Category: Art

Is Taylor Swift a Strategic Guide?

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.

Jennifer Lawrence in a Nude of Her Choosing

I had to call attention to this article by Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic about Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photo shoot for Vanity Fair.  The photo itself is brilliant as is Garber’s analysis of it. Lawrence’s calling the hacking of her private photos a “sex crime” is entirely reasonable. And I am reminded why I care about copyright, why it still matters in the digital age, and why those who say, “Forget it, you’re fighting against the future,” are at least lazily cynical and at most hopelessly corrupt.  Permission is the foundation of copyright, just as it is the foundation for respecting another person enough not to “share” photos of her that she did not choose to distribute.  Permission is fundamental to civilization, yet somehow, the principle has been given a bad rap, treated as some sort of elitist barrier we must cross if we are to be free to play with these gadgets.  And I have no qualms asserting that this idea of permissionlessness, which has been championed as a digital-age value does emanate from a sexist psyche.  Permission deserves more attention than it gets.  Permission is the difference between a regrettable one-night stand and a rape.

Lawrence is talking about ethics. She’s talking about law. She’s talking about, essentially, decency in the age of digital reproduction. And she’s also, of course, talking about the tensions that inevitably exist in a world mediated by images. The line between objectification and empowerment is a notoriously thin one, particularly for women. Is that short skirt—or that low-cut shirt, or that nude Snapchat—liberating, or something else? In an environment saturated by images and therefore expectations, where does control end, and victimhood begin? “She” versus “her,” subject versus object … images, whether sent or stolen, capture all of those things.

Read Megan Garber’s full article here.

KPMG Report – Movies & TV Widely Available on Legal Services

I’ve lost count at this point how many times and ways I’ve rejected the premise that piracy is a consumer-driven response to claims of scarcity in the market, especially in the United States; but now KPMG has released the results of a study of motion pictures and television programs that rebuts such pro-piracy claims with actual data.  You can read the details of the report for yourself, but suffice to say that if you’re an American, you really have no excuse not to be watching filmed entertainment through one of many available legal channels.  From my point of view, the KPMG report doesn’t reveal a lot that cannot be surmised anecdotally simply by scanning available titles on iTunes, Amazon VOD, Google Play, Netflix, Hulu, and so on.  But the report does verify these casual observations for anyone seeking a more methodological examination.

Naturally, KPMG could not study every possible title and account for every taste, but by looking at a sample of 808 unique films with measurable popularity based on revenue, critical acclaim, and awards, the firm found that 94% of the films studied were available on at least one (and in most cases several) of 34 legal distribution services included in their research.  These services included Subscription Video-On-Demand, ad-supported Video-On-Demand, and Electronic Sell-Through services.  The study did not even include TV-everywhere services or online catch-up services offered by networks for fans who might have missed episodes when broadcast.  Naturally, the report also does not look at original programming for web-based networks like Netflix’s House of Cards, though shockingly enough, these programs as well as network titles made rapidly available on such services are still pirated in remarkably high numbers.

Data aside, I can say personally that I currently use four non-broadcast, web-enabled services these days and still don’t have time to watch everything of interest. And so, I continue to wonder what kind of ultra-leisurely lives are led by those who complain about a lack of access to filmed entertainment.  Simply put, if you need pirate sites to feed your demand for these media, you have WAY too much time on your hands. Certain individuals may claim that specific titles of interest cannot be found through any legal channels, and such complaints often give way to over-reaching claims that piracy is about preserving culture; but year after year, sites like TorrentFreak reveal that the most pirated titles are, not surprisingly, the most popular titles according to the same kind of criteria used by KPMG for its study.  All highfalutin claims aside, if pirate sites had to rely on fans of arcane, art-house cinema, they would all fold.

To put the time thing in perspective, if we only count the titles included in the KPMG study, they translate into roughly 6.5 hours of viewable material per day for a whole year.  I don’t know any adults with full lives, jobs, responsibilities, etc. who have 6.5 hours a day, every day to watch TV shows and movies. The only people who have that kind of free time are children, who really shouldn’t be watching that much of anything, legally or otherwise.  And I suppose adults who possess great wealth might have that kind of time on their hands, but then they can afford all manner of access to media and are far more likely to spend their leisure time sailing or heli-skiing or something more exotic than six-plus hours a day watching TV and movies.  So, claims of scarcity by anyone in the US at least really need to be scorned and then ignored for the adolescent whining that it is.

One aspect of this subject I do find interesting is that despite chronic claims by various pundits and consumers that legacy industries need to “adapt,” the filmed entertainment industry has actually responded very rapidly to changes in viewer habits and desires as consequences of changes in technology.  In fact, industry-wide modifications and even experiments in distribution have been virtually in synch with advancement in the capacity to send and receive high-quality video signals worthy of our high-quality monitors and televisions.  One chart on Page 8 of the KPMG report shows a trend in decreased time between primary and secondary release of motion pictures, and this downward curve over the period studied more or less matches the technological improvements that make services like Netflix and iTunes work in the first place.  When you consider the scope of these industries as well as the number of potential stakeholders in a particular title (e.g. the number of licensees involved), the industry as a whole has actually done a pretty good job of keeping up with the times.  I get that there remain a number of Veruca Salts out there singing “I want it now,” still unsatisfied perhaps with a three-month window between a theatrical release and a low-cost, online rental; but certain demands are  simply unreasonable if we’re to have a market at all.  Of course, while waiting for that one title to become available, the KPMG report shows that even Veruca has legal access to about 585 hours of other things she can watch.