There is a GREAT article in the Friday Dec, 17, 2010 edition of the Wall Street Journal written by Damian Kulash Jr of the rock band OK Go which discusses at length the quantum changes that have occurred in the music business in the past decade.  With the rise of the Internet and digital music, he asserts that the primary product being sold today is a music experience not a recording of a particular song.  The current industry model is based on the premise that music is a commodity – that businesses can measure the success of a band based solely on the number of records they sell.  A song that sells 1 million copies is more successful – at least financially – than a song that sells a thousand records.

According to the article; as records sales plummet “In 1999, global record sales totaled $26.9 billion; in 2009 that figure, including digital purchases, which no represent 25% of sales (nearly 50% in the US) is down to $17 billion”, revenue from touring has also declined “A report from Edison Research found that in  2010, 12-24 year olds went to fewer than half as many concerts as they did in 2000; nearly two thirds went to none at all.”  So if you can’t make money selling records, or from live music shows, how are bands making an income?  By selling access to their fans to corporate sponsors.

It works like this – instead of signing with a record label that will control what kind of music is created, whether or not there will be a budget for a music video, or merchandise or a tour for that matter, artists are contracting directly with corporate sponsors who “tend to take a broader view of success.  The measuring stick could be mentions in the press, traffic to a website, email addresses collected or view of online videos.  Artists have meaningful, direct, and emotional access to our fans, and at a time when capturing the public’s attention is increasingly difficult for the army of competing marketers, that access is a big asset.”

Sound familiar?  Sounds like social media to me.  In my blog post – Social Media ROI: Measuring Engagement – written a few weeks ago I talked about emerging ways to measure the success of your social media efforts – like comments, nested comments, discussions between followers fostered by your site, etc.  While I don’t have an easy metric for figuring out if you have “meaningful, direct, and emotional access” to your followers, I think the closer you can get to saying you have that access, the more powerful and successful your social media efforts are.  I am going to be on the lookout for a way to capture and measure the nature (and possibly the intensity?) of something as elusive as “meaningful, direct, and emotional” and will post that information here when I find it.  Do you try to measure the depth and the intensity of the access you have to your followers or fans?  If so, how?  If not, what do you measure and do you think it provides any insight into the nature of your relationship to your followers or fans?  I would be very interested to hear from all of you.

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Blog by Joyce