Indulge me a moment to set the storyline. The San Antonio International Piano Competition was last week. My wife and I had the pleasure of hosting one of the competing pianists Weiwen Ma. For five days she practiced on my piano from about 9:00 AM to Midnight with an amazing display of prowess and dedication interrupted only by periodic bio breaks. My Mother-in-law also hosted an Italian competitor named Angelo Arciglione. See him here playing a Chopin piece that he played for us on my piano. I am a huge Chopin fan and if you watch this video you may be able to imagine my awe and gratitude at the opportunity to sit three feet from these incredible artists. On top of it all they both were wonderful people. As great as the piano competition was, it can’t compare with the experience of forming relationships with these two beautiful artists. I will follow both their careers from this day forward.
The point here is the tremendous power of relationships.
Two weeks prior I attended the San Antonio Symphony performance of Beethoven’s 7th. I was struck, as I always am, by the advanced age of the audience and it makes me fear for the future of classical music. I have no relationship with the Symphony just the usual boring transactional interactions where they mail me their season’s programs and ask me to buy. Bottom line, the classical music performance business just like the music recording business is terrible at building relationships. They are squandering a great opportunity. In fact, I had a conversation with a former President of the San Antonio Symphony about their current “I’m with the Band” ad campaign (billboards and posters) and complimented the attempt to highlight the artists. He told me that he didn’t like the campaign because it “brought the Symphony down a level.” What, huh, did I misunderstand you? Unfortunately I didn’t.
In an even worse attitude, the music recording industry is threatening to and taking legal action against large portions of their customers and prospects. Who thinks this is a good idea? How would your business do with this approach? Again, the problem is lack of relationships. The record label and the Symphony are corporate organizations. The people don’t care about them and many don’t care about stealing from them. The people certainly don’t feel like these organizations care about them. People probably don’t want a relationship with the corporate organizations. So what can they do?
The answer is really simple. Record labels and Symphonies and the like need to get into the relationship building business. They need to become relationship enablers. Record labels should be developing a core competency in building community around their artists. Social media can help them do this. They need to connect with the audience through the artists. People are much less likely to steal from the artist than the corporation. Labels can drive music sales through these “artist communities”.
This represents a fundamental business shift from “distribution to collective.” The music business has historically been all about distributing music to the people (recorded or live) and it needs to shift to the collective approach of bringing people to the artists and music. Rallying the people around what they care about and then mining those relationships for mutual value is the future of business.
Hopefully at this point you have realized that this shift isn’t just about the music industry. This is about your industry, and mine. Most industries are all about distribution. Gartner is in the research distribution business. Months ago when pitching to Gartner executive leadership about this shift I talked about moving from distributing research to clients to collecting all IT professionals around our research and analysts. I stated that “every IT professional in the world should have a relationship with Gartner.” Notice I didn’t say “should be a paying client.” Gartner then can mine these relationships for mutual value (btw, I’m not saying that Gartner needs to give away all its research).
Earlier I blogged about IT shifting from providing collaboration platforms to delivering social solutions. This is a subset of the overall business shift from distribution to collective.
Right now the transactional interaction of moving someone from prospect to customer is the primary and dominant business interaction. In the years to come, collaborative interactions will dominate with transactional interactions as derivative behaviors.
As always, I request your feedback.
8 responses so far ↓
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3 Michael // Oct 20, 2009 at 7:13 am
You will actually find that some labels and managers are good at building relationships now. Probably the major factor in the demise of the industry was how long it took the major labels to understand MP3s, or – as you point out – the new relationship that they enable. But on top of the labels, you have the professional associations that are fighting a rearguard collective battle.
You’re right to sound an alarm, as I think it is quite clear the movie industry is next in line for a painful shake-up. So who’s next after that? Or more importantly, what can I learn from this? Good questions. As I don’t know your industries, it’s hard for me to guess.
4 Warm // Oct 24, 2009 at 7:34 am
Thanks for hosting the competitors. Weiwen’s playing was amazing and her program choices were very good in my opinion and I was surprised she did not make the final round. I agree there is tremendous power in relationships, especially for musicians. When Angelo accepted his San Antonio International Piano Competition semifinalist award, president Anne Johnson said he had class and respect for the competition by staying the entire week, participating in the competition’s other activities like master classes, and receiving his award in person. Unfortunately the other semifinalist competitors including Weiwen left early and missed a great opportunity to develop more social relationships with the San Antonio music community. That is, not all social media relationships are formed online. And as talented as they are, marketing and social relationships are just as important to their careers.
I think you are right about classical music audience demographics. What is interesting is that many of the performers are young, but the audience is typically much older. I wonder if these performers can get more of their similar age friends to also enjoy this music genre. Also schools need to offer music classes even in this age of elective class cutbacks so we can develop another generation of music lovers. For the San Antonio competition, more marketing is needed to people of all ages. In the 7th largest city in the US, even if classical music is enjoyed by the minority, with such talented young performers as Weiwen and Angelo they should be able to fill the concert hall every night, but it was not full except the last day.
Using Weiwen just as an example again, I cannot hear her beautiful music on Facebook, YouTube (except a Spanish TV interview with her), San Antonio IPC website, her website (she doesn’t have one), or elsewhere because it is not posted. Please encourage them to post their music to these social networks. The San Antonio IPC records each concert, but does not make the CDs for sale to the public, which is another travesty.
5 Anthony Bradley // Oct 26, 2009 at 10:15 am
Warm,
Agree with all you said. I do believe that musicians need to project themselves with social media (YouTube, Facebook, et al.) but building community is hard and they need to be practicing so actually building community around artists is better served by a label or their agent. Also agree that the SAIPC need to market better and tap into the social Web. They didn’t even post the competitor’s programs ahead of time on the Web so people new what pieces they were performing. That alone, IMO, significantly negatively impacted attendance.
6 Pam Mark Hall // Oct 30, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Anthony,
I agree with your premise that the value of building community trumps distribution. The most difficult part of utilizing all the social media platforms is technical. What I mean is, most of the musicians I know are often early adopters of new technology. The breakdown comes for us when any kind of customization to templates is needed. We need knowledge of and access to developers who can assist us in leveraging all the moving parts. It is amazingly difficult to find technical help for those of use who are independently promoting our music. Any suggestions of where to find that help at a local level?
7 Pam Mark Hall // Nov 11, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Anthony,
Any suggestions to my sincere question about how to find technical help?
8 Anthony Bradley // Nov 15, 2009 at 6:12 pm
I don’t really have any suggestions other than looking for service providers, consultants, in your area. I only know of one called simplesolutions.com in Maine but I’m not sure how much social media they do. Like you said, the skills are hard to find.
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