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CMU Insights Update
CMU+TGE Music Marketing Conference 2019: In Context
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 1 May 2019
We last put the spotlight on music marketing at TGE in 2015. Last year I re-read our reports on the conversations that took place back then and realised just how much has moved on in the last few years. Pitching to streaming service playlist owners was the big new thing back then, and now it’s a core element of pretty much every album marketing campaign. Which got me thinking, given what was the future then is now very much the present, what next?
Also, the Music Marketing Conference is sponsored by the BPI. CMU Insights runs two marketing seminars as part of the BPI’s member training programme, one focused on frontline marketing and the other on catalogue campaigns. Those sessions also look at how things have been changing in the world of music marketing in recent years. And while that is partly about the rise of playlist pitching, it’s also about the ever-expanding marketing toolkit and the challenges raised by the fact album campaigns now need to run for longer.
It’s with all these things in mind that we decided to stage another full day Music Marketing Conference at TGE this year. The first half is looking at that music marketing toolkit. We’ll discuss how traditional tools – like the music press, radio and TV – still play a role. We’ll look at where social media now fits in. And we’ll talk about social advertising, outdoor advertising and that thing they call influencer marketing.
We’ll check back in on playlists, with plenty of practical tips on how to target and utilise streaming service playlists, but also plenty of discussion on where the whole playlisting thing might go next. Then we’ll focus on how modern music campaigns eat promotional content and how you can deal with that when you are operating on tight budgets. And finally we’ll look at how you should be using all that data – streaming data, social data, ticketing data – to inform how artists market their recordings, shows and brands.
In the second half of the day we’ll get more strategic. In the streaming age, music marketing isn’t just about scoring as many sales as you can in the weeks after release. It’s about encouraging fans to keep streaming tracks again and again and again so that the tiny per-play royalties mount up. This changes the messaging of the marketing and increases the length of time that marketing activity needs to keep happening.
CMU has been analysing these changes and challenges for a while now and we’ll report back on what we’ve discovered and discuss how those challenges can be met with leading music marketers. Part of meeting that challenge is about ensuring that all of an artist’s business partners – including label, manager, agent, promoter and any marketing or PR agencies – all work very much in tandem. To that end, we’ll be bringing together reps from each of those different strands of the industry to discuss how that can be achieved.
So, plenty of great insights and debate will occur on sage. And then, at the finale of the day, I’ll be sitting down with the brilliant Cassandra Gracey who heads up Sony Music’s 4th Floor Creative division. We’ll find out why the major set up this new unit to bring together its content, partnership and analytics work, and we’ll get her take on how music marketing is evolving, and what artists, labels and all the strands of the industry need to do to succeed.
The CMU+TGE Music Marketing Conference takes place on Friday 10 May at Jury’s Inn Waterfront from 10am. It’s open to all TGE delegate and conference pass holders – click here for the full schedule.
As mentioned, CMU has been investigating trends in music marketing for a while now and will report back on that work at the Music Marketing Conference. As part of that, we’re interested in getting some final very timely input from people working on album campaigns right now, and we’ve set up a speedy survey to do just that. If you work in music marketing and would be willing to fill out that survey in the next couple of days, email sam@unlimitedmedia.co.uk and he’ll send you the link.
