Marketing Music In The Digital Age:

Here's a transcript of excerpts from an interesting chat session between myself and Ian Morris discussing the ramifications and opportunities presented by digital distribution, peer group sharing, and the ease of dissemination of digital copies.

Whilst this conversation also refers to the Gavland website please note that Gavland does not distribute copies of the songs we playlist. Our program is streamed in real time in the same way as a traditional radio broadcast and is comparable audio quality to FM radio. We are occasionally approached by listeners to sell MP3s of songs on the playlist but we are not authorised to do this and do not provide this service. The only music we sell is that listed in our sales section.

Gavin Burgess:
I just had the first EVER (in 7 years of operation) request from an artist to remove their song from the Gavland Radio playlist (on the grounds that they hadn't given specific permission for its use). Who was this artist? you may well ask... just rest assured its no-one you're likely to have heard of!

Ian G. Morris:
The complainers are still concentrating on selling lumps of plastic at record shops that no-one visits any more.

Gavin Burgess:
Hey, I buy plastic - and vinyl when I can get it. I like looking at the pretty pictures and having a physical representation of the product - and I always reckon if the modern world disintegrated I could still build a mechanical device to play my vinyl and could still read my good old paper books - so I think the idea that everything should be digital only is a myth.

I could have stated the above more succinctly as follows: I've never received an MP3 with a larger than life-size photo of a hot chick's lovely face on it's front cover!

Ian G. Morris:
Indeed, there's nothing like the physical thing, but to deny the virtual if you're trying to sell yourself is bad business.

Gavin Burgess:
I figure anything you put out there is going to be copied and distributed amongst peer groups etc so you have to consider a certain percentage of product to be given away - call it promotion though cos it is. My theory is that, for physical sales, packaging is becoming critical.

The CD era was a lazy one in this respect. In the Vinyl era packaging was considered much more important (e.g. Tull’s Thick As A Brick, Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Who’s Live At Leads, Floyd’s Ummagumma, pretty much any Yes LP….) Superturtle’s last album was a good example of the way forward… A gatefold 45rpm vinyl plus the album in MP3 format, various info and videos all on a CD.

Ian G. Morris:
Gavin I agree 100%. Promotion is king. Attention is the new currency. Of the thousands upon thousands of NZ artists who have released CDs and vinyl over the "Rock n Roll" period - say from the mid-1950s - perhaps a dozen have made any money from them. The Finns, Bic, Carl Doy have probably seen a return that's above the minimum wage. I doubt even Dave D has actually made money on his record sales.

To deny potential fans free access to your music in the hope that you can sell it to them on a plain old lump of plastic is folly in the extreme.

Yes, special editions, value-added editions are great, but for Jimmy and Jane Smith in Form 5 of Taradale High School, if you give them a song they really like, within a week you'll have 100 kids really liking it. Form a gang. Form a club. Get as many people digging you as possible. When you visit their town you have a ready-made fan audience. You'll have to add a second show! You'll have to print more t-shirts! And hey! - now Coca Cola has heard your song and wants it! This is where the new revenue is going to come from.

I hope to have a new album out soon and damn right I’m going to give it away in some form on the interwebs!

The argument that, by allowing people to listen for free, the artist is "losing money" mistakenly implies that the artist had the money in the first place, and now those naughty downloaders are making him/her lose it. Just because 100 people downloaded your track for free it doesn't mean you lost 100 CD sales.

Gavin Burgess:
I agree. I've been on the Amplifier mailing list for several years from which I get regular free downloads - and I also receive Kiwi Hit Discs - and get sent CDs by all sorts of bands and musos. Very few of these would have been things I would have been likely to have bought - or even heard about otherwise. But I get to help promote these artists. To me it’s a win win thing. I love receiving this stuff. I get to help promote a band – and as an NZ music enthusiast it all becomes part of my vast archive which hopefully means its all preserved for posterity.