Taylor Swift’s new album 1989 is the first and only to go platinum this year. And the year is just about over. At the same time, Swift is making headlines because her label Big Machine (a label she and her family own) has pulled all of her albums from Spotify and other streaming services. As David Lowery’s artists rights blog The Trichordist has been pointing out this week, streaming company representatives and Internet industry cheerleaders have revealed some rather sexist overtones in their criticisms of artists like Swift, Adele, and Beyonce for their strategic decisions to restrict streaming of their tracks. Certainly, this kind of response is SOP by the brash, young boys of Silicon Valley, who like to tell everyone, especially silly girls, that they just don’t understand new business. The arrogance of male money losers lecturing successful female entrepreneurs is something to behold, but let’s move on…
What I find particularly interesting are the lessons to be learned from the brief report on NPR this morning in which Sam Sanders describes Taylor Swift’s ingredients for success. I say this because all of the tactics employed by Swift are consistent with a marketing strategy that blends the best of the digital age with the best of pre-internet business models. Taylor Swift does the following:
- Create a product people actually want. Check. Clearly.
- Connect with fans via social media. Check. Swift is a long-time user of Twitter and responds directly and personally to her fans.
- Promote like mad. Check. Swift is constantly self-promoting with live appearances.
- Tour. Yep. Got it.
- Give people a real reason to buy your product. Check. Read on…
As Swift explains, 1989 did an exclusive deal with Target that has three extra songs and a unique photo collection. This is a real-life example of the often vague suggestion that artists need to “add value” or “give consumers something they can’t get online.” But right there is the trick, isn’t it? Swift did add value by creating a limited edition CD with extra stuff for her most ardent fans, but the other component to get people to buy the album was — and this is really mind-blowing — to not make it available for free right away. Genius, right? This is not to say that infringers have not uploaded files from the album to YouTube, which is a whole other problem. What this story really makes me think about, what I am always thinking about, is the middle-class band or singer/songwriter, partly because that’s where I think some of the best music is produced. People can speculate all they want about whether Big Machine is providing a guide to success for other major artists; but my question is what do artists do who aren’t quite so huge as Taylor Swift?
For instance, I recently discovered a band I like after attending AmericanaFest 2014 in New York City. It was clear their fans had showed up because everyone crowded around me knew the lyrics to the songs, but I did wonder if these fans were album purchasers, streaming listeners, concert attendees, or all of the above. I happen to know through an industry source who knows this band personally that they are very typical of the middle-class band today in that their album sales are a loss leader used to promote touring and that they have to tour constantly to make any kind of living. This colleague explained, “This is one of those bands that’s just over that line of making a living, playing just big enough venues to make it work; go one notch below them, and you’re pretty much operating at a loss.”
Now, this band is doing more or less everything Taylor Swift is doing as well as everything the know-nothing web gurus tell them to do. They use social media, sell tee shirts, tour constantly (leaving families behind); and of course they’ll never be as popular as Swift or Beyonce and are unlikely to get invited on the Today Show to promote a new album. And that’s nothing new. But in a pre-internet market, this middle-class band would be doing pretty well, still working hard, but not operating quite so on the edge of survival. And while nobody may care, they ought to for selfish reasons alone. Because the longer a band like this continues to work, perform, and experiment, the higher the probability is that both they and society will be the beneficiaries of some new song or album that becomes a favorite hit that lasts for decades.
There are hundreds or thousands of artists who match the profile of this band, and if all of them are surviving (or not really surviving) on touring and merchandise alone, their days of playing are likely to be more limited than their predecessors simply because they’re mortal. Album sales are a form of passive income, and passive income translates into time — time to spend writing a new song or experimenting with a new sound rather than booking a tour or approving the design for another stupid tee shirt. So the question is whether or not a band this size should take a page from Swift’s playbook, pull or limit its tracks on streaming services and effectively force, rather than beg, their fans to buy CDs or digital downloads or even vinyl? Would there be the backlash against the artists that so many predict? I sometimes wonder. Certainly, the owners of Spotify and Pandora would like us to think so. But of course, if the options are zero income or mere drippings from streaming that don’t sustain, more than a few artists may be willing to find out.
