Punch Records – Music Marketing day 2

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.

Published by Chris Unitt

I work at One Further, doing digital projects with cultural organisations. Follow @ChrisUnitt or find me on LinkedIn.