VIRAL How big 3 grab copyright of UGC in promo campaigns

Interesting blogger in music industry worth following. Her major contention here is that the labels are quietly subverting notions of the fan/audience empowering potential of converged social media, angrily noting a Sony example of claiming a hashtag use as a binding legal contract handing over all rights in perpetuity with zero compensation (other than glory!).

The former audience as audience 3.0, working for The Man?

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/cheriehu42/issues/the-music-industry-s-inconvenient-truths-149151

Big Three Sony Universal Warners

In film its the big six (7 if you count Lionsgate); in the music industry, following a controversial 2012 $2bn takeover of EMI by Universal, its just the big three: Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group. Sony and Universal also combine on the VEVO platform.

See: thebalance.com feature on the big 3; musicbusinessworldwide.com (the spin on this one is a bit odd - that the ENTIRE Indie industry beats any one of the big three individually); digitalmusicnews.com; this pdf.

Table from digitalmusicnews.

You can see how the industry has gone through dramatic 'disruption' from digitisation - but with little impact on the market share of the dominant conglomerates:

Source: p.11 of this report (pdf).

Sony CEO: Social Media drives music biz today

Sony's CEO says in an interview for the CBI's magazine that One Direction have shown him that social ('new) media are now more important than the traditional ('old') media. Sony used UGC, such as fan campaigns to get One Direction to play a gig near them ("Bring 1D To Me"), to build up buzz and a following for One Direction before any material was released to radio stations, traditionally the key to breaking any band.

Gatfield says this has completely changed the dynamic of launching an act, enabling music companies to bypass the traditional radio-station gatekeepers.
“Traditionally you’d have to persuade radio to support it and there’d be a long, hard slog while you built up the support and marketed them on the back of airplay,” he says. “This is the other way round: you market them and then airplay is the accelerator.”

He goes so far as to say that Sony wouldn't now consider signing a band that didn't already have social media profiles up and running.

Article Source.

One Direction: Social media made them a global phenomenon, says Sony CEO

One Direction have become a $50m business thanks to their army of fans across the world - and this is just the start, according to Nick Gatfield

15th February 2013
This article appeared in the December edition of Business Voice, the CBI magazine

'Their live business is through the roof. I haven’t seen anything this big in my entire career on a global level.'
- Nick Gatfield

To understand the transformative effect of social media on how music labels market their acts, look no further than the success of One Direction.
The boy band, who are signed to the Syco label, came third in The X-Factor TV show in 2010. Since then they have won a Brit award recognising their worldwide success and become a $50m business – with Sony Music UK CEO and chairman Nick Gatfield predicting that this will double in 2013.

Nick Gatfield: X-Factor made us complacent >>

“They are a global phenomenon,” he says. “Their live business is through the roof. I haven’t seen anything this big in my entire career on a global level.
"You can get that kind of explosive moment if you galvanise young music fans and find something they want to engage with – it goes worldwide incredibly quickly. That’s the beauty of social media and the internet: we sign locally but we market globally from day one. That’s a fundamental change in our business.”
By acting on pockets of support for the band that emerged online in places from Sweden and Italy to Australia and Canada, the company built support for the band before they’d had any airtime on the radio. This was particularly important in the US – an impossible nut to crack for British pop bands for more than 20 years.
Sony Music’s US division picked up on a campaign called “Bring 1D to me”, originally developed in the UK, which encouraged fans to pitch for the band 
to play in their area. As a result, What Makes You Beautiful, their first single available to buy on iTunes in the US, sold 130,000 copies in a week and entered the top ten without any airplay.
Gatfield says this has completely changed the dynamic of launching an act, enabling music companies to bypass the traditional radio-station gatekeepers.
“Traditionally you’d have to persuade radio to support it and there’d be a long, hard slog while you built up the support and marketed them on the back of airplay,” he says. “This is the other way round: you market them and then airplay is the accelerator.”
He adds that he would be loathe to sign an act that had no social media profile. “All that would say to me was that they hadn’t got sufficient wherewithal or drive.”

VEVO vertically integrates with TV channels

VEVO, as a coalition of 2 of the 3 remaining global giants, Universal and Sony, already had a production arm; YouTube acted as the main distributor/exhibitor for its wares (music videos) until now, arguably being of greater importance than MTV and suchlike. Now they've launched their own channels, so are able to boast in-house production, distribution and exhibition.
There's more in the article below, including the assertions that "Part of what we're trying to achieve is that element of nostalgia but 70% of our audience is under 34."
YouTube has now bought a 10% stake in VEVO.

Article source.

Vevo launches 24-hour digital music channel in US and Canada

Video website hopes to recreate MTV's 1980s heyday with service for internet-connected TVs, tablets and mobiles

• Josh Halliday
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 March 2013

Rihanna: likely to feature on Vevo TV. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/Getty Images

Thirty-one years after MTV flickered into life to the sound of the Buggles hit Video Killed the Radio Star, the video website Vevo has launched a 24-hour digital music channel in the US and Canada.
Vevo, the site created by record giants Universal Music and Sony, hopes to recreate MTV's 1980s heyday with the channel, showing a selection of music videos, live concerts and original programming.

Sony CEO: social media more important than radio

Sony's CEO says in an interview for the CBI's magazine that One Direction have shown him that social ('new) media are now more important than the traditional ('old') media. Sony used UGC, such as fan campaigns to get One Direction to play a gig near them ("Bring 1D To Me"), to build up buzz and a following for One Direction before any material was released to radio stations, traditionally the key to breaking any band.

Gatfield says this has completely changed the dynamic of launching an act, enabling music companies to bypass the traditional radio-station gatekeepers.
“Traditionally you’d have to persuade radio to support it and there’d be a long, hard slog while you built up the support and marketed them on the back of airplay,” he says. “This is the other way round: you market them and then airplay is the accelerator.”

He goes so far as to say that Sony wouldn't now consider signing a band that didn't already have social media profiles up and running.

Article Source.

One Direction: Social media made them a global phenomenon, says Sony CEO

One Direction have become a $50m business thanks to their army of fans across the world - and this is just the start, according to Nick Gatfield

15th February 2013
This article appeared in the December edition of Business Voice, the CBI magazine

'Their live business is through the roof. I haven’t seen anything this big in my entire career on a global level.'
- Nick Gatfield

To understand the transformative effect of social media on how music labels market their acts, look no further than the success of One Direction.
The boy band, who are signed to the Syco label, came third in The X-Factor TV show in 2010. Since then they have won a Brit award recognising their worldwide success and become a $50m business – with Sony Music UK CEO and chairman Nick Gatfield predicting that this will double in 2013.

Nick Gatfield: X-Factor made us complacent >>

“They are a global phenomenon,” he says. “Their live business is through the roof. I haven’t seen anything this big in my entire career on a global level.
"You can get that kind of explosive moment if you galvanise young music fans and find something they want to engage with – it goes worldwide incredibly quickly. That’s the beauty of social media and the internet: we sign locally but we market globally from day one. That’s a fundamental change in our business.”
By acting on pockets of support for the band that emerged online in places from Sweden and Italy to Australia and Canada, the company built support for the band before they’d had any airtime on the radio. This was particularly important in the US – an impossible nut to crack for British pop bands for more than 20 years.
Sony Music’s US division picked up on a campaign called “Bring 1D to me”, originally developed in the UK, which encouraged fans to pitch for the band 
to play in their area. As a result, What Makes You Beautiful, their first single available to buy on iTunes in the US, sold 130,000 copies in a week and entered the top ten without any airplay.
Gatfield says this has completely changed the dynamic of launching an act, enabling music companies to bypass the traditional radio-station gatekeepers.
“Traditionally you’d have to persuade radio to support it and there’d be a long, hard slog while you built up the support and marketed them on the back of airplay,” he says. “This is the other way round: you market them and then airplay is the accelerator.”
He adds that he would be loathe to sign an act that had no social media profile. “All that would say to me was that they hadn’t got sufficient wherewithal or drive.”

TOWID (The Only Way Is Digital)

2013 is clearly set to see digitisation continue apace, with analogue media being displaced by digital media which are typically cheaper to produce and distribute. That doesn't mean that analogue media, such as films shot on 35mm and distributed as 35mm prints to cinemas (each print costing £000s), will disappear, but that bit by bit the industry is moving over to digital content.
Here's some useful stats from this article, about Google buying a 10%, $50m stake in the video distributor Vevo (the joint Sony/Universal venture that you'll have come across if you've watched a few videos on YouTube, given how much of the music industry their artist sales represent):

Earlier this month the Entertainment Retailers Association reported that downloads of music, TV shows, films and video games topped £1bn in the UK for the first time in 2012. Digital music sales grew but revenue from physical singles fell by 44% year on year and albums dropped 11%.

The cinema industry and CD sales remain strong but, like newspapers, which are also seeing circulation declining rapidly as more people access their news online, may not have a bright future. The record set by Skyfall, 2012's Bond movie, may never be beaten: it became the first movie to take in over £100m at the UK box office by the last week in December 2012 (it was already the biggest ever UK cinema hit, and topped $1bn worldwide).

INDUSTRY: EMI sale creates Big 3

With the announcement that EMI is being bought up as two packages by Sony and Universal, the already absurd concentration of ownership that was the big 4 now becomes the big 3, as I blogged on recently:

The last British giant, EMI, has been in the hands of private equity companies for some time, and has been effectively for sale for a while now, the private investors having bought it at what now seems an obviously inflated price just as the music industry began to feel the financial impact of digitisation.

This article contains a useful update on all this.
So, will the Big Four become the Big Three?

-------------------------------------------------------

A little bit of theory: Chomsky's propaganda model includes as one of the five filters 'concentration of ownership, while Ben Badikian has written about the negative impact of monopoly (a topic we'll explore for the exam Media Regulation topic) in his classic book The Media Monopoly (now renamed The New Media Monopoly)

Leading corporations own the leading news media and their advertisers subsidize most of the rest. They decide what news and entertainment will be made available to the country; they have direct influence on the country's laws by making the majority of the massive campaign contributions that go to favored politicians; their lobbyists are permanent fixtures in legislatures.
This inevitably raises suspicions of overt conspiracy. But there is none. Instead, there is something more insidious: a system of shared values within contemporary American corporate culture and corporations' power to extend that culture to the American people, inappropriate as it may be. (excerpt from http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/Afterword_Bagdikian.html)

You can find an archive of articles at http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/emi
Some recent, useful additions include:
'EMI: the sad demise of a very British company: For three decades, EMI took on the world in record sales. Now its sale to Sony and Universal marks the end for the music major'
'Universal and Sony reach deal to buy EMI for £2.5bn: Famous British music business could be split into two in agreement that hands control to biggest rivals'
'Farewell then EMI, your tunes were the background to our lives: The company that brought us Cliff and the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and Susan Boyle is disappearing. We should salute its contribution to our culture'

Industry news

I'm not going to post every bit of news from the excellent http://www.guardian.co.uk/music section (and the following example comes from elsewhere - the business section - of the paper, just showing the utility and value of regularly reading a broadsheet, even if just once a week!), but would remind you to have a scan from time to time, and ensure you don't neglect to evidence your grasp of the contemporary music industry on your blog.

This article considers how two of the industry giants have decided to change decades of policy on release schedules, scrapping the idea of releasing singles to radio weeks, even months, before commercial release to build up appeal, in an effort to counteract the effects of digital piracy:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jan/16/universal-sony-music-singles-release