Music’s New Album Release Cycle
Steve Jobs left a part of the disruption of the music business unfinished. By launching iTunes in 2003 with songs for download he succeeded in disrupting the Album Distribution System, cutting in half the cost to distribute new music and freeing singles from their captivity in the album.
Proof was the red ink that flowed from the Music Majors’ logistics divisions as half of their volume shifted over to a cheaper and better value distribution channel. And that’s what makes the music industry’s screaming foul about piracy sound hollow. Imagine if drones become the diaper delivery method, how sympathetic will you be when P&G starts writing-off Pampers retail distribution centers? It’s the same thing.
The part Steve did leave undisrupted was equal in size and called the Album Release Cycle. This provides a continuous supply of fresh music product to distribution and the promotion spending to pull it through. It is those other divisions of the Music Majors called record labels, along with the independents who perform this by signing bands to multi-album contracts and using a codified series of steps to produce and promote each album.
The time it takes for a band to complete each Album Release Cycle is long…about 18 months:
Writing and Recording — the band produces a master recording of enough songs to fill a 10-song album, which can take months to complete all 10. Bands exit this stage only when all the songs for the album are done and a release date for the album has been set. Since bands are in competition with other bands for a release date they are often stuck in this stage for months after completing the album.
Pre-release — With a date set for release, promotion planning begins around this single-day launch event. Spending commitments are made for radio play, advertising and in-store shelf placements. This mass media approach is really expensive because it isn’t efficient and that’s what’s behind the single-day launch event strategy. The belief is that spending around a single event caps the total amount and concentrates its effect.
Album Release –On the day of the album release the promotion spend begins and it peaks very quickly over a few week period. The majority of sales are pulled into the first several months, and word-of-mouth continues to produce sales for another 6 or 9 months.
Touring — The band’s prior album successes factor large in the size of the tours they are booked on, as does early results of their new release which is used by tour promoters to forecast ticket sales. Bands go on tour with new songs to freshen their set list, increasing crowds and the number of performances because they can return to venues they’ve played recently.
But the analog era Album Release Cycle and its codex of practices foster inefficiencies that look senseless.
- With a goal of only maximizing album sales using a single-day event, only 15% of the 18 month cycle is spent actually doing promotion.
- Embargoing 10 finished songs for months may be good for smoothing out label staff workload, it doesn’t feel in the best interest of bands or fans.
- Analog word-of-mouth is too slow to play a leading role in driving demand, which leaves promotion spending to carry the load.
- Not knowing who the fans are means spending on expensive broadcast media to cast a wide net… and hope.
A Digital Early Adopter
If you’re a metalcore fan you’ll know this band — We Came As Romans. Back in 2008 they were small but already proving themselves musically with a growing number of fans. They had not yet signed with a record label so they looked at the release of their new 4-song EP unburdened by industry conventions. Their genius was in understanding the changes caused by digital that had already taken place:
- Fans digitally connected to their friends cause word-of-mouth to happen exponentially fast
- What fans like to share most with their friends is new music (not new but really important)
- The band didn’t know who most of their fans were, but they could reach them through the internet
- Music in digital format can be downloaded at zero cost by anyone
Today these look pedantic, but they were not widely understood then. Nor was anyone predicting they would make the analog era’s codex for album releases obsolete. But We Came As Romans knew something about digital’s new power, because in December 2008 they posted their Dreams EP… for free download. In a few months fans downloaded 90,000 copies of Dreams.
Right after self-releasing the Dreams EP the band signed with independent record label Equal Vision. And a year later in December 2009 Equal Vision used the conventional codified steps to release the band’s first full length album To Plant A Seed. In the next 12 months there were sales of 950,000 equivalent songs.
Six months after To Plant A Seed’s album release, bassist Andy Glass said, ”Releasing that EP for free was like the best thing we ever did. Just from it being online, we have so much recognition from it and then from it being on Pure Volume, kids would download it and then it would be on torrent sites. It just spread so far, there were just under 90,000 total downloads.”
Equal Vision says To Plant A Seed was their most successful first-release of all time. Ok, but it had nothing to do with them. The seeds for its success were planted in December 2008 before the label had entered the picture. And this success changed nothing about their practices for releasing new albums.
The New Album Release Cycle
Maybe this was not the first proof, but it was early proof that new digital forces could be used to operate the album release cycle to make band income grow faster. Taking just the lessons learned from the free Dreams EP, look at how it changes the thinking about the Album Release Cycle:
- When you can grow new fans exponentially fast, going for album sales alone can be really short-sided
- Digitally connected fans have super powers for promoting bands and can be motivated to do it
- There is a new role for new songs… to promote, expanding the time promotion can be effective to most of the 18 month cycle
When combined into effective practices these can cause new fans to grow by multiples. Look at the effect on band popularity of going from doubling fans to tripling them each year.
Starting at 50,000 fans, ending each year with 2 times the number of fans will in 3 years grow to… 400,000 fans.
Starting at 50,000 fans, ending each year with 3 times the number of fans will in 3 years grow to… 1,350,000 fans!
This is the digital’s incredible gift. Bands who deliver a continuous stream of content and experiences cause deep and frequent engagement by their fans. These engagement patterns can be mined to identify new practices for maximizing them. From this comes many digital codexes, each situation-specific. Successes cluster around certain band metrics for popularity and velocity, social media activity, and traits shared by their fans. That means these practices can be used reliably by other bands to achieve similar results.
My prediction is this… the company that learns these new practices and uses them to operate a new album release cycle will be the ones who finish the job that Steve Jobs left behind.
