Today I decided to take a deeper look into the music industries behind successful artists and to find out what they contributed to make the artist a successful product.
The main company behind music is the record label which manages over the marketing, manufacturing, recording, legal rights and distribution of the music. Contrary to most peoples beliefs the record company isn't just responsible for getting the music heard by other people.
Nowadays record labels are nearly all owned by another company and can use their skills/expertise to promote a product or to borrow money for the initial big start-up cost of promoting an artist. There are 4 big record labels currently in the world Sony, EMI, Universal and Warner who are all sub-divisions of conglomerates and together make up around 70-80% of the world's music market. These sub-divisions are then split down into departments such as sales, artwork, publicity and management.
Applying this knowledge to my own work, I decided to look at how the record labels used media to promote their artist. On youtube I watched various videos by Jimmy Iovine the head of Interscope records. What I learnt was that sites like youtube and Facebook are becoming more popular ways of promoting music. Now even on printed work like magazine adverts and on album covers it is common to see Facebook links tempting you to like or share the artist's page with your friends. This has given me the idea that when I am producing my own print work I will include something similar so that people can connect with my artist and share their findings with their friends.
I would like to share some links with you to show you how powerful the internet has become in the music industry. The first is a link to an article about Justin Bieber who not matter what you think of him you cannot deny that as an artist he has been a big success. He was founded on youtube.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Weekend/teen-pop-star-justin-bieber-discovered-youtube/story?id=9068403#.T4GbjPuPn4s
The second is a video by Jimmy Iovine who talks about advertising by moving popular culture in order to attract an audience for your artist:
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