January 18, 2010 It's everything except our music that will make us the most popular place to hear music in the future.
In a recent post, radio industry guru Mark Ramsey (occasionally posts on MTT) offers this advice to the radio industry:
Radio competes in “a world where your music can be duplicated - song for song - by an endless parade of competitors, each more novel (and with better PR) than the next. It’s everything except our music that will make us the most popular place to hear music in the future.”
Labels and artists should consider Mark’s advice. If all music is available in all places (it can be, but should it be?), then “it’s everything except your music” that will make a “place” a popular music destination.
Related posts below:
Labels and groups of artists working together should not miss the window to overtake local, regional and national radio brands. You own the music and most of the “other stuff” the radio industry needs. Don’t go over the self promotion cliff, crush your local radio station instead.
In my eight things post I stress: fan control, fan generated content, and fan-to-fan engagement as essential features of a branded, multi-artist music site.
Reader Comments (2)
Sounds more than a little counterintuitive on the face of it, Particularly looking at it from a musician's point of view-we think music makes the station, we know it ain't the other way around, but kind of a no-brainer if you consider that radio's traditional role is providing everything that isn't music; the commercials, the promos, the rounding up and squeezing of advertisers...
That of course applies only to radio stations and artists trying to live from recording (good luck..). Live venues and bands doing concerts of course makes music that cannot be duplicated at all.
And also, what makes a (music) radio station popular is of course the relevance of the _selection_ of music, and that is pretty hard to copy on the fly. I know that there are a thousand radio channels that do play the same 5 songs, but I don't see any chance or reason for them to survive.