The main challenge when facing digital for the cultural industries has been from the start the monetization for content creators and cultural industries’ players. Piracy has been a major setback for music industries. Also digitalization has changed end-user (music fan) relationship with the music and artists. Independent labels have suffered enormously from piracy and new models of free streaming music platform. As a result, there is less and less capability to invest in the development of new artists, that are left to their own means to produce, promote and tour. Even when an artist is signed to a label, the investment of the label is really low, both in terms of production and also promotion and the Artist should be actively promoting itself.
The good news is that there have never been more tools to produce recorded music at an affordable cost and there is currently more recorded music available than ever. The problem that the Artists face nowadays is not anymore associated to the difficulties of recording but of developing audiences and monetizing.
There are two main ways for an artist to develop its audience and acquire music fans. The first one is through the gatekeepers that have a privileged relationship with the music fans: radio DJ, popular playlist creators, music magazines and webzines. Having the regular support of these gatekeepers guarantee the artist a high profile exposure to the audience that will then react to their music. Unfortunately those spaces at radios, magazines, TVs are very scarce and usually hard to reach. The second way is through digital tools available that enable a direct contact of the Artist with its fans. The artists use in a regular way the social networks (facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube) to relate to their fans. There is nonetheless a big void when it comes to develop their current fan base and also being able to reach them in a music environment. Back in its day, myspace achieved the creation of such a music friendly space, a social network truly devoted to the interrelation between music fans and artists. Facebook and twitter are really far away of creating this closeness.
A big challenge that exists is then empowering the Artist (and also independent labels) with user-friendly and easy-to-use ICT tools that help them to develop and monetize audiences, directly or through a smart usage of social media potential, and then to maintain a close relationship based on a music environment of real music fans.
MMAA project will empower music artists, bands, and label records with the most valuable insights on who and where are their fans, by means of big data analysis within and beyond the MMAA ecosystem, making possible to them a clear strategy to expand their audience, with tools to work on maintaining their loyalty and monetize it.
MMAA project has the objective to make it possible for the artists to have an all-in-one, easy to manage solution for recurrent needs where today they need to use different tools, many of them complex:
• Artist profile – official website alternative with custom URL linking
• Artist profile – downloadable press kit and all data from social networks and streaming platforms
• Online sales (music and merchandising)
• Audience expansion & community building
• Targeted communication with their fan base
• Crowdfunding
• Ticket sales
• Analytics: online sales and fans profile activity
Regarding music related editorial content, music magazines have seen a clear and rapid decline in their sales the last ten years. The migration to digital is been performed in a precarious way, through webzines which are difficult to monetize (advertising is not enough) and digital downloads of the magazine through a digital kiosk solution, whose value is perceived as low compared to the paper version and has difficulties getting substitute sales.
The challenge here for the magazine is finding a new solution that will make it possible to attract and build a loyalty relationship with the music fan for a recurrent usage of their magazine in a way it could be monetized. This monetization will come from have a subscription based model besides advertising and with new additional streams of income, developing new business models that currently are not supported by any standardised product in the market (“Kiosk-type” solutions that offer a very basic digitalization of the magazine) and require a high-cost (in terms of financial costs, development time and skills needs to define and maintain the project) for an ad-hoc solution from a developer company.
