Posted: 10 March 2008 | Author: Chris Unitt | No Comments »
Unfortunately I could only make it to the morning session in week 2 so I missed an afternoon learning about street teams and fan based activity. I hesitate to say “meh, nevermind, it’s not too relevant to Culturedeluxe” because there’s every chance that it was very relevant. I’ll have to ask around in the next session.
The day’s talks were delivered by Reggie Styles who works closely with Sony/BMG in a marketing capacity. He’s taken an interesting route to his current position, starting as a work experience kid in a record shop and working up from there via pirate radio stations, his own companies and in-house. There’s a vid here of him DJing behind Lemar on GMTV.
It was his experience with radio & TV plugging that he was passing on in the morning. The general upshot was that if you’ve got a record/act you want on radio or TV then you need to employ a plugger with an extensive list of contacts to make it happen for you, and that can get very expensive indeed. In fact the kinds of figures mentioned meant that although much of the information we were getting was interesting, it wasn’t really relevant to us at this stage – none us on the course are anywhere near that kind of level yet.
Reggie’s recommendation that the producers in the room incorporate some pop hooks into their work if they ever want to sell anything were received coolly. Also, although no-one challenged his idealistic view of the 360 degree music contracts (recording, distribution, touring, merchandise… everything) major record labels are currently keen on it doesn’t take a genius to see that putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t a great idea.
Reggie, then, was a corporate record label guy and clearly very money-motivated. That’s not to say he’s not a good guy though. After all, he was spending the day giving us his valuable time and experience. Not only that but he took the time to ring round and find the name of Steve Lamacq’s producer for me, the reason being that Lammo recently played the Young*Husband single that CDX released on his R2 show and, with the next release being prepared, we need to follow that up. Reggie had a few bits of advice on how we could do that.
The next session is tomorrow. In the morning we’re covering online, digital and mobile media marketing; the afternoon is on developing and managing media relations. It sounds absolutely relevant to how we’re planning to push Culturedeluxe and it should have an impact on some other projects I’ve got on at the moment so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be reporting back here with the good stuff.
Posted: 25 February 2008 | Author: Chris Unitt | 2 Comments »
I applied to take part in this course because of my involvement with Culturedeluxe Limited (as it’s soon to be known) – the spin-off record label from the Culturedeluxe music website. There are plans to develop the label and move it away from its hobby roots and I want to be prepared for the step up.
The course was taken by Miles Hesketh from Hedz, aka Mylz from hip hop night Heducation. He’s got a Masters in marketing so we were in good hands. The session started with a fair amount of theory but became more practical as it went on, covering branding, segmentation, positioning and pricing.
There were a fair number of (entertaining) digressions but it was good to be involved in some lively discussion where everyone was coming at the material from slightly different angles. The group included a vocal coach, an MC, a producer and some event managers and we’ll all be looking to apply the same information differently.
I took a few good things away from the session, some impacting the record label, some more relevant to my own day-to-day business. As far as CDX is concerned the following stood out:
Funding
We spoke for some time on funding which, although it isn’t strictly within the course’s ambit, was of interest to everyone, especially as Miles was able to give some insight into what might be available to creative businesses. This isn’t something I’d thought of as being relevant to CDX but I’m starting to change my mind.
Direct marketing
Every marketer I’ve ever heard has gone on about the importance of having a mailing list and Miles was no different. I understand CDX doesn’t have one anymore so we need to start collecting emails again asap.
Promoting Culturedeluxe more widely
Related to direct marketing, we discussed the ‘communications mix’ – the range of media in which CDX’s ‘voice’ is represented. We need to increase the amount of content on the site and also start making ourselves more noticeable, instead of waiting for new readers to discover us. I’ve got some ideas and am going to come back to this one day soon.
Focus
The music website has a good, strong focus and I could easily divide artists into CDX and non-CDX camps. I couldn’t say the same for the record label and I think this is a big weakness. The three releases last year were in different genres – glitch-funk, ambient and indie-folk. While there’s a mission statement of sorts on the site: “giving a voice to some of the world’s best new music” we need to set out exactly where the label’s heart lies.
So day 1 has provided penty of food for thought.
Next week we’ll be covering ‘Plugging: TV, Clubs, Colleges & Universities’ and ‘Street Teams & Fan Base Activitiy: Guerilla Marketing’ with Anna Goodman (Abstrakt Publicity) and Reggie B & Redz (Sony BMG).
