With an ageing population at a time when the importance of the single is much reduced and rock is in the ascendant the music industry has shifted focus to adult-oriented artists and rightly so given the proportion of music sales accounted for by the over 20’s. However, the typical teenage act was often what we call a Mother & Daughter act and our research always revealed that those young acts didn’t just connect with the teens but often with their moms, hence the significant album sales once they set foot in the teen market.

Ignoring teenagers isn’t the smartest move even if they aren’t music buyers. If a song or an act connects with them then their much larger network of friends becomes active and with today’s technology, the word can spread quickly via social networks.

From a modest PopScore of 5 in September 2007 to 24 this month, Scouting For Girls have grown significantly above the average. Why we highlight this is because the key driver segment has been the teens putting SFG safely into the Top 20 most loved artists with that demographic.

 
The graph above shows the steady growth in familiarity and popularity over the life-span of their campaign. This is an image of 3 singles. (and it’s likely to continue for a few more singles considering the purchase propensity score is 2 points above the average)

What’s important to understand is that love doesn’t grow equally across all demos and often there are sizeable variations between the demos. The lead demo for SFG is the core demo for probably 90% of all artists namely 13-19 year olds.

Why does this matter?

As SFG is demonstrating (and the Kaiser Chiefs, The Kooks and many others before them) one of the most effective routes to achieving an established and unifying status for an artist is by breaking that artist with teenagers before moving on to an older and more lucrative market. Of course, teens are the most fickle and unreliable audience, they tend not to buy music and retaining their interest over the long run is perhaps the most difficult thing to do. Consequently, the careers of many teen-oriented artists expire prematurely. However, targeting them is relatively easy and leveraging their connections is what music marketing is almost all about right now.