Revolutionary method of music marketing & distribution

You gotta be dead drumming genius John Bonham not to have noticed the audible death throws of the the music majors this past week. Radiohead were not the first to release their album in a ‘pay what you think‘ format, The Charlatans got in a week before and no doubt others before that, but it takes a major player to get everyone to sit up and listen. Now it’s reported Oasis and Jamiroquai are to follow suit and Madonna is to expose her disco rear to Warner Brothers and sign a $120m deal for 10 years with concert promoters Live Nation.

The economics of music are shifting. The artefact, ie the vinyl record or CD no longer matter in the digital age. Now the artefact is a loyal fan, a concert ticket, a t-shirt. Given the cost of replication of any MP3 is zero, charging for a single is going to become a very difficult model to sustain, whilst the album can adapt and thrive in the new ‘pay what you think’ format.

By giving away a single you grow a fanbase, lock the single down using the 30 second excerpt model made popular by iTunes and you’re locking out a potential ticket sale. What is it with Apple? Let me listen to whole godamn song before I decide to buy! I’m no pop-economist, but that’s $0.99 for a single versus $30 for a potential concert ticket, it seems a bit of a no brainer.

With all this lyrical tearing down of walls and the generals deserting The Kingdom of Big Labels, it would seem like a good time to get involved, a good time to aid this evolution and formulate new business models.

Fat Man are pleased to be collaborating with TorrentFreak the leading BitTorrent weblog and music blog aggregators like Hype Machine to create a revolutionary method of music distribution and marketing.

Labels have sought to use p2p networks in the past, notably when Jay-Z’s record company released a single with a Coke commercial attached. The same company, Media Defender are responsible for planting decoy/spoof files in the networks to deter people which only manages to alienate a key 14-25 year old male audience.

Fat Man and TorrentFreak are offering a new marketing methodology, seeding legitimate singles on the top torrent trackers with a view to building a fanbase from an 80 million strong audience. As evinced by Media Defender, seeking to spam this audience only gets them mad. Fat Man and TorrentFreak are in a unique position to understand this audience and to be able to build new business models, a distribution network that allows for swifter download speeds the more popular it gets, making singles free and available to share, without DRM. Building a fanbase, offering exclusive content and working with the bands and enlightened record labels to build the backbone of the business on merchandising, concerts and ‘pay what you like’ album sites.

Methods of music discovery, consumption and economics are evolving and Fat Man/TorrentFreak are striving to be at the forefront of understanding and shaping this change.

Posted in Music, New Business Model, p2p | 1 Comment »