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The next new thing: niche-music promotion

slartabartfast

By slartabartfast
in The Coffee House

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slartabartfast

slartabartfast

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https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/17/niche-is-the-new-mainstream/

If you read between the lines in the above, it is a pitch for a new type of service that would attempt to deliver targeted promotion over social media to replace the old model of mass promotion by the big record companies. So a solution to the nobody-can-find-me-on-SoundCloud problem. The claim is that the new music business will be based on the cultivation of niche markets giving artists with limited appeal the position that the big label superstars used to occupy. Capital intensive dredging of big data on worldwide streaming behavior will enable the service to target specific interest groups tastes to connect them to the artists who are working in that musical canton. Result: artists who would be overlooked will be found and raised to godhood. This will certainly be the inevitable next step, but how much better will it be for most performers than the old system? 

The first issue to consider is that big data costs big money. If these services are to provide anything more than general mailing lists, they are going to have to find big revenue somewhere. Revenue for small audience artists'  promotion is now largely coming from the artists themselves in the form of public relations firms. I doubt that most of the money going into this form of promotion is being returned in increased sales to most of the artists involved. Clearly that is not of great concern to the firms involved if they are just billing for services rendered. I audited an online course about the music business a couple of years ago, and I was struck by the number of students who planned to become social media specialists corralling a stable of artists that they could make a living from.  A bright young thing with access to Instragram working out of her bedroom seems an unlikely road to serious financial success. A massively capitalized company using AI to sieve the world community of listeners is a more credible vehicle, but at some point it is going to need to produce real revenue, or the private capital it has duped will drop it.  Can such a monster feed on the nickels and quarters that a herd of starving musicians can provide?

The second issue follows from the first--it is the inescapable problem of dilution. If the new promotional services provide promotion for enough small scale artists that those unsuccessful performers contributions (in the form of payment for services or some type of percentage of sales) will pay the bills, then there will just too many clients to promote. It is difficult to imagine a niche so small that every artist working in it will be a major star, unless the number of interested listeners is too small to produce significant revenue. In audience sectors where there is real money for the winners, unless the service is selective in who it represents, they will need to flood the social media accounts of those interested listeners with a massive volume of mostly ineffective communication in order to represent all of the artists in that niche who need promotion. This is the reason that services that currently charge artists a small fee for just making their recordings accessible to a large number of listeners or on a large number of sites make enough money to keep going, while most of their clients do not. It is the issue that had to be solved before the major record companies could make money, and their solution was to contract with and promote a very limited number of carefully (although not always successfully) selected artists. Of the two systems it is easy to see which created more millionaire performers. Of course neither the big labels nor the mass distributors have done much for the vast majority of the artists hoping to make it big.

So the answer to the revenue problem is going to be how these services select the limited number of artists they will promote. The majors did it largely by "spotting talent" using employees who had a record of  being able to find the next big star/band, who were expected to have a critical knowledge of music and musicianship. Later they largely farmed out this cost to agents, whose reputation hinged on being able to screen out the crap, and whose income depended on their clients' success. Either of those methods produced what was basically a curated collection of contracted artists who for the most part could be profitably exploited. Now they seem to be turning towards the natural selection of the internet to swoop in and scoop up the few survivors who rise to the top on YouTube and the like--the signed artist is expected to bring his own audience. This latter strategy is likely to be the method used by the new promoters, although perhaps with computers instead of educated ears. Artificial intelligence is capable of finding trends within the data even when no human being understands the principle behind the trend. But is that so different from the mass-market-mind of the audience that is coughing up the few internet superstars that seem to come out of nowhere? Likely a potential superstar will receive a boost in his rise from the swamp if he has effective targeted promotion, but that does not mean that there will necessarily be more superstars discovered (fewer commercial failures left to struggle), or more money for the lesser stars that this system envisions making its profits from. Will the tiny group of unknown artists who can become big money makers be a better group if they are chosen by a self-learning algorithm? 

The cost savings to having the search largely computerized and the messaging distribution almost free mean that this type of  service will have every chance to prosper. The method of extracting  profit from the artist's work will likely look pretty much like the system used by the record companies. At some point between the finding of the next megastar-to-be and the service beginning to send the good news out to his potential adoring fans, he most likely will have to agree to some type of revenue sharing. At that point the new service will have a strong position over the artist. Either he must give them a big piece of the action or take his chances with the fickle audience. In that case he will be much weaker in negotiation than someone who already is a viral star. So although the potential market may be smaller in the niche, the ticket to success may not be any cheaper as a proportion of income for the artist. A promotional service that aggregates hundreds of niche-audience performers may do as well for itself as a record company contracting with several dozen mass-market stars, but this structure will not make most of the artists as wealthy. At best it may make it possible for substantial numbers of the most popular niche artists to quit their day jobs. And of course once this type of service shows its worth to artists, it will engender a hoarde of ineffective, nonselective services that will flood social media with the music-promotion equivalent of p1n!s enlargement advertising, while offering to take cash from gullible artists.

Edited by slartabartfast
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