Music and influencer marketing #1 : Is there a problem ?

Over the past 3 years, influencer marketing has left the back seat and moved to the front row of marketing plans.

Whether it’s in video games, travel or cinema, most of the entertainment and leisure verticals have now tested and learned how to best implement influencer marketing into their plans.

What about the music industry?

The answer is not so much!

Here are a few reasons why:

- STAFF: During a 15 years long crisis, labels had to downsize the teams as much as possible to survive. Most of them are understaffed and crawling under work. When addressed, influencer marketing is not a priority. Most of the time it is considered as PR or web promotion and ends up executed poorly by sending an email to the same large mailing list hoping for influencers to write back. 99 times over 100, they won’t.

- MONEY: Influencers are very relevant for a developing act. When you’re trying to enlarge a fan base, an influencer can be a catalyst by introducing the artist to an audience who trusts him. If you target an influencer with a 6 figures fanbase the cost will most likely eat all your marketing budget. So you’re back to stage one, hoping for influencers to write back.

- ROI: Let’s say that you’ve managed to deal with the cost and closed a deal with the influencer you targeted. Youtube, Instragram, Snapchat, Facebook, here are the major social networks the influencer will use to connect your artist with his community. He will create a content and post it and your artist’s music will be played for free (except for Youtube but everybody knows the value gap). You will provide a link to streaming services to be highlighted in the post and hope that the audience will like your artist enough to click on the link and stream more of his music.

That’s basically what my partner and I witnessed last year when we decided to create Matchplay, a Paris based influencer agency dedicated to music. We wanted to bridge the gap between influencers and music by testing and learning.

Considering what I explained earlier you might think that influencer marketing is not fit for the music business.

You’d be very wrong, on the contrary it is perfect.

I’ll be delighted to explain why in my next post !