Music Export Finland tarjoaa asiakkailleen mahdollisuuden tutustua musiikkialan konsultointiyritys Music Allyn uutissisältöön julkaisemalla Sandbox-uutiskirjeen artikkelin Musiikkiviennissä.
SQUARE EYES
By Music Ally, Published in Sandbox
The TV industry already has a big impact on music, thanks to the boom in reality talent shows like X Factor and American Idol. What else can the music industry take from TV? This week, Sandbox went to the MIPTV conference in Cannes, to see what music marketers might be able to learn from their small-screen compatriots.
The big trends are common to both industries: everyone is buzzing about apps and social media (or, to put it more accurately: about iPhone, Facebook and Twitter). Some of the excitement is specific to TV, but with a bit of lateral thinking, can be applied to music too.
Take the chatter around ‘two-screen’ or ‘second-screen’ applications and activity, for example. This refers to TV viewers sitting on the sofa and using another device – a smartphone, tablet or laptop – while watching a TV show on the bigger screen.
A lot of this is tweeting and status updating, with discussion focusing around how producers and broadcasters can analyse and act on the resulting data – just like there are a number of music-focused startups promising to deliver you metrics about what your artists’ fans are doing and saying online.
Some things are going beyond that though. ABC has launched a ‘Sync’ iPad app that displays different content and social features on screen synced to different parts of a show that’s being watched on the TV. Game show Million Pound Drop, meanwhile, has a playalong Facebook game where people answer questions at the same time as contestants on the live show.
Could this work for music? Companion apps for albums that display lyrics, information and images while tracks play is one idea, especially if those tracks are stored on the iPhone itself. Mobile Roadie’s recent app for The Beatles’ LOVE album allowed fans to play the tracks from their iPod library, but the next step would be to have more content synchronised to this playback.
Gigs might also be ripe for this kind of treatment. Artists and managers may balk at the idea of actively encouraging their fans to look at their phones during a concert rather than the stage, but what’s getting TV companies excited is using these sorts of apps to make fans more engaged, not less. Voting for encores, sharing photos, even seeing details of the DJ’s playlist in between sets... The idea of apps that act as the companion to a gig has plenty of potential.
Facebook’s head of international business development Christian Hernandez Gallardo gave a talk at the Connected Creativity Forum part of MIPTV which included a focus on a new feature for Facebook Places, the social location feature of Facebook’s smartphone app.
Since it launched last year, people have been able to check in to locations, but now they can check in to events as well. “Think about having a time and place around every single episode of your series,” Gallardo told the assembled TV industry delegates. “We’ve talked to broadcasters about putting up their whole EPG as events on Facebook, and letting people RSVP to them to get a reminder.”
For series, read gigs. There are a number of tools already available to pull artists’ gigs into Facebook as events, which can then be checked in to by fans – which in turn provides artists and their marketers with data on the keen followers, and opens the way for potential competitions and promotions in the future. If Facebook is encouraging TV producers and broadcasters to educate their viewers about checking in, there will be a boost for music too as awareness grows.
Perhaps the most important thing to take away from MIPTV, though, was the idea common to both music and TV industries that social media is not just about artists (or programme makers) connecting with their fans. It’s about fans connecting with one another, around that content. FremantleMedia’s Gary Carter said on a panel session that TV producers are often still surprised that fans of a show might end up forming online relationships – and you could say the same of music marketers.
That said, artist apps are already moving towards having more social features to get fans chatting with one another about the music and the artist, while a number of apps are also encouraging them to share their photos and videos. Both TV and music have traditionally revolved around one-to-many relationships – the artist being the one and the fans being the many. An important new trend in both markets is how to foster this many-to-many communication.
More information:
http://www.musically.com
"Music Ally, the leading digital music information and strategy company"
