How Internet Marketing Saved The Music Labels

By Author: Larry Tang
Total Articles: 507
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The turn of the century brought a lot of new technology to the world and with that it brought the Music Industry a whole lot of problems. To deal with declining sales and continuous losses, record labels are finding new ways of raising money by focusing on different aspects of their business such as online marketing and consumer feedback rather than basing everything on CD sales.

Historically, record labels have based everything on CD sales. The idea of MySpace Music is innovative as they realized that they need to move into a new area of business. The Internet and the ease of illegal file sharing have long broken the business to consumer relationship. Rather than fighting against the trend, the industry has decided to take advantage of the easy accessibility of the Internet to move to the B to B model of marketing. MySpace is a huge social networking website with over 120 million users who go online almost everyday to check on friend updates and music. The new MySpace Music has already made millionaire deals with McDonald's and Toyota Motors who want to advertise on the site since so many users check on artist's updates ...
... constantly.

As mentioned, the business to consumer relationship broke down a few years back when many people began downloading music from the Internet rather than paying for CD's. Record Labels accused these users of piracy and many cases have led to trials. In order to establish a new relationship, record labels are focusing on consumer feelings to improve profits. The accessibility to videos, podcasts, music and games via Internet makes it possible for consumers to establish a more personal relationship with their favorite artists. Rapper T.I. began sending videos in which he talks to his fans about what he is currently working on. Other artists let fans ask them questions, which they will reply to via private or public messages on the web.

Whether these strategies will work or not is uncertain, but at least the industry is innovating. Actually, they're trying to innovate. It's a reality that most of these innovations are started from garages and build all the way to multi-billion dollar operations. So, how is it possible that the record companies with billions of dollars of resources cannot get a handle on innovation?

Innovation has always been directly proportionate with change. The traditional business model of the music industry and their unwillingness to change has caused them to lose their competitive edge in the market, thus forfeiting billions of dollars to innovations such as Itunes. Therefore, the music industry has partnered with MySpace to make a better value proposition for the consumer offering them a means of communication, social interaction and alternate forms of music media such as ring tones and pod casts. Itunes have established this value proposition for the consumer by offering them music previews of their favorite artists and purchase of their most favorite songs instead of the whole album. The music industry is also trying to follow in the footsteps of the movie industry by aggressively promoting merchandising. These efforts are too late as the 21st Century market still proves to us that going against a trend is almost always unprofitable for businesses. The music industry must focus on their current operations and allocate their resources to creating new innovations for distributing their music to the masses rather than being followers of past-favorite technologies and trends. Only then, they will be able to succeed competing against rival technology companies and recover some of the profits they have lost in the past decade.

We cannot deny the truth that Internet Marketing plays a huge role in leveraging innovation. It provides the means of broadcasting your message to millions of users and consumers with the click of a button. All you need to know is how to click.
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