Playback and Payback series; (part 8) who does what to whom (IV)

In the meantime the marketing people prepare artwork and budgets for the displays at the base of each row of records, or “endcaps,” counter displays, and other point-of-purchase techniques at retail. At the least, they make one-foot-square “slicks” of the product cover available for display by the retailers. If there is a budget for it, the department might sponsor a contest for retailers to create a display. The manager of the store with the best display selected by the marketing department wins an appropriate prize – usually a play on the artist’s name or the title of the album. The marketing people’s job is to make the product more visible, within budget constraints.

Slightly before the release date, the initial shipments go out to the stores or the wholesalers. Almost all CDs come out on Tuesdays, mainly because that allows them to report a full week of sales to the SoundScan sales-tracking service, which runs from Tuesday to Tuesday. That way Billboard, the music industry’s main trade magazine, can compile the charts based on the SoundScan information and go to print by Friday.

While all this is going on in the back office, the front office is cranking up the promotion machine to get the artist’s “story” out to as many people as possible. The main source of exposure for music since the 1920s has been radio, but economic dynamics and the relationships between the record companies, consumers, and radio have changed radically over these last couple decades or so.

The entire promotion department at an indie might be one or two people, calling radio stations, writing press releases, going online to get their artists’ names out there virally. At a major, it’s a very different story. There is the senior vice president of promotion, who quarterbacks the promotional team. In the main office, there is a head of promotion for pretty much every genre and format of radio – the national head of classic rock promotion, national head of rhythmic Top 40 promotion, and so forth. They take care of business on a nationwide basis.

In most of the branch offices, two or three local promotion people work the radio stations in their area under looser guidelines – in one office one person might handle Southwestern rock promotion – all the rock as opposed to the more specialized promotion people in the back office – while in another office someone else handles R&B promotion for a particular state. A record company might employ over 100 promotion people nationwide, working to get the company’s records played by the local radio stations in their genre.

The publicity department tries to secure whatever media coverage on the artist it can garner – reviews of the artist’s recording, news stories about the artist, etc. – again within constrictions of its budget. This is frequently where the buzz for an artist gets started. However, the publicity department is often the Rodney Dangerfield of the record company; it gets no respect at all. One publicist of my acquaintance recalled that the promotion department of the major record company for which he worked just usurped about half the publicity department’s budget one year when promotion ran over.

With the rise of MTV in the 1980s, video promotion became a very important means of breaking an artist. Some artists that could never get a break on radio broke big at MTV. The network’s influence started to ebb in the 1990s as it lost track of what the M in its name stood for and remade itself as a teen and young adult lifestyle channel.

Another promotional outlet that runs in waves of importance is the club scene. In the disco 1970s, the new wave ‘80s and the moshing ‘90s, club promotion broke artists on a regular basis. All of this to get the consumers into the store to spend their $16 on a CD.