We, the audience series; (part 4) the lost audience – how the music business broke faith with its main supporters (II)

Independent record labels can create the music that will reach the rock-and-roll adult, and they already do. Putumayo does very well with its world music, making tidy profits on CDs that sell between 15 and 90 thousand copies. Concord, fundamentally a jazz label of long standing, has recognized part of this lost audience and risen to the occasion by signing artists like Barry Manilow and Ray Charles, who had fallen out of favor with the major labels they once supported. Barry sold 160,000 for Concord and Ray Charles did even better, selling in excess of three million copies and earning eight Grammy Awards in the process.

With his momentum, Barry went back “home” to major label Arista and topped the charts.

So some music reaches this demographic, when the demographic becomes aware of it. The problem, of course, is that for every boomer buying Barry Manilow there are six that might like to burn it, for every buyer of a Putumayo world collection there are dozens who wouldn’t let “that music” get played in their car, and for every fan of the Band there are a dozen groups on independent labels that would love if only the label could get the music to them.

The question becomes, how do you market to a diverse group that would sooner listen to “oldies” and “news radio” than any of the major-market stations? How do you get them to renew their passion for music? How do you reach a niche in a business that has a century old history of mass marketing?

Can the business create a promotional channel to reach adults, beyond R + P = S? Especially since, as we’ve seen, even getting pop product over the airwaves has turned into a fierce and bloody competition, taking no prisoners and leaving few survivors? The record business seems to have missed or misinterpreted the wide-spread changes in the symbiotic relationship between it and radio in its trip down denial. As we’ve seen, radio, once a beacon of media independence, now answers to central control, in large part, by four or five major media companies. Local program directors have less and less power over what they program. The days of the “local hit” dwindled to nothing some time ago. We have entered an era when local programmers hardly have any power at all. Where diversity once ruled, constriction has become the name of the game.

Ironically, as we have also seen, worldwide, centrally controlled stations may offer part of the answer to the dilemma of playlists controlled so tightly they can barely move. XM, Sirius, and digital cable radio reach out to the adult demographic, with centrally programmed channels, but hundreds of them, each speaking to a specific audience. Their logic, that only people in this demographic would likely spend the money on subscriptions to radio with programming diverse enough to speak to them, seems sound. Paid subscription radio reaches out to people with discretionary income who have become disenfranchised by radio in general.

Internet radio also has this chance, but the recent CARP (Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel) decision on web radio royalty rates sent a lot of internet radio programmers reeling out of the game, and only recently have they started regrouping. Recognizing the viability of this medium, Artemis Records stated that it will issue free licenses to nonprofit internet-only radio stations that want to webcast its music. With adult-oriented artists like Rickie Lee Jones and Warren Zevon on the label, that might be one of the smartest promotional moves of this young millennium.

The internet offers other viable possibilities. Record companies could mine lists of fans of people who buy their music, creating opt-in direct e-mail marketing for music from a listener’s favorite artist and other artists of the same ilk. A record company could send a song or a link to a song to likely listeners. This, of course, begs the question of how you find those likely listeners. The initial research would cost a fortune, though the internet, again, might make it simpler. Information mining, if done right, could turn into a valuable ancillary source of income once someone figures out how to generate the mining stream in the first place. Once companies or artists figure out how to get the audience to a site, they have won at least half the battle.

There is a website called Pandora.com, for example. They use a proprietary database called the Music Genome Project as its core. Created by programmers and musicologists, it breaks down by hundreds of musical attributes and then matches up elements like melody, harmony, rhythm, orchestration, lyrics, and vocal style with other similar music. When you access the site, it asks you to input the name of a favorite band and starts streaming music by other bands with a similar “genome” that it thinks you might like.

It even gives you the reason it thinks you might like it. If you do like the music, you give it a thumbs-up, and Pandora plays more in that vein. If you don’t, you give it a thumbs-down, and it stops playing that song and adjusts accordingly. The technology rocks my world, and it’s an amazing source of music I have not previously heard – and that, I humbly add, takes some doing. Now, what if the company could mine this information? Suddenly, it has a whole profile on me that it can sell to record company marketers about the kind of music I want to hear. Those marketers in turn could reach out to me with promotional offers to make me aware of their artists. And unlike some of the spam I now get, I might even want to hear what they have to offer.