Creating Breakthrough Moments for Catalog Artists in the Digital Space
As we showed in our opening article, The Value and Marketing of Music Catalogs, the importance of respecting and elevating catalog releases cannot be overstated. Although between 60 and 70 percent of major music labels’ total revenue is driven by catalog releases, the accompanying marketing strategies tend to remain in autopilot or non-existent. This space affords a wide window of opportunity for taking proactive initiative, and designing marketing strategies that straddle both the traditional marketing playbook and innovative marketing blueprints in the digital space.
Understand the Value of the Assets
In order to make the case to shift priority and marketing resources toward catalog releases, a label has to first understand the deep value of what they have in catalog assets. This approach demands considerations beyond publishing, to instead weave in a fuller understanding of the social and historical contexts of releases, and interrelated audience interactions. As music is remastered, reissued, and marketing devices are put into place for previously unreleased material, there is simultaneously an opportunity to dig into valuable archival content such as photographs, movie clips, and articles/press clippings to speak to the richness of artists’ legacy.
In an exclusive interview with Pinal Group, Jim Parham, former Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Sony Legacy Recordings, noted the importance of properly understanding and organizing assets. Sony Legacy, he explained, “had a dedicated A&R team…this was a team that worked in studios, transferring files, getting everything that the company owned into a form that would be usable for any possible partner that might want to use it. Digitizing the catalog was a huge undertaking.” This digitizing process, he continued, was not limited to audio assets, but rather also included visual assets such as videos, album covers, and an extensive photo archive.
As shown in the recently-released documentary Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell celebrating the life of Notorious B.I.G., many of the most illuminating moments arrived through rare, never before released archival footage. This footage provided never before seen documentation that illustrated the late artist’s tour regimen, comedic candor, and sense of responsibility for creating opportunities for other artists. As Washington Post contributor Lawrence Burney commented, “the film also feels like the first time we are afforded the opportunity to experience him as a multidimensional man who was destined to be an artist, whether he broke into mass consciousness or not.”
Create Digital Content That Will Give You Reach
While traditional catalog marketing tends to focus primarily around major milestones such as artists’ birthdays and album release anniversaries, this strategy begs the question– when does the consumer come into play? Rather than centering storytelling around the artist’s life and career, a label has the opportunity to center and explore what was happening in consumers’ lives at the time of an album release. How might a festival, tour, social cause, or historical moment be the anchor for the storytelling, and how might it serve as a window into the place that a catalog releases played in soundtracking these moments?
For example, rather than commemorating the anniversary of Santana’s debut self-titled album in 1969, how much storytelling could instead focus on the artist’s performance at Woodstock Festival earlier that summer, which ultimately gave the artist a significant boost due to the audience’s reception of tracks such as “Evil Ways”? It’s worth noting, and valuing, that the consumer was there guiding and pushing Santana throughout this early trajectory, and it’s the labels’ job to remind them of those experiences. This context provides the opportunity to create marketing campaigns that get the consumer involved, with the potential to collect and celebrate these stories and points of interaction.
The creation of unique digital content doesn’t have to stop at documentation, and can also extend even further when these archives are recognized as being living, breathing sites of memory and interaction. This content can extend to remixes and edits of original catalog works, live covers, photo montages of the specified era, recorded covers, sample pack projects, social cause playlists, and, as seen most prominently today– dance choreography, as it’s taken over TikTok reels.
TikTok choreography has marked a particularly fluid, and wild to predict, reemergence of catalog tracks to become the soundtrack to the platform’s latest dance trends. Take Sean Paul’s 2005 single “Temperature,” which has now become the site of TikTok improvised dances, or Handsome Dancer’s 2015 single “Coincidance,” equal parts parody and camp, and also now the fuel for hilarious dance battles on TikTok. These surprising, yet high-charged examples of content mark the opportunity to move the song from the back shelf to digital front pages, as well throughout viral content on social media platforms.
Harness Data Analysis to Identify Breakthrough Moments on a Real-Time Basis
The digital space is oriented around interactivity, and the consumer is the backbone of that. Whereas traditional marketing is focused on the catalog artist and album, and predictable milestones such as anniversary or birthday celebrations, there is a vast space of possibility for creating emotional connections that a fan can have with an artist, album, or moment. The digital space provides an opportunity for this to happen in a real-time, cost-effective way that also provides the opportunity for a piece of catalog to go viral.
The agility in managing these points of interaction is dependent upon the robustness and sophistication of a label’s data analytics and social media tracking infrastructure. Apple, Spotify, and other streaming platforms offer data sections that every artist and label can utilize to understand and to capitalize on picking the appropriate demographics and locations to reach the people most prone to connecting with their music.
Cost-effective digital storytelling also provides a window of opportunity to test drive and monitor responses to strategy and content. This technique was seen powerfully in the case of Olivia Rodrigo’s recent single “Drivers License,” which nailed the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100, last reported by Billboard for its 7th consecutive week. As reported by The New York Times, the 18-year old singer-songwriter details that she’d written the song with TikTok in mind, setting it up to “debut at №1 after setting streaming records on Spotify.”
Rodrigo’s reverse-engineering of strategy to go on to chart at Billboard demonstrates the far-reaching scope of opportunity in interacting early on directly with consumers. When this strategy is well thought out, as seen here, a release has a better chance of going viral and having a wider impact on overall music strategy.
Take Advantage of Traditional Breakthrough Moments
Milestones dates and moments such as anniversaries, vinyl reissues, and remastering provide the opportunity to connect with fans on a consistent basis. Major milestones such as the 25th anniversary of an album, or the 75th birthday of an artist might be the impetus needed to revisit and catalyze reissues, re-releases, and revisits to the archival catalog.
In an exclusive interview with Pinal Group, Aliza Rabinoff, Senior Vice President, Entertainment at Dan Klores Communications, underscored the importance of valuing the rich occasion that interacting with and collaborating with living catalog artists might afford. She called on her experience working with Sony Legacy Recordings several years ago on a campaign surrounding music legend Loretta Lynn, who she explained “has been having a great renaissance moment as a result of a combination of both reinterpreting and revisiting older songs while also continuing to write and record new material. That has kept her relevant to new generations as well as her lifelong fans.”
Jim Parham also highlighted the necessity of complementing and collaborating with artists’ engagement with their own catalog. “If it’s an artist that’s still putting out music and is still very active, then anytime that they have new music, you want to dive into the catalog to see how you can use the event of the new release to drive more catalog streams or sales, whatever your goal is.” While this technique may also center around a new album, birthday, or anniversary of an album release, he also noted the importance of dialogue with other occasions, such as “an appearance on a TV show or a tour, or maybe there’s unreleased material that you found in the catalog that you want to release and you put a plan together for that. There’s always an event, then it’s all down to how you define what the event is, and how significant of a driver you think it will be.”
Embrace Traditional Marketing, But Don’t Be Limited By It
Traditional marketing may provide tactics to facilitate a level of interaction that consumers have come to expect, however it’s not where the effort has to stop. Labels shouldn’t underestimate the value of creating digital breakthrough moments for today that gives catalog the chance to develop relationships with and connect with past audiences, as well as finding new audiences in the digital space.
Vinyl reissues have grown significantly in popularity, with CNN Business noting in 2020 that vinyl record sales surpassed CDs for the first time since the 1980s. While vinyl reissues certainly present great potential for revisiting catalog, the work shouldn’t stop there. Vinyl, instead, can be the marketing flagpole project that a label can go on to create robust digital content around, not only ramping up presence on social media, but also positioning the chance to seamlessly reconnect with the digital album and track.
While vinyl offers ample windows for reconnection, the reality of pressing vinyl must be met with awareness that it’s not exactly cost-efficient. In the case of a high-volume vinyl pressing approximating 20,000 units, and a wholesale rate of $4/unit, this marketing tactic invites the question of what other modes of interaction might be invented or reinventing to facilitate ongoing, dynamic points of interaction.
As Rabinoff accentuated in our interview, the key for press and marketing around catalog is quite simply creativity. The current era of quarantine and a reorientation toward streaming requires a keen sense of keeping up with the quickly-shifting tides of interactivity. Rabinoff highlighted in particular the reach of a DJ such as D-Nice, who managed to quickly pivot once venues were closed to instead set up for frequent livestreams, quickly earning himself headlines such as CNN’s, DJ D-Nice Is Throwing The Best Quarantine Party.
As she shared, “newer generations of fans definitely pay attention to what the artists they like are listening to. So if an established artist, DJ or producer is posting something about a particular artist they love, younger fans will ask “who’s that?” and actively learn more about the artist or song.” In the case of D-Nice, his setlist often leans toward old school classics rooted in a wealth of knowledge of albums’ histories, prompting an opportunity for song/album placement and brand collaboration.
Parham also stressed the value of creativity in the way that artists have “used this time to create moments.” As touring continues to be impeded by health restrictions, artists have instead shifted to “[going] to a sound stage and doing a show that fans can subscribe to. If you look at the artists that did New Years Eve parties this year, most of which were pay-per-view kinds of events…that’s exactly the kind of thing that they should be doing to continue engaging with their fans.”
Real Time Analysis and Pivoting
And finally, because of the instant feedback in the digital space, follow what consumers are grabbing onto. Track what they’re liking, sharing, and viewing, and magnify it in real time. In fact, this is a great time to create even more content and storytelling from the consumer perspective. But you must have the right processes in place to make this happen. The idea is to put the story out there, and to let it continue to be told and shared by the fans.
Written by Sara Skolnick and Michael Rucker.
Skolnick is a creative strategist with more than 10 years of experience at the intersection of music and technology. She manages label operations at Ok Fine Music, and is the founder of the record label APOCALIPSIS.
Rucker is a Managing Partner at Pinal Group and was the former Chief Marketing Officer at Fania Records. He has more than 15 years of experience in the marketing of music catalogs.
