There are of course those in the industry that continue to pursue the big markets. These guys are often associated with the old school. Truth be told, they are the ones who will probably drive the music industry forwards into a more profitable world. In theory everyone is going after the same markets but there are some who seek to unify segments into major markets while others search vainly for success in the long tail.  .

Greatest success in the industry has almost always come from those artists who were able to unify the masses and that simply hasn’t changed and probably never will. PopScores shows exactly that, month by month. Only very few people are remotely interested in the millions of tracks that are available through subscription services like Napster or Spotify. It can’t work. Let’s learn from YouTube. The reason YouTube works so well is because they got the model right of how people want to view videos. YouTube runs “playlists” with a few featured videos and then there are the “most viewed”, which is a “cosmic audience conscious” or at least a chart that measures what the majority of people is “into” right now.

It’s not the billion daily views that essentially generates the hype. Surely it doesn’t hurt to have practically everything available, however, much has changed since the early days of YouTube, and there are many clips that are not available on YouTube anymore and yet the traffic stats are not in decline. When one studies PopScores, one can see that there is a “group consciousness” in the UK that shows unified audiences for some artists and it is the job of the Music Industry to continue to find those artists and songs that speak the language of the masses.

The newer artists within the cosmic consciousness of music are strongly embedded in the British public’s heart. The Kings Of Leon, Snow Patrol, Kaiser Chiefs, Pink and The Killers are currently achieve scores that are usually only within the realm of  long established artists. However, these are not new artists. It takes more than just one platinum plus selling album to establish this level of emotional connection.  

The big movements this week come from artists on their way to the top of the British consciousness. The Black Eyed Peas have another striking record on the radio and their PopScore rose by a strong 2 points with the strongest advance in the 30+ female market which bodes well for album sales. The Peas have been around long enough to get the level of connection that we understand as credibility and trust. To be fair they are not too far away, currently ranking as the 12^th most popular artist in the UK.

The highest climb this month was achieved by Michael Jackson, as the news of his death sank in deeper. During the month his PopScore rose by 5 points, the largest climb in a single month we have ever seen for any artist. He now ranks as the 11^th most popular artist in the UK. The increase of affection comes from across the board of demos.

Remarkably, Michael Jackson is now the 4^th most popular artist with teenagers; a considerable achievement given that he is surrounded by artists like Kings Of Leon, Black Eyed Peas, Pink, The Killers and Beyonce Knowles, all of whom are much younger than him. Michael makes it near the top spot with 20-29 year olds, claiming number 2 position, just behind the Kings Of Leon. The most difficult segments for Michael Jackson are ironically the 30-39 year olds who rank him at nr 20 and the 40-49 year olds who rank him at 28 and his own age group, the 50-59 year olds who rank him 36^th.

To get an idea of how this compares to last year, in November 08, Michael Jackson ranked position 54th overall!

Last but not least Beyonce’s visibility has also made a positive change. She advanced another 2 points, most of the additional affection coming from females 20-39. She’s had a good run of hit records in recent months which is naturally paying off now.

Now, what PopScores reveals is an exceptionally strong purchase propensity for some artists and these are typically artists who sell well in the adult segments despite that market’s relatively low inclination to buy music. Take That for example have a purchase propensity which is x 5 the average in the oldest segment (and amongst women). It’s no surprise therefore that they continue to sell music at a prodigious rate.

Listed below are the twenty acts with the highest purchase propensity. Obviously being in this position is no guarantee of success if the album is poorly received but what it does provide is the lifeline to come back with something that delivers what consumers want.

Popscores Purchase Intention

Let’s focus upon Kings Of Leon. Here is an act whose Informed Awareness is only 75% which places them in 90th position. However, their purchase propensity score is an overall 16% across all demographics and that puts them in 3rd position. What is remarkable is that although Kinds Of Leon are an act with its primary market in the 13-29 year old segments they manage to score x4 the average purchase propensity with the 30-49 year old demographics and over twice the average in the 50+ year old segment.

Not only do Kings Of Leon currently command more purchase intention than the vast majority of more familiar artists, it’s highly likely that with increasing familiarity they will become one of the biggest selling artists in the UK. Only The Killers are in their company with a 79% informed awareness and a 15% purchase propensity.

Radio has not been much help recently to labels in terms of supporting their new acts and yet radio remains a very significant force. Without radio airplay it is nigh on impossible to achieve commercial success, but radio continues to go back to classic tunes, the ones with the greatest familiarity which make the hairs on your neck stand up. And why? Because much of the new music doesn’t sound like its produced for the ears but for the eyes and although the eyes can eat they can’t listen to the radio.

Many of the recent successes on the radio are not necessarily the ones you would instantly recognize on the street. The Kings Of Leon are a good example. So its no surprise that when youplay Guitar Hero or Rock Band you find that the most popular tracks are the classics with 12 year old boys battling online to songs like Hotel California. Kids worry much less about how old a track is than how buff it is and the more they get involved the less they care about the visuals.

With Beatles music due for digital release sometime this year via Rock Band kids will have the opportunity to learn about the band for the first time. It shouldn’t be a surprise then if we see something of a Beatles revival.

There are some commentators who say that today’s audiences have changed in that they are much more segmented than they were 10 years ago. They therefore argue that superstarswith mass audiences are no longer possible.Those people should start playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band and watch kids unifying over some classic Bon Jovi or Lynyrd Skynyrd. We shouldn’t always blame change; some things just don’t change.

At the heart of the internet there are lists. Lists are traffic drivers. Most viewed, Most discussed, Most listened to, most this and most that. People use lists to filter their exposure to new music. People want the best of things. For anyone serious about spreading their creative content, getting on a popular list is an absolute requirement.

Once on that list, the Mathew Effect takes over. Listed content will always grow in popularity, the extent determined only by the level of emotional connection. The more it grows, the more it will grow. That’s cumulative advantage or in simple terms, snowballing.

It’s not just the lists as we know them. It’s also about visibility, about “dressing up” content. A search on YouTube for a specific video may show up the same video several times. Tests have shown that the clip with the most views is the chosen one; the Matthew Effect at its best.

This of course also applies to different clips within the same subject.

While we’re all seeding content in the hope that people will ultimately share or recommend it, the sharing dynamic only applies when the content is perceived to be worth sharing. Generally it’s not individuals who discover music that they then share but a group or community who decide what’s best.

This of course is why social network marketing is so attractive.

If you want to see this in place then check out a property company by the name of simarc.

Getting on the list to take advantage of the Matthew effect is the most difficult hurdle. Becoming richer when you’re already rich is much easier than going from poor to rich.

Matthew Effect Marketing is the art of bypassing the natural and often slow selection process and moving directly to relevant lists where visibility can create its own impetus.

PopScores is a useful source of information to help inform the argument. For starters there are the Love scores. We know that Love is the ultimate driver of sales. For every 10 people who Love an artist, 7 will definitely consider purchasing new music by that artist. We also know from PopScores that people only love a few artists at a time; on average a little over 4 artists at once. This does vary with age & gender but not so much as to matter. Women on average love 5 artists at any one time while men love 4. Males in their teens love 3 artists whilst males 20-29 love 5 artists. Females love 6 artists when they are teenagers and progressively fewer as they age.

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Radio tells a similar story. When the first jukeboxes were installed in clubs and bars in the US, a station owner noticed that despite the large choice of songs, patrons tended to choose the same songs. That was the birth of Top 40 radio. However, 40 songs were still far too many for radio listeners and CHR was born out of necessity to play fewer songs more often. The same Love principle applies today. There aren’t enough songs around that are loved at the same time by the same people. The implication sounds very unappealing but this truth clears up many of the mysteries around music sales.

So, choice is certainly no winning argument for subscription services. The “millions of songs” available mantra will be meaningless to consumers if they feel they have to pay for the right to access them all.

Furthermore, there is always the risk of overestimating familiarity. The vast majority of the millions of songs potentially available are unfamiliar to the target consumer who is generally aware of hundreds of songs rather than thousands. Why would millions matter to them? Even an advertising-supported model may struggle to attract enough consumers to build a mass-market presence. Music is unlike TV where subscription and advertising work. MTV knew a long time ago that people wouldn’t pay an additional fee to subscribe to their Music TV offering and so it was offered free as part of a package. TV stimulates us differently from music. We spend much of our lives watching TV as a primary activity while music is often a secondary or background activity. Radio still works as an advertising-supported model but the most successful stations have small playlists and drive ratings with celebrity-based entertainment and local, relevant non music content.

PopScores shows us that people are willing to pay for music if they love it. Music doesn’t have to rely on being supported by advertising or to be thrown into a pool of millions of songs that one might eventually stream. What music relies on is Love. The love a consumer has for an artist and/or song which is seemingly at odds with a volume for volume sake proposition.

At the same time free music affords huge value to businesses like YouTube. Let me make this clear – YouTube would not be remotely where it is without music and companies like Viacom and artists like Prince have long understood this and want to be compensated accordingly. Check it out if you don’t believe me – YouTube’s Top 100 most viewed clips of all time are dominated by music. No other content category delivers as much permanent value as music. What I mean by this is simple. Other categories do drive short term traffic to YouTube and do make Today’s most viewed honours, but after the short term limelight they quickly disappear pretty much forever. Compare Katy Perry’s I kissed A Girl with a Sarah Palin Interview. Which one do you think we’ll still be watching in 10, maybe 20 years time? Which therefore has permanent value?

Music never stops generating traffic. Kids know to go to YouTube for a brand new Panic! At The Disco c lip and thousands of others watch 50 year old Beatles clips over and over again.

Sure , the value depends up on demand like everything else but don’t tell me that music has no value. Without music or without having infringed copyright on a huge scale, YouTube would just be another copyright-respecting Spike (iFilm) and therefore way less successful. The music industry has learned its lesson and now keeps licensing deals very short knowing that soon it will be time to get some of that value back.

Sometimes I hear people talking about how YouTube showed giants like MTV how it’s done and that frustrates me. When you respect copyright, there ’s very little one can do to compete with those who infringe.

YouTube had its big break with the embedded player. Suddenly millions of websites were pointing to YouTube and breaching copyright. Their message was something like “hey kid, you like this clip so just play it on your profile page”. And the Google bots started indexing links to YouTube on a never seen before scale, sending traffic to YouTube in the millions. End of story.

We are in an age where a lot of self-interested business development execs and snake-oil digital strategists talk about paradigm shifts, pulling culture, music democracy and so on.

The fact is music comes attached with copyright and has huge value for businesses and consumers alike. Permanent value.

For this reason established artists can make extraordinary use of new media and rely less on the pushing power of record companies hence Nettwerks’s achievement with Avril Lavigne and Live Nation’s ideas with Madonna. However, until an artist commands that level of familiarity, nothing can replace the traditional push strategy.

The average chart video is 23% less familiar than the song. That’s because songs are pushed on the radio making it incredibly hard for new artists to break-through without radio. Radio works because it filters product for its listeners and exposes them to music they eventually love. Pushing can work online just the same. We like to believe that when something is right for a market it will take-off simply through word of mouse but that’s rarely the case, especially when it comes to music. An extremely funny music video may work virally but may still not sell music. Visuals are important but even more important is the story told and to whom.

Recently, a new artist’s music video on YouTube was scoring about 100 plays per day globally which was credible but wholly insufficient to build substantial familiarity and a following. Few people where paying with their attention. The very same video was then featured by YouTube and generated 120,000 views in twenty four hours and was able to build a substantial subscriber base. The video now scores about 1,000-2,000 views per day and the artist is building a large following. The power of push.

In the 90’s, 70% of video product couldn’t find a home and was never played. Today there is a home on the internet for every piece of content but without getting selected, filtered and eventually pushed by a trusted entity, it remains unplayed. Distributing content is not pushing content. Too often we expect songs and videos to fly just because they are good and deserve success and are then disappointed when success eludes them. It may not be fashionable to admit it but the push model is as relevant as ever

Music testing for radio has been around since the early 80’s and radio programmers are highly adept at knowing when to back the song and when to support the artist. We make this point because there are artists around that manage to build a bridge with a single song and there are those that go almost unnoticed despite numerous hits.

Let’s take the winner in this month PopScores – Katy Perry. Her familiarity just increased by 14% and her PopScore by 19 points in the female teen market. She’s grown on average across all demos by a stunning 4 points. These scores are driven largely by her increased familiarity and overall likeability. However, her Love score is still low at just 2%. This compares to the 28% Love score for her song “I Kissed A Girl” which has put her on the consumer map. Which goes to show it takes more than just a song to generate that emotional connection that is a precursor to album selling success..

At its peak Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” scored around 35% Love and familiarity climbed incredibly quickly. Today, however, his Love score is just 5% despite nearly 90% familiarity which begs the question, how much do we really know about Gnarls Barkley?

Compare this situation to Snow Patrol, who also had a massive hit with love scores around 35% but today manage a handsome19% Love, which is more than 3 times the UK average.

If you just look at the five most loved artists in the UK , they have two things in common.

They all have at least one song that still scores 30% or more love with consumers
They all possess a compelling and highly differentiated story

The Beatles, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, REM, Kaiser Chiefs and Snow Patrol have managed to build incredibly strong relationships with consumers through their music and their stories.

Conversely, there is P Diddy, whose song “I’ll Be Missing You” scored well above 30% Love in song tests, yet himself manages only 4% Love despite 96% Name Awareness.

Jay Z had a number of hits with Hard Knock Life also achieving record-breaking research scores, yet his Love score is a lowly 6%. Even Joss Stone has a below average Love score (5%) despite a 96% Name Awareness.

What this highlights is simple: it’s not as easy as just having a great song, a song that receives saturation playlisting and people fall in love with. That’s difficult enough and happens only too rarely (just look at the amount of new music on commercial radio). What success also demands, and is non-negotiable, is a unique and truly engaging story. No wonder the US presidential elections are so much about each candidate’s life. They draw from the same well as artists although often unknowingly. So if you sell a government airplane on Ebay, make sure you tell the world!

Top 20 artists ranked by Informed Awareness

Madonna
 
Robbie Williams
 
Spice Girls
 
Michael Jackson
 
Britney Spears
 
Kylie Minogue
 
Elton John
 
Take That
 
Amy Winehouse
 
Westlife
 
Girls Aloud
 
Justin Timberlake
 
U2
 
James Blunt
 
Sugababes
 
The Beatles
 
Eminem
 
Will Young
 
Jennifer Lopez
 
Beyonce
 

Reaching 100% familiarity takes an immense amount of investment and in most cases requires many years of commercial success. For most of these artists there isn’t a week that goes by without a headline and many of them still have active recording / touring lives. Being talked about is critical to building an emotional connection. An artist that isn’t talked about will not gain in familiarity and will have problems selling. Sure, there is room in the long tail for these artists but this shouldn’t be an excuse. Great music alone isn’t enough to enter the 100 Club. Despite his massive songs Gnarls Barkley still stands at about 80% informed awareness; Lenny Kravitz has been around for 20 years and still only scores 80% while former Blue star Simon Webbe, with a double platinum album under his belt scores just 64% informed awareness. Conversely, Leona Lewis is close to entering the club with her current 92% informed awareness.

For many new artists this is a positive challenge. Commercial album success on the back of low informed awareness indicates the potential scope. Number one album sellers Scouting For Girls score just 64%; The Ting Tings 33% and Alphabeat 30%.

Whilst the digital age presents its all too familiar challenges to the music industry, it does offer great opportunities for growing informed awareness. Never has it been easier to spread a message. There are countless opportunities to broadcast your message to millions of people – the challenge is to have a message, a story that connects by being distinctive and relevant and is capable of standing out from the rest of the noise.

If you don’t want to wait and build love organically, you will need a megahit. These rarely come these days. We have aggregated a lot of them over time, but today it’s exciting if we hear one a year. Last year we had Chasing Cars.

It accelerated the growth of love for the artist from nowhere to 30% in during the life of the song.. And guess what? Chasing cars is still the number one testing song in the UK across pretty much all formats. An it’s not burned. People are not tired of it.

You can find evidence for this passion everywhere, on the likes of On Myspace, YouTube and broadcasting sites. Songs like this attract huge audiences.

But this love is not just great for the artists, it transfers right over to whoever ,manages to get involved, to ride along. Be it the Radio Station, A Tv Show, a website or a product.

Brands know how powerful music is and they do want to get involved. But its not the music that’s powerful, it’s the love some music generates. Without Love, there is little point. For a brand to play in music matters only if the can access love.

Ever wondered why many radio stations sound so much alike? They fighting for the same love. Love generated by a number of tunes, old and new. Now whilst we’re all subscribing to the idea that music has never been more important then it is today, its also never been more accessible then today and there lies the problem. There is still only a small number of tunes that attract large numbers of people. Yes, and we all subscribe to the long tail and target micro segments and we try and unify a smaller number of people, suggesting that we still can make money selling our music and tickets and merchandise to these small segments. The truth however is that music is a social medium, it carries a message that wants to spread and so by nature it is only the big songes that unite big crowdes and can create such phenomena’s as Youtube and Myspace. Its not the many small segments, the many not so popular tracks that in the end unite large crowds, else we would have seen the likes of MP3.com, Peoplesound, Vitaminic etc come far further then they have.

So please let’s not think it’s technology or new ideas that matter, what makes them work in the first place is nothing but the love for content.

Let’s keep finding the big songs!