advertisement
FYI

When 'Free Promotion' Doesn't Pay In A Digital World

Before digital platforms, it was pretty clear what constituted free promotion that contributed to record sales and concert attendances, but the economies of scale have shifted and what once worked may now be working against an artist's best interest and income.

When 'Free Promotion' Doesn't Pay In A Digital World

By External Source

Whether you’re listening to something on the radio or listening to a song on Spotify, for the end user they’re listening to music. There is no difference. Okay, on Spotify you can choose what you want to listen to and when you want to listen to it, but effectively it’s the same experience.


And one of the things which we think about quite a lot is there’s only so much consumption time that you have: there’s limited amounts of time in anyone’s day for their music consumption: television, YouTube, radio, Spotify, Netflix all competing for a slice of your time.

advertisement

People say ‘Well we’re just going to put it on YouTube because it’s promotional’ and it’s like ‘I’m sorry? There is no more commercial platform than YouTube!’ Owned by one of the world’s biggest commercial companies, Google. So, we can’t look at that as promotional.

YouTube is the world’s biggest music service: the most amount of people, the most amount of music. If we give our rights or access to our artists to whoever it is – whether it’s radio, a blog, a YouTuber – and if we say that those rights are ‘promotional’ because you’re going to do something else [as a result] I think as an industry we’re running in to problems.

Someone watching something on YouTube doesn’t go ‘Oh actually, I’m just going to go off to Spotify and play the song because I liked that so much’. All they’re going to do is watch something else on YouTube.

– Beggars Group’s Simon Wheeler talking about a different kind of value gap, as reported by Stuart Dredge in Music Ally

advertisement
GMINXR
Alt. Studio Lab

GMINXR

Music

New & Upcoming Canadian Albums: Punjabi-Canadian Producer GMINXR Drops 'Hit List' EP on 91 North Records

Also this week, Neil Young puts out the new documentary soundtrack, Coastal, and Tami Neilson has announced the new album, Neon Cowgirl. Check out the full release calendar here.

It's a holiday weekend, but Good Friday hasn't stopped the slew of releases on New Music Friday,.

Heading up notable new releases this week is GMINXR. Fresh from a Juno Awards performance, the internationally renowned Punjabi-Canadian producer now has his own release, Hit List, featuring Tegi Pannu and Zehr Vibe. It's out on 91 North Records, the label collaboration between Warner Music India and Warner Music Canada. The five-song EP is inspired by both golden era hip-hop and Punjabi folk music, and infused with GMINXR's trademark trap beats.

keep readingShow less
advertisement