kidmercury

One of the little joys I get on a monthly basis is an email from TuneCore telling me how many times my songs have been streamed and purchased from iTunes, Rhapsody, and various other digital music applications. As I've discussed before, the primary strategy I've taken is to write songs that will rank in the search engines of these music applications (i.e. digital jukeboxes).

The most widely heard and downloaded song I've distributed is my song for Eminem, "Eminem, We Need a Freedom Relapse" -- a track widely regarded as the best song EVER to mention Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, and an instant classic in the burgeoning genre of econo-rap. Relapse is the title of Eminem's forthcoming album, slated for release about a month for now. The fact that this song has generated over 500 listens and 50 downloads is an indication of the attention that can be derived from "predictive" search engine optimization -- basically the practice of creating content that will rank for keywords that will become popular in the future. My song for Eminem was put on iTunes and other digital jukeboxes this past November, and has been accruing an increasing amount of listens since then, as we approach the release of Relapse and more marketing continues to be done for it. I would expect the number of listens to continue increasing at an accelerating rate.

What We Can Learn From This About the Future of Music

Part of the reason I've gone through this trouble (aside from the fact that I enjoy it very much, and that I thought it would be an effective way of spreading the Truth) is to learn how bedroom rock stars -- musicians who write, record, and distribute their music from their bedroom -- will market themselves and earn a living. Here's what I've learned from my song about Eminem in particular:

1. One of the best marketing strategies is to leech off other people's brands. I expect this trend to continue. (We'll get to the legal/moral issues of this a bit later in this post).

2. Services that re-intermediate markets and networks are very valuable. This is a broad trend in all things Internet. To give an example of what I mean, think of TuneCore, which is an intermediary for distributing your music to digital music jukeboxes. CDBaby offers something similar, as do many other companies. Any service that pulls together other services in the name of empowering publishers is a business that I think will be a part of the future of music and all digital publishing.

3. Obviously I am very bearish on the idea of paid media, I think the window of opportunity in selling music is closing. A new window is opening, though, and this window involves building and monetizing a community, in my opinion. I still see there being an enormous opportunity in filling this void.

How Can Artists Like Eminem Protect Their Brand?

Obviously some artists/labels will view this as infringing on their brand. For them, they may wish to keep information about their endeavors very secret until they are ready to be revealed. Or, they may wish to put out false information. In fact, my song for Eminem was originally entitled "Eminem, Become King Mathers" and had slightly different lyrics because the album was rumored to be called "King Mathers." Then just as I was about to record it I saw an official news release that the album was going to be called Relapse, so I changed the lyrics accordingly (admittedly I think the original version was better).

Ultimately, though I think the future is about encouraging fans to co-create -- to essentially want your fans to build and spread your brand for you. From this perspective, a counter argument would be as follows:

1. Artists can embrace attempts at leveraging their brand. For instance, one of the expected uses I think niche social networks will find is for artists to have communities where their fans do covers. We see things like this on YouTube, popular artists will have tons of people covering them. Instead of YouTube owning this community, though, artists need to find a way to own this community. This is the key to making money online, and thus is a vital part of the future of music: community before commerce.

2. An extension of this is for artists to use their fan community as a recruiting ground for launching new artists. The efficiency of using talent shows to find talent has already been proven via American Idol, a horrifyingly awful show with a great business model (minimize costs of finding, developing, and marketing music acts). For this reason, I expect popular artists to use their own fan community to launch other artists, and that this is how record labels of the future will grow.

We've talked about this before; see my previous posts, The Coming Internet Publishing Revolution and Five Steps to the Future of Social Networking, among other posts.