The Biz
BUSiNESS & MARKETiNG
On the other side of the
Atlantic, Dolly moved to
Nashville, whilst Elvis moved
to Memphis (two of the three
musical hearts of
Tennessee). And have you
ever seen the film Coyote
Ugly? Why did Violet leave
her
hometown
of
South Amboy, New Jersey for
the bright lights of New York?
It’s a well documented fact in !
h i s t o r y t h a t m u s i c i a n s
regularly moved to find the
relevant commercial centres
of their chosen industry, and
each one of those commercial
centres had a distinct
personality; its own way of
w o r k i n g . A p p l y i n g
s o m e m o d e r n b u s i n e s s
terminology to the act of
touting one’s self around town
in order to get a recording
contract, the ‘marketing
methodology’ of a musician
in Memphis would have been
markedly different to the one
in Denmark Street (or even in
Nashville, for that matter).
Taking an opportunity to get a
little more detail on that,
m o d e r n
marketing
methodology was (and for
many, still is) based on a
marketing mix termed the four
P’s; Product, Place,
Price, Promotion.!
!
The point of the mix is to
create desire in a consumer’s
mind, leading them (hopefully)
towards a purchase. You offer
a product or service (for
instance, an apple) that
a particular group of people
wants. You make it visible in
some place they visit regularly
( f o r e x a m p l e ,
the
supermarket), at a price level
which matches the value they
feel they would get from the
product/service (what is the
taste of that heavenly sweet
apple worth?) and
you use promotional techniques (such as in-store
announcements) to let people
know all about your product/
place/price combination in the
hope of selling lots
of apples. Got it? !
!
Now apply this to your own
Musicality. For aspiring artists
searching for a record deal,
the product / service (that’s
you and your voice) would
perhaps be made visible in
the venues frequented by the
influential people at the
record labels. Those people
would be invited as guests
(dealing with the price aspect)
and
artists
would
communicate with a whole
host of people in a variety of
ways (making phone calls to
personal assistants and other
colleagues etc, some of them
even at competing labels)
in order to create awareness
of and promote the gig/
showcase. The combination
of you/your voice/the gig/
the venue/the free invite and
all of the promotion
undertaken will hopefully
have created a desire for a
particular label representative
to listen to you sing. You’ll
have needed to do lots
of research along the way,
and of course, there was no
guarantee that things
would go any further even if
someone did show up, but it
was a start.!
IMAGE
IMAGE
!
Going back to Shirley and
Tom and Dolly and Elvis, it
was therefore with great
excitement that I received my
IMAGE
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iSing | issue 1
isingmag.com
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