Music sites and magazines that are making it

This was in AdAge last week, and was posted on the the home site here at digital central, on our home page. It's about music magazines and sites and how they're winning the battle (or so they say) for advertising dollar. You have to consider the source, but advertising is what it's all about. As soon as you figure out that television is one big advertising medium, that the TV show is just a commodity for bringing in viewers, i.e. potential buyers of your products and shit, you've got the game beaten. That's why morals are out the window. As long as it's selling toothpaste, you'll see the skankiest, amoral bunch of losers doing the most base things. It really is that simple.

And I know I keep saying the business model, the business paradigm has shifted in the music business, it looks like the same old model for entertainment will be put to work on music. The music, the artist, will just be a commodity, and while that flies in the face of a lot of real artists, the real world has always done so for people who view the world from the fringes.

Fader, Paste, Rcrd Lbl, according to this article, are music-supported vehicles, not ad-supported. There's a difference. Target the audience with a specific kind of music (the bait, the commodity) and the theory is the audience (potential buyers) will show up and advertisers will pay to get their attention. It's the rifle approach to advertising, targeting a specific audience, vs. the shotgun approach to the more general sites like the music site MySpace just launched, that throws a bunch of stuff out there, hoping to hit something. The more targeted, the more specific anything is--a joke, a dramatic monologue, an ad--the more powerful it's going to be.

Art as business.

And as for the musicians. They'll keep banging away. They'll need a cut. They'll want a cut. But they won't get that much, unless it's Madonna or U2 dealing with Live Nation, which is a whole nother story. And right now these sites are giving free downloads of their music, which is giving them exposure.

Here's the article:

Music Blogs Team With Magazines and Labels
Spate of New Deals Create Opportunities for Advertisers
By Andrew Hampp
April 17, 2008

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- This was a banner week for music blogs, as several merged and others found partners in Universal Music Group and print magazines like Fader and Paste.

Gawker Media kicked off the round of deals this week by selling off Idolator, its music blog, to Buzznet, a social-networking site that recently added the popular music site Stereogum to its network. Now two independent-music magazines, Fader and Paste, are looking to the music blogosphere to add some reach to their online-ad buys.

Fader Media is partnering with Rcrd Lbl, an ad-supported indie-music downloading site that launched in November, with clients such as Puma, Virgin America and Nikon in tow.

Independently together
The indie-music mag, which has a print circulation of 92,000, saw an opportunity to align similar audiences interested in underground music and emerging talent. Its partnership with Rcrd Lbl is expected to grow Fader's online audience from 60,000 unique visitors per month to 250,000. Plus, Rcrd Lbl's creative director is a former Fader editor, so the relationship with the magazine was quite simple to negotiate.

Andy Cohn, Fader Media VP-group publisher, said, "The aesthetic of Rcrd Lbl -- the hand-selected content, curated by a former Fader editor -- made the site something we were all extremely excited about when it launched. It wasn't really just a clearinghouse of ad-supported music, it was carefully selected music that's ad- supported."

That was a key differentiator to both parties, separating the new association from more broad-based ad-supported music downloading sites like Qtrax, Spiralfrog and the recent expansion of MySpace Music. Sites like "MySpace are so overarching and so mass, this is much more of a targeted community," Mr. Cohn said. "It weeds out the average casual music fan that might go to MySpace to check out a band."

Multi-sourcing music customers
Peter Rojas, CEO of Rcrd Lbl, sees the ad-supported music space as part of a larger strategy for advertisers to use behavioral targeting online. "It's not a one-player game anymore. Just because someone downloads from Rcrd Lbl doesn't mean they'll stop buying from iTunes or stop going to Hype Machine. You ultimately have to recognize the music fan gets music from lots of different sources."

The same goes for music content, which Paste Magazine is looking to aggregate for advertisers via its new Paste Nation network. The new partnership brings 11 music and movie blogs to the Paste online network (including PopMatters, Spout and Virb), totaling 4.3 million unique visitors and over 28 million page views per month. Not only is it a scale play for Paste, it's a targeting opportunity for non-endemic advertisers seeking to align their brands to different music- and movie-based activities.

"The idea here is to provide major brand advertisers an efficient way to reach that true tastemaking audience," said Nick Purdy, publisher of Paste. "It takes a lot of work to go buy those individual sites, so grouping a select group of these together can help even just the planning side of some of the agencies out there."

Indeed, scale is of utmost importance to key buyers in the space, but so are the targeting opportunities. Carl Fremont, senior VP-media director at Digitas, said aggregated online communities with focuses like music, fashion or travel have benefits for brand marketers seeking to align with lifestyle affinities. "Anything that will improve our ability to target and improve our relationships with customers is what we're looking for. We applaud anyone who develops technology that will allow for a greater connection," he said.

Blogging for bucks
As the indie, Long Tail side of the online music community gets more consolidated, the major labels are starting to take more of a stake in monetizing through blogs, too. Universal Music Group just announced its investment in Buzznet, the aforementioned music-oriented social networking site that recently added Idolator and Stereogum to its network. Universal will be one of the first music conglomerates to take a hands-on role in editorial programming for a social-media site, with revenue split between both companies. Universal artists' songs and videos will be woven into the site's daily news feed, and users will also be able to create blog posts dedicated to Universal artists and content.

Doug Morris, Universal chairman-CEO, said in a statement, "We are always striving to push boundaries and expand the scope of our digital activities. And our partnership with Buzznet fits perfectly into that strategy. Tyler [Goldman, CEO of Buzznet] and his team have built a dynamic and legitimate social destination that provides fans and sponsors an all-encompassing musical experience."

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More on the state of the music business

Shit comes in threes.

Harp magazine quit publishing. Then No Depression.

Today Folio reported that Resonance, what Folio called a "small, well-regarded independent music magazine," called it quits.

I didn't read Harp or Resonance, but the other day I blogged about No Depression, a magazine I found about a year ago; I would devour the each issue of the magazine cover to cover a couple of times. And I pretty much said the music industry has to figure out how to market, but that mags (or is the hip terminology, 'zines??) are still valuable to the industry.

The music industry has to come to terms with the new business model that includes the digital world. So do magazines like No Depression, and all the rest. Low advertising, paper and printing costs, postage, and a few other reasons are all the standard reasons why magazines are going out of business. The Web seems to be the answer, but Resonance was finally putting its edition online, and that didn't work. I'm not sure why, except a quick glance at their site showed that they basically took their magazine, turned it into a giant pdf, and made that the content. The online world won't have none of that.

First and foremost publishers have to prove to the labels that they are needed, but that's not easy. What they need are hard numbers. I can't give hard numbers off the top of my head, but because of magazines like No Depression (and Performing Songwriter and American Songwriter) I actually went out and bought CDs of artists I read about in their pages. And I will continue to buy more CDs because I like the quality I get, but I'm never paying full retail price because they're way overpriced and I'm too smart of shopper to pay that. I'll buy on sale or used. CDs are not going to go away anytime, soon. Times are still in a transitional phase, so there are still uses for CDs as revenue generators--even in ways not yet thought of, but the labels have to figure this out, too. How about this, A&R head of your major label:

CDS ARE OVERPRICED, YOU'RE JUST RIPPING OF THE PUBLIC, WE KNOW IT, AND THE TRUE LOW COST OF A CD MAKES IT IDEAL FOR PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES.

There, do you think they'll get that? No, they won't. Blind, deaf, and dumb. And richer beyond belief. You actually can have too much money. It changes you. But that's a topic for a different blog. No wonder people steal music.


My Tour Filter is packed with bands I'm tracking. I'm a huge Lucinda Williams, Cowboy Junkies, and Steve Earle fan, just for starters, all of whom I've seen in concert a couple of times. There's where you're money is, or good chunk of it. I keep saying it, too: ticket sales, t-shirts, beer. There's where you're money is going to come from. (Of course, when I write that, I think, the labels and promoters will jack up the price of admission to the point where Major League Baseball has gotten, where you can't afford to go. Greed, greed, greed.)

But I'd drive a hundred miles to see Chris Knight, who I first heard about in No Depression. You can't tell me there aren't others like me. Maybe not huge numbers to fill a stadium like, oh, say Faith Hill and her Hollywood hillbilly husband, Tim McGraw, but that's the size of your market. Too effing bad if you don't like it. The world is changing, and you got to get creative. Labels and magazines both....

No Depression is coming to an end

The March-April issue of No Depression magazine is the second-to-last issue that will be published before it shits the bed. I read the editor's letter on the subway yesterday, after buying it at Border's on Downtown Crossing where I've been buying it for the past year.

Great magazine, if you love alternative music, which is a label for music that I'm prefer to call just plain American. It's the music that's being written and played in America, divorced from the big corporate music world, particularly in Nashville.

The reason for the 'zine folding seems two-fold. Advertising is down, which is where a magazine earns its keep. And the music industry itself is in flux, and the before mentioned advertisers would be the labels, major and minor I suppose, and they don't know which end is up right now. They don't know how to run their businesses right now, and advertising (or media) budgets are critical pieces of the mix. I can understand what happened in the music industry to a degree, but you can't blame it all on the digital world and downloads. A lot of it was shear greed. The price of a CD is still upwards of 18 bucks or more. I still buy CDs, and probably will for awhile. I have an iPod, and download, and while I like being able to buy just one song rather than a whole album, there's still nothing like the quality of my home stereo playing a CD.

And I don't think what the labels get is that the business model has changed so dramatically, and like so many other dinosaurs, they just keep doing the same thing over and over again even though they're not getting the results they want. They are just dumb, dumb, dumb. Money is going to be in concert and beer sales and t-shirts and shit like that, and I learned about so many new artists through No Depression and yes, then went out and bought CDs and told all my friends about them because I get so stoked about talking about new music I've found and went to concerts, the most recent one being Steve Earle (who I learned about from the No Depression cover story a couple of months back) at the end of last month. (Allison Moorer opened for him, and the ad for her CD, Mockingbird, is advertised on the inside back cover.) Right now the cover of No Depression (January-February 2007) is pinned to the bulletin board of my cube here. Lucinda Williams is on the cover. I already knew about her before I found No Depression, but again, have seen her twice in the past year with the accompanying couple of cups of expensive crap beer.

The fat suits don't get viral marketing, social networking, or guerrilla marketing. They don't get that people like me push their CDs harder than they do. They just keep counting their money, and more to the point, they keep counting the money they're losing, rather than how their making it and putting more toward that.

And sorry, dudes, just like the rest of America, you may just have to take a cut in pay. Horrors. That's really it. It's really fat cats (hogs, really) feeding at the trough and are more willing to cut off their own snouts than share the trough.

But I'm getting off the point of losing No Depression. For me, who spends, hell, I don't know how much I spend on music and music-related stuff, but it's a lot, from CDs and magazines off the rack to guitar strings and shit like that, a magazine like No Depression was invaluable to me. And guess what, you fat hogs--I'm invaluable to you, but you're not willing to admit that.