The Promotion Equation.

Ah, this is the big one. The big, knotty, thorny one. The one that just looms larger. Because as distribution ceases to be an issue, promotion just becomes a bigger one. As the barriers come down, more and more artists will flood into the arena. And promoting a record in the midst of thousands of other recordings will just become harder in many ways. Music fans will have ever more artists clamouring for their attention.

Let's tackle some huge philosophical issues first. How many good artists are out there? Record companies presented us with a certain number of artists. Some were good, some were crap. The demarkation here is as much about individual taste as anything else. Let us consider everything here from the point of view of an individual listener, with their own tastes and prejudices. Were the good artists the record labels presented them with the only good artists around? If we say "yes" then we are asserting that the labels magically found (and continue to find) all the good artists that were to be had.

If we say "no", then the strong possibility is that amongst the many independent artists existing today are many gems, that may NOT be picked up magically by the record companies (if they want to be "picked up" at all). Yet we can also be certain that there are many derivative, underdeveloped, shamelessly self-aggrandising or clueless artists. Yet the chances are that our listener may not be prepared to do the work of sorting the artists for themselves. Why should they, if the record companies present them with enough artists that are to their taste? For more on this, see The Audience.

Once, record companies put in the work of listening to and sorting artists (at least, in theory). Then they promoted the artists to the audience. If this process is bypassed, the artist has to take on promotion. And usually with a relatively tiny budget.

This raises the prospect of thousands of artists competing to spend their tiny budgets to little purpose, and failing to make an impact. Anyone can pay for an ad claiming they are the best thing since sliced bread. Anyone who is smart enough can have good band photos done. Anyone can pay for banner advertising. Will all this have an audience impact?

Here are my thoughts, in the total absence of marketing data.

Print advertising, to my mind, is of limited usefulness. And under print advertising I include internet ads and banner ads. For established artists, print ads can alert the audience to a new release. For a new artist, I think a major and expensive campaign would be needed to make an impact. And audiences are sceptical of print advertising for music. The audience that is most accepting of print advertising is probably also the audience that is most sceptical of non-major label artists.

The best way to advertise music is to let people HEAR it. Once this is what radio stations did. Obviously radio play is still an important part of a promotion strategy, but realistically substantial radio play is initially likely to elude independent artists. So a better strategy would be to persuade internet users to listen to or download tracks. Banner ads and internet ads would be useful if they let listeners click on them to hear a track immediately, as they are doing other things. Listeners could download individual tracks or your track could be part of a podcast or suchlike. The key point is to persuade someone to listen to you- at that point, they can make up their minds for themselves, and further promotion becomes largely irrelevant. But persuading listeners to give up even this time may be difficult, in the face of competing artists...

And of course, you want the listeners to hear one of your best or most accessible tracks. So if you let them download these tracks you are sacrificing any return on your best tracks. The Weed system offers a potential solution to this. Of course, sacrificing your best tracks like this may still give you a good return in the long run. The Arctic Monkeys seem to have adopted a strategy like this.

More extensive and expensive promotion strategies to some extent start recreating the problems of cash flow and financial depth that independent labels have always struggled with.

All this ties in with The Audience, Internet Radio, and Filtering as issues. .

See also "Live" Performance and Word Of Mouth.