MADE

For the last three decades or so, we were led by the music industry to believe that marketing is everything. The music industry of the last 30 years was marketing on steroids. In fact, the degree to which profits were based on aggressive push marketing was so dominant that the industry couldn’t help but come to its knees with the second coming of the Web.

They say you can’t put lipstick on a pig. You could for the last three decades in the music industry. To a large extent, marketing itself was the product. The labels devoted most of their budgets to marketing. The thinking was that you could sell just about anything by making it slick enough and shoving it down people’s throats over and over. Eventually they would swallow.

It worked. And it turned the music industry into one of the most undemocratic institutions in American society. The industry was a cabal. The only way you could really break out as an act was if you had a connection of some kind with people inside the pearly gates.

Then two things that I love happened that bloodied their nose. One was the social web. The second was the return of Steve Jobs. Nobody could stop the iPod. Not even mighty Microsoft.

The Internet gave everyone a huge variety of choices to pick from and all of a sudden people were discovering all of this great music out there that they had never been aware of before. People began realizing that there was this huge pool of music out there that was actually better than what the labels fed us. And the iPod gave them a place to store it.

Whack! The industry felt the impact like a crowbar to the knee. But the marketing mentality forged by the last three decades is still with us to a large extent. Old habits die hard.

Indie musicians I know are still spending a fortune on printing thousands of beautiful looking albums. They’re still infected with the “push marketing is everything” meme. Even though many of these people realize that CDs and albums will pretty much fade out over the next few years, many of them are still reluctant to let go of many of the old marketing notions that came of age during the CD decades.

Don’t get me wrong, marketing is extremely important. It should be at the top of everyone’s priority list. But the process of marketing has completely changed.

Marketing today is to a large extent out of your control. What you as an indie music artist do have control over is how much potential a song has to perpetuate itself. I’m not talking about going viral either. Forget about viral. I’m just talking about people talking about your music.

A simple way of saying this is that you yourself don’t have much control over how quickly your content spreads, but you can increase the chances of it spreading at all by making it good.

In other words, content is king. You’ve heard this before. It’s true. And just as important, content is marketing now. Crappy stuff doesn’t spread because people don’t spread crap around.

Susan Boyle got 40 million hits on YouTube because she’s terrific…and she’s real. In a do it yourself world, a song has no chance of taking off on marketing alone. The quality of the content is the entire foundation of marketing in a way that we’ve never seen before.

This all sounds like common sense, right? Unfortunately, common sense ain’t so common. Lots of people confuse social media with content. They think that Twitter and Facebook are going to save the day…somehow, some way…regardless of the quality of content they themselves produce.

Twitter isn’t a content strategy. It’s a tool. Social media only matters to you if other people are using it to talk about you. You can help push that process along by using Twitter yourself, but if your music isn’t legit, nobody’s going to talk about you. Marketing in 2009 is useless without good content.

The old rules are gone. Embrace the new.

By: Twitter Buttons