Lee Thompson reports back from Music 4.5’s Smart Radio event ‘Beyond Playlists & Promoting The Future’

26 September 2014 - Editorial

An interesting little afternoon conference session took place in London this week. Music 4.5’s Smart Radio event ‘Beyond Playlists & Promoting The Future’ brought together a bunch of people working in the digital music world with some rather-more geeky tech types to discuss all manner of things. Some of the stats and revelations that came from it were a bit of an eye opener.

It’s safe to say the music industry is changing. The pace of evolution now seems so rapid that old models simply don’t work anymore. One of the key speakers, Simon Cole, CEO of 7digital even made a point of saying that if you’re asked by your hierarchy what your five year business plan is, they’re pretty much dead in this game right now as you have to react to things on a day to day basis and thinking even five months ahead is challenging. The key is to be open-minded and willing to change at the drop of a hat. And that, in his view, seems to be a problem for some major labels and other traditional music biz behemoths in 2014.

Iain Sawbridge, Marketing Director for Tesco’s blinkbox music service provided some interesting stats to ponder on. 95% of all blinkbox music usage now is mobile. Yet Tesco in the UK still turned over more than £60 million of business on CDs last year. Britain is still amongst the bottom ranked of all mass music-consuming nations in the world when it comes to streaming (along with, you may be surprised to learn, the USA). So the dilemma for our industry now is to balance all aspects of it successfully. Focus on just one of those areas and you’ll be left behind. The big question seems to be: are majors in a good enough place right now to be able to spin half a dozen plates successfully at the same time?

Here’s an anecdotal observation from my social circle last week: A friend of mine is a huge pop fan in his late 30s. He buys and downloads four or five new singles every Sunday as soon as they’re released and hears what he intends to buy through Capital and Radio 1, plus the odd key primetime TV appearance. Sat opposite him was a lady in her mid-40s who thinks £9.99 to have everything she wants musically via Spotify is a bloody bargain and can’t understand why he’d spend more than £20 a month on just a handful of music. He wasn’t convinced. He’d no idea you could cache it and take it anywhere with you as part of the deal. He’s a huge music consumer who simply hasn’t been educated properly by our industry. But there are tens of millions more just like him. That communication breakdown needs to be resolved. And fast.

Another huge misconception is that age is a barrier to technological acceptance. Wrong again. Andy Puleston, Head Of Interactive for the BBC was on hand at the event on Tuesday and revealed that the 55+ audience for the Sounds Of The Sixties show on Radio 2 each Saturday morning (hosted by the remarkable 86 year-old Brian Matthew) has been one of the key demographics to embrace the new BBC Playlister functionality. The ability to add tracks you hear on the radio to your own bespoke playlist seems like something mainly Radio 1’s listeners would embrace. They do, of course, but not exclusively. 50% of all ‘calls to action’ during the Annie Mac show on Radio 1 are now people adding tracks to their own Playlister area, more than Facebook and Twitter combined.  By the way, Radio 1 has 1.9 million Twitter followers, 1.8 million Facebook likes and 1.5 million subscribers to its YouTube channel. Yet their traditional listener base continues to fall. Balancing that dichotomy is now part of the every-day job for everyone at Broadcasting House.

You may still think YouTube and Spotify are the most important discovery destinations for people to find music. Wrong again, sadly. Classic FM actually hits more people in the UK each week than both of them. Oh, and the No.1 place? That’ll be Radio 2 again.

Anyhow, just 10 months into its existence, BBC Playlister is now cited as the No.1 reason for people to sign into the BBC. It’s a great tool and fantastic asset to any curious music lover. In fact, one American bloke at the back of the room asked Andy during the Q&A session why any organisation would simply give technology like that away free to everyone. His reply was that basically Auntie saw itself as altruistic, helping strengthen the BBC’s position with licence payers just as the charter renewal rears its head once more. I’m not sure the American could understand such a concept in this fiercely competitive digital world.

Cait O’Riordan, VP of Product for Music & Platforms at Shazam was the final interesting speaker at the session this week. She talked about how the tagging app now seems to be guiding the media towards what will and what won’t be a genuine hit. Using the gap between current radio airplay for a song versus the volume of Shazam tagging being attributed to that particular track, they reckon they can measure a track’s potential chart performance pre-release. From the bar chart she showed, Meghan Trainor will be one of the biggest week-one debut hits this year when it comes out on Sunday, with Sunlight by The Magician as second highest, but quite some way behind in terms of sales. Cait said her evidence now is that people use Shazam to tag what they initially don’t know, but then go on to re-tag it multiple times afterwards, almost in the way that people will ‘like’ or ‘favourite’ something on FB and Twitter. On a side note, the most-tagged song ever in the UK still remains Rather Be by Clean Bandit, which racked up 127,000 tags in a single seven-day period back in January.

So, all in all, one came away from the day with lots to think about. I’m not entirely convinced that the dysfunctional world of a major label is best suited to be able to see its way through all the challenges ahead. Fresh-faced marketing teams, often focused on traditional ways of thinking based on what they learnt in college, tasked with performance-related targets and pressure from old school artist management and bosses from above, will most likely flounder. Lack of investment and knowledge in the riches held in deep catalogue at all labels remains a key problem, especially as the high-spending, time-rich, tech-savy over 50s are embracing new technology but still like physical formats too. Focus too much on streaming and digital and you’ll miss out too when 40% of the UK population don’t even have an iTunes account but more than 95% of all UK households still have fully working bit of hardware that allows them to play CDs. 

To succeed and make big money in 2015, the key is to know and understand all aspects of the music-consuming market and not throw all your eggs into just one basket. You have to wonder who is best placed for the challenge – a traditional major label still just dabbling and getting its head around tech, or a tech company that employs real music experts from every age group and the broadest possible range of taste, especially the generally-perceived less-cool Tesco-esque mass market? You’d be a fool to bet against the latter.