Rhydian Dafydd, on bass and Ritzy Bryan, on guitar - rock out at the Chop Shop Records / Atlantic Records SXSW Party 2011, enabled by Cisco Eos
At SXSW, with hundreds of bands, singer / songwriters, DJ / producers, playing across the city, I was reminded of why record labels are important. You need them for the curation and aggregation of the music. Otherwise, in a sea of music, there are less avenues to find a good group of similar artists you may like. Last year at the Bandwidth Conference in San Francisco, we heard music industry luminary and Elektra Records founder, Jac Holzman, opine on the importance of labels as curators (watch video here).
I attended many record label showcases at SXSW 2011 that proved this point -- including two showcases enabled by Cisco Eos: The Killers Lasers Papers showcase which was hip hop / R&B focused (link to our review), and the primarily indie rock driven Chop Shop Records / Atlantic Records SXSW Party. If you are reading this post before March 27th and you register at several of the artist sites of the bands who played the Chop Shop / Atlantic showcase including -- kittentheband.com, scarson45.com, republictigers.com, thejoyformidable.com -- you’ll be entered to win a custom designed Flip MinoHD™. The custom artwork on the Flip reflects the talents of Portugal The Man lead singer, John Gourley, who created the painting for the showcase poster.
I had not heard any of the Chop Shop Records bands before the event, and I was pleasantly surprised once the showcase got going. All the bands put on monster performances. I thought to myself again, “great curation at work”. The showcase started off with Kitten The Band, led by vocalist / guitarist Chloe Chaidez. Chloe was thrashing about during the 5 song set with a powerful voice and a confident stage presence. The music reminded me of early years of The Cure.
When Chloe of Kitten got off stage, I got to talk with her briefly about how she uses social media to connect with fans. The Atlantic Records team kindly let me know she’s only 16 years old. You would need to get up close to the stage to even guess Chloe’s age because she performs so confidently, yet sure enough she’s a soft spoken fresh faced teen when not singing. Each of the bands I talked with during the showcase have a specific social media channel that they like to use as their primary means of communication with fans. Chloe of Kitten’s social media platform of choice to talk to fans is Facebook; I guess like you would expect of a teenage girl. John Gourley of Portugal The Man emphasized he’s all about Twitter. For the U.K.’s Scars on 45, video blogging is the primary way they communicate to fans. In the clip, they talk about the video they shoot and other methods they use to communicate with fans, including via their Cisco Eos powered web site -- Scarson45.com.
SXSW has become an increasingly important event for the media and entertainment industry. The numbers themselves are telling—the show has had five+ years of double digit growth, and organizers said there was a 40 percent increase in registrations for the interactive portion this year compared to 2010. On the music and film side, organizers said that last week, the city of Austin, TX saw 2,000 bands perform on 92 stages, and there were more than 275 film screenings.
While the conference and festival’s increased prominence brings more eyeballs, it also means it’s harder to stand out from the crowd. Brands need a strong online presence to create interest and drive audiences to their physical events.
Scott Brown, Director of Marketing, Cisco Media Solutions Group - quoted on Twitter at the Digital Media Conference West, San Francisco
The above quote from Cisco Media Solutions Group Director of Marketing, Scott Brown, highlights a point we make often when speaking to our media and entertainment customers about the Cisco Eos® platform. We believe that a digital strategy (e.g. how you reach and engage consumers via digital distribution channels and social media) should not be separated from an overall media business strategy.
Record labels should be applauded for recognizing that digital is not a separate strategy from an overall business strategy. As much as they are berated by the press, the labels are leaders in creating what are known as ‘direct to consumer’ or ‘D2C’ strategies and business units, focused on reaching consumers directly via online channels (artist web sites, social networks). D2C is a much wider strategy than just selling music product (physical product or digital on iTunes). Such D2C business also involves collecting data about consumption of content on social networks and digital purchase behavior to drive strategies in the real world like, “where should my portfolio of artists be touring”? Jeremy Welt, SVP of New Media at Warner Bros Records offers that D2C strategy means many different things to different people.
How do you find out about new TV shows, movies, and bands and artists?
At the Bandwidth Conference (a digital music trade show), a few months back, we captured some conversations about ‘how content finds you’, in this case, how you find new music. Jac Holzman, the visionary founder of Elektra Records(read a Cisco blog post about Holzman and the 60th anniversary of the label here), was asked if it’s a bad thing that technology has lowered the cost of recording, thereby allowing hundreds of thousand more musically inclined people to make records. With so much new music being released, isn’t so much of it just mediocre music? For instance, going online to sift through hundreds of blogs, unknown artist sites, music discovery sites like the Hype Machine and recommendation services like Pandora -- is it worth all that time to find good new music? Holzman offers that record labels themselves, like Elektra (see the Cisco Eos powered site for the label here), are one of the best platforms to discover new quality music -- he explains ..
When it comes to discovering new music, what if you don’t have a favorite record label or radio station, to be your ‘first filter’ as Jac Holzman calls it?
