“T-shirts and stickers! That’s what bands should focus on; t-shirts and stickers!”
Who knew at this point how many times I would be hearing this phrase this past October at the “Music Business Primer: Marketing & Promotion” panel at CMJ’s 2007 Music Marathon & Film Festival.
This year’s panelists included moderator Jason Feinberg, On Target Media Group (President & Founder), George Davis of The MuseBox (General Manager), Jenny Oppenheimer (Nettwerk Music Group, Director of Marketing), and Jonathan Schwartz (Relix Records, Zenbu Media Group, Music Executive). During the hour and a half discussion, these panelists touched on a number of issues – everything from finding the selling points of a particular good/service, how to entice the consumer with your product, how to cover all bases in effectively marketing one’s projects virally, down to how to be completely aware of one’s target audience to do so.
As one can see, the panel covered very interesting topics and served as a good discussion forum in answering questions that various members of various types of companies had to offer. The essential message that underlined each and every response involved knowing one’s direct and indirect audience and targeting them both with as much efficiency as possible. This means for urban hip-hop promoters, know that mixtapes play an essential role in your target audience. For indie-rock tour managers, knowing that fans love to have a piece of your band even after the show ends and the album repeats. It is at this point in the discussion where Jonathan again yells “t-shirts and stickers, you can’t go wrong!”…
Know your audience. And as the repeated phrase illustrates above, keep it simple and direct – this is the way to connect to the consumer audience and get your product exactly where it needs to be. As simple as all of this sounds, one would be amazed at how routinely both companies and individuals overshoot these simplistic axioms.
-CP
November 16, 2007 at 10:38 pm
[...] to subscribe to my RSS feed.Good summary of the CMJ marketing + promo panel I moderated over at the Digiwaxx Dream Team blog. Money quote:…the panel covered very interesting topics and served as a good discussion forum [...]
November 18, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Great to see you’re discovering a music business model from 1995 (or was that 1985?). Tshirts and stickers, eh? What’s next? Maybe bands could get into this “video” thing – I hear kids like to watch videos.
When you’re finished rediscovering and reinventing antiquated methods, maybe you could think about how music artists can pay their bills when nobody wants to pay them for their music. Maybe you’ll come up with something that doesn’t require the musician to give everything away in hopes they can retail a few of those “can’t go wrong” stickers and tshirts.
Hey, I hear Gap’s making a killing selling textiles – maybe bands could get in on the action, too! Shareholders in Hanes?
November 19, 2007 at 10:52 am
Ok, I was snarky.
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