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Rants By Topic
Marketing
Razors Vs. Blades
12.20.2008
I saw a very interesting post by John Mellencamp the other day in Huffington Post (of all places—who knew he was so literate). He made some very articulate points on the music biz. To both paraphrase and use a well-worn marketing metaphor, he suggested that, back in the day, touring was the razor and ‘records’ were the blades. Musicians toured in order to support a record. That was how we talked about it. We supported the record. You didn’t worry so much about making money on the tour because the record was the thing that brought home the bacon.
However, today, he posited that this equation has become reversed; it is now it’s the music which is almost the give-away, which tries to lure customers to the tours (and ancillary merchandising deals) where the real money is made.
Why the shift? Several reasons:
1. Money (duh). For quite some time, the artist’s share of CD revenues has been shrinking, not to mention the fact that sales of CDs themselves are falling off a […]
Closing Pandora’s Box?
First of all, sorry, sorry, sorry for so many things recently. Where to begin?
–No the old blog posts are still not ‘back’.
–No you still can’t post. You still have to e-mail.
–Yes, I am working on all this stuff. It may seem like nothing’s happening, but really, a lot of stuff is happening.
Today’s little ditty is in regards to an episode last Friday (only 4 days behind schedule? Wow, I’m getting faster by the minute!).
A couple of you started telling me that you had noticed that your Pandora stations were no longer ‘suggesting’ my stuff in the course of playing stations starring artists that should eventually be flagged as similar to what I do… eg. Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel or perhaps Talking Heads. But… nada… nichts… bupkus. Dadai.
So I contacted Pandora and was told by one person that they could no longer find me in their database. (?!?) I informed the nice young lady that I was playing the JC Harris Station while we were talking. Now how about that? […]