely to use a digital promo system if there was one platform for all labels.
That’s unlikely to happen, of course, and might raise competition law concerns if it did, but perhaps the future is that there will be a number of digital preview platforms which take music from all labels, so that journalists can choose the platform that best suits their needs; ie a platform will succeed not by signing up labels, even though they will be the ones paying a fee, but by signing up journalists. That would certainly provide a commercial motivation for the operators of these platforms to talk to the journalists they are servicing.
But even if all those matters are addressed, there remains one core problem with all the digital preview systems currently operating or being developed – and that is based on the labels’ ongoing paranoia that journalists leak pre-release music onto P2P file-sharing platforms, even though we know most albums are available via BitTorrent long before they get mailed out to the press.
It is this paranoia that will stop labels from using and embracing MP3-based preview services which, as noted above, is what might make digital promos work. An easy to use press-only website that gave access to MP3 downloads of pre-release music – perhaps built so only editors have access to all the content, but so they can move relevant tracks to the personal folders of relevant journalists – would overcome many of the issues raised about digital promo systems and might just work.
In fact, we reckon a system of that kind is where we’ll eventually end up. But it seems likely that – as with consumer-facing digital music – the labels are going to first invest a lot of time and money into alienating important stakeholders, by clinging onto a digital rights managed system, until eventually realising such systems are expensive to run, frustrating to use and, ultimately, never going to succeed.
