January 6, 2010 Reconsider promotion. The faders are coming. The faders are coming.
If you have not tried MOG’s new streaming music service, then take a few minutes and watch the demonstration video. MOG’s streaming music service features a fader that enables music fans to simply adjust the flow of new (relatively unknown) music that’s inserted into any MOG music stream. I believe Echonest powers this feature. Enabling music fans to completely control their music experiences is no longer a pipe dream, it’s now a must-have feature that will appear everywhere over the next twenty-four months.
Quality faders will change the promotion game.
I think it’s relatively easy to enable consumers to control just about any part of their musical journey, but what about quality? Quality is subjective (or maybe it’s not?), however with artists creating over a million songs a year, the absence of a quality fader (filter) reduces the flow of new music to a trickle (the new music fader stays pinned to the left), as no music consumer wants to be burdened with the need to sift through a truckload of poorly written or poorly produced songs. (Note: I believe Echonest is already (somewhat) filtering for quality (hotness)?)
In my opinion, a quality filter-fader that everyone can trust - changes (ends) the promotion game for everyone. When we get to a point where quality, combined with other attributes, can be faded in and out, the entire industry will terminate the marketing department and hire a gaggle of people that can improve quality (subjective or not, it will me measurable). Promotion will become something you (possibly) do after you measure “quality”, not before.
