#Midem – Ted’s Intro & Marketing To Fans Panel
Ted Cohen, in his MidemNet convention introduction set the tone well with a call for total music ubiquity and an industry shift "from vendor like relationships to a partnership" between music services, the labels and the fans. Next, Paul of Digital Music News moderated the first panel "Marketing to Fans – The New Mix". A few highlights:
- Artists are being asked to "rise up an an replace all that has been lost" in the music business and I'm not sure that's a reasonable expectation," said Eric Garland of Big Champagne. "We're so preoccupied with measuring social connections…. But there is often no correlation between the number of social connections and making money."
- So many bands are doing social media that it begins to loose meaning. "We have to help artists tell their story and make social media part of their art." – Jeremy Welt, SVP New Media at Warner Bros Records. "It's about connecting everything an artist is doing."
- "It's almost not about what you do, but rather about what you don't do… But can you make money?" – Michael Doernberg, CEO of ReverbNation
- Examples worth watching: OK Go, Arcade Fire
The Midem blog has official coverage here with a bit of exclusive help from Music Ally.
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I fully agree with these statements. I’m not saying that artists shouldn’t keep up to date with their fans, but I read all too often articles where social networking is stressed upon and promoted with new social networking sites popping up every day and how much do the artists really get out of it? Sure we live in a world where people can know every bit of news at the push of a button, but pre-Internet musicians didn’t do the social networking expected now of artists and they were fine. Why? Because social networking HELPS, but there are other factors that may even more important to success, like talent, marketing, connections, and discipline. We are in over saturated times and the problem (which has always been a problem) is that most musicians ONLY want to be musicians. They want to make and play music, but they don’t want to be businessmen or anything else! Only in this day and age, without the support of major labels (like pre-Internet artists) the musicians of today HAVE to be bussinessmen AND think outside of the box!
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