You can’t sell your art until you know how to discuss it. We can help you define your identity and purpose with five simple questions.
The most common problem we encounter when working with musicians relates to their identity. Like you and I, musicians have difficulty understanding who they are and what motivates them to create. Taking time to find the answers to these questions is important, but most don’t know where to begin.
The answers you seek are closer than you think! With five questions, we can help anyone understand who they are, what they do, why they do it, who they hope to reach, and what their audience gets from their music. It’s a deceptively simple questionnaire, but one that can be used to alter the course of your career radically.
Who are you?
What do you do?
Why do you do it?
What do your listeners want?
How does your music change people?
In this Music Biz update, James Shotwell breaks down the five things every artist needs to know to understand their career. That includes their identity, their purpose, and their target market. These items make up the foundation of any successful marketing campaign and can be used in many other ways.
The key to maximizing your responses’ value lies in your answers’ specificity. The more details you can write down, the more information you have to build future campaigns. These answers tell you who you are, what you do, why you do it, why people care, and what they get from consuming your music. You now have a target market, a value proposition, and a firm understanding of the product (your music). Get out there and promote!
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
From audio reactions on Spotify to the latest streaming scam, we’ve gathered the need-to-know music news of the week.
Welcome to the thirty-third Friday of 2022. We are over 3/5 of the way through the year for those keeping count. While kids head back to school and temperatures begin to cool, the music industry is preparing for an incredibly busy fall release and tour season. We feel for you if you’ve got dates or records to promote. It’s a warzone out there, but still—we wouldn’t do anything else.
We’re working hard on exciting new developments for Haulix that will be revealed in the coming weeks. These changes completely rethink our business and how we can help the music community connect. You probably have a lot of questions, but that’s all we can say for now.
We cannot ease your workload or give you more hours in the day, but we can help you stay informed. Below you’ll find the biggest stories of the week, all covered by the best outlets in tech and entertainment. Click around, learn what’s happening, and use the weekend to prepare for the end of the month.
But let’s be honest. There is no way we can hope to cover everything that happens. If you see a headline we missed that people need to know, please do not hesitate to send james@haulix.com an email. We’ll include your links in the next update.
Swedish music streaming platform Spotify is working on a new feature to let users post audio comments or reactions to music playlists.
A Reddit user in Vietnam first spotted this Spotify experiment, reports The Verge.
“So what do you think? Record an episode to share your thoughts on the playlist,” read the interface.
Below the notification is a record button to start the audio recording.
There are also some simple editing options like being able to add background music and tags.
The reaction feature seems to be accessible via a microphone icon on the playlist’s page, the report noted.
“We are currently running a limited test of in-app audio creation, but have no further details to share at this time,” the company was quoted as saying.
Artist-first music streaming and discovery platform Audiomack announced the debut of Premiere Access, a industry-leading feature that allows artists to reward their biggest fans by making a unreleased projects available on Audiomack before the general release.
“Artists deserve the most powerful tools possible to build their work into financially thriving enterprises,” Audiomack VP of Product Charlie Kaplan said. “Music companies have the opportunity and obligation to enable creators to explore diverse means of monetization and help realize their work’s financial potential.”
For musicians on Audiomack, Premiere Access offers a brand-new revenue stream that goes beyond standard streaming. Now that they are signed up for the Audiomack Monetization Program (AMP), artists can upload their work to Audiomack, use the Premiere Access function, and choose the duration of exclusivity for their release’s backers.
Puerto Rican hitmaker Bad Bunny leads the list of finalists for the 2022 Billboard Latin Music Awards, with a staggering 23 nods across 13 categories. (The only other artist to ever score that many is Ozuna in 2019.)
Bad Bunny is up for artist of the year, tour of the year, Hot Latin Songs artist of the year, male, and top Latin album of the year for his chart-topping album Un Verano Sin Ti, which is back at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart this week for an eighth nonconsecutive frame on top.
Following Bad Bunny is Colombian star Karol G with 15 entries in 11 categories, a record number of nods for a female artist. (The old record was held jointly by Jenni Rivera, who had 12 nods in 2014, and Shakira, who had 12 in 2018.) Karol G’s categories include artist of the year and Hot Latin Songs artist of the year, female, as well as Hot Latin Song of the year, vocal event, for her Becky G collab “MAMIII.”
What if tagging the wrong artist pages was not just a headache to resolve but also a money-making scheme?
What if obscure artists were profiting by purposely tagging big-name artists as primary collaborators, thus reaching said artists’ fanbases via algorithmic music delivery systems like Spotify’s Release Radar?
This is the story of an artist/record label, variously known as Diversify and Variegate.
From Spotify’s ticket deals to WMG’s Meta agreement, we’ve gathered the need-to-know music news of the week.
We’re publishing this post on August 12, which means everyone reading it has survived the dog days of summer amid the hottest year on record. Stretching July 3-August 11 each year, the dog days are known for their unbearable heat. 2022 is certainly not short on sunny days, so we hope you’re finding ways to keep cool.
We’ve spent the last several weeks working on exciting new developments for Haulix that will be revealed in the months ahead. These changes completely rethink our business and the ways we are able to help the music community connect. You probably have a lot of questions, but that’s all we can say for now.
We cannot ease your workload or give you more hours in the day, but we can help you stay informed. Below you’ll find the biggest stories of the week, all covered by the best outlets in tech and entertainment. Click around, learn what’s happening, and use the weekend to prepare for the end of the month.
But let’s be honest. There is no way we can hope to cover everything that happens. If you see a headline we missed that people need to know, please do not hesitate to send james@haulix.com an email. We’ll include your links in the next update.
Weezer canceled its September Broadway residency due to “low ticket sales and unbelievably high expenses,” frontman Rivers Cuomo announced.
The Los Angeles rock band had planned a six-night stand at the Broadway Theatre to celebrate its “SZNZ” project, which consists of four 2022 releases that correspond with the four seasons.
“I just learned that our Broadway shows have been cancelled (due to low ticket sales and unbelievably high expenses.) I’m very sorry to be telling you this now after we’ve already invested so much time, thought, and emotion,” Cuomo, 52, wrote on the band’s Discord server Wednesday.
Instagram appears to be missing the essence of why people even enjoy BeReal, even though Instagram is obviously riffing off of BeReal and not Frontback. BeReal is arguably more like Wordle than it is like Instagram or Frontback, despite the two-camera aspect being entertaining (which other writers have also pointed out). BeReal is more about the daily habit of sharing something with your pals than it is about the actual images.
Reportedly, Instagram adopts the Stories feature while Snapchat introduces it. Due to TikTok’s excessive popularity, Instagram switched to short-form videos. Here’s another for the list right now. Reels, Instagram’s TikTok clone, now has a function called Dual that enables simultaneous recording with both the front and rear cameras. This feature was discreetly added this week.
It has a striking visual resemblance to BeReal, the popular social app that has been around for two years and is presently ranked No. 1 on the App Store. BeReal bills itself as the anti-Instagram and was founded in France by former GoPro employees Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau.
Warner Music Group has become the latest major music company to announce a fresh licensing deal with Meta. The agreement will enable WMG and its artists to receive a portion of revenue from the use of licensed music on Facebook creators’ posts.
The deal was confirmed by Warner Music Group CEO Steve Cooper during an earnings call on Tuesday (August 9), nearly two weeks after rival Universal Music Group revealed that it had formed a similar partnership with the Facebook owner.
It appears that UMG’s deal with Meta was struck in calendar Q2; Warner’s quickly followed in early Q3.
Meta recently announced that it will start directly sharing a proportion of advertising revenue with music rights holders for certain user-generated video content on Facebook that is 60 seconds or longer.
Meta’s decision follows years of debate over how social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok pay publishers and record labels for the use of their music in videos and how these platforms protect the copyrights of licensed songs.
Spotify’s testing a new website to sell concert tickets directly to fans, as first reported by Music Ally. The site, dubbed Spotify Tickets, currently has a limited selection of upcoming US-based concerts for participating artists like Limbeck, Tokimonsta, and Annie DiRusso.
Spotify already partners with Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, and See Tickets to sell tickets through its new Live Events Feed, where you can browse nearby shows and purchase tickets through a third party. The new Spotify Tickets site, however, lets you buy tickets through Spotify itself.
As pointed out by TechCrunch, the site’s legal page states the company sells tickets “on behalf of third parties which can include venues, event promoters, fan clubs and artists as their disclosed ticketing agent.” This means that Spotify doesn’t set the prices of its tickets, and that it will also charge customers a booking fee that it will disclose during checkout.
The numbers are in. Germany’s record business generated revenues of $1 billion (€967 million) in the first six months of this year from physical music sales and streaming.
That total revenue figure of €967 million (on a retail basis) marked an increase of 5.5% compared to the same period last year for the world’s fourth largest recorded music market.
According to new figures, for H1 2022, published by German Music Industry Association (BVMI) today (August 11), Germany’s revenue haul was driven by audio streams.
Audio streaming grew 9.1% YoY in the first half of the year and now accounts for 73.3% of the recorded music market’s total revenues.
SONG OF THE WEEK: Fit For A King – “End (The Other Side)”
Ahead of their new album, Voices In The Sky, Brymir chats with Haulix about the secret to their global success.
Finding your sound takes time. For Brymir, the Finnish metal greats spent multiple records pursuing a sonic direction that didn’t fit their personal aspirations. The band believed a ‘folk’ friendly sound would help them find success, but in recent years found a much more powerful marketing tool in honest and personal storytelling.
With their latest release, Voices In The Sky, Brymir tackle the world around them and the chaos it breeds. The material touches on everything from our relationship with nature to interpersonal conflicts and the wide range of feelings they can produce.
In this Fast Five interview, Brymir frontman Viktor Storm Gullichsen chats with Music Biz host James Shotwell about his band’s ongoing evolution and how embracing change has made all the difference in their career. The pair also discuss song length, Brymir’s writing process, and what the rest of 2022 holds for these wide-eyed metal masters.
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
From the end of Spotify’s Car Thing to the impending launch of TikTok Music, we’ve gathered all the music news you need to know.
Can you believe it’s August? We are seven full months into 2022, and most haven’t had enough time to catch their breath, let alone catch up on music news. If you have been reading, it’s most likely related to your work. That’s understandable. We do the same.
We cannot ease your workload or give you more hours in the day, but we can help you stay informed. Below you’ll find the biggest stories of the week, all covered by the best outlets in tech and entertainment. Click around, learn what’s happening, and use the weekend to prepare for the end of the month.
But let’s be honest. There is no way we can hope to cover everything that happens. If you see a headline we missed that people need to know, please do not hesitate to send james@haulix.com an email. We’ll include your links in the next update.
Spotify has unceremoniously stopped making the dash-mounted “Car Thing,” its first hardware device, the company announced this week.
The change was announced as part of Spotify’s latest earnings release for shareholders, which said that developing the Car Thing cost €31 million (approximately $32 million USD) and that its overall gross margin was “negatively impacted by our decision to stop manufacturing Car Thing.” Spotify told TechCrunch:
Based on several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues, we have decided to stop further production of Car Thing units. Existing devices will perform as intended. This initiative has unlocked helpful learnings, and we remain focused on the car as an important place for audio.
Announced in April last year, the short-lived device first went on sale in the United States in February for $89.99. It was designed to be an in-car dash-mounted music and podcast player to provide a more seamless and personalized listening experience, especially in the large number of cars that do not support modern in-car infotainment systems or Apple CarPlay.
Concord is expanding its interests in the Australasian market by acquiring a key independent music publisher in the region, Native Tongue.
With offices in both Australia and New Zealand, Native Tongue has its own roster of songwriters and also represents a significant network of other publishers from around the world in the Australasian market. And for more than ten years now, that has included Concord Music.
The company’s founder, Chris Gough, went into semi-retirement in 2014, with the business being managed day to day by his children Jaime and Chelsea. They will now head up what will be known as Concord Music Publishing ANZ, as Managing Director and Senior VP respectively.
Confirming the deal, Chris Gough says: “Jaime and Chelsea along with our wonderful team of people have grown the company significantly in recent years. This is the next step, providing our home-grown writers with a truly international organisation capable of maximising their potential worldwide”.
SoundCloud will be laying off approximately 20% of its global workforce citing “a significant company transformation” and the current economic and financial landscape.
“During this difficult time, we are focused on providing the support and resources to those transitioning while reinforcing our commitment to executing our mission to lead what’s next in music,” reads a statement by a rep for SoundCloud.
Earlier this year, SoundCloud began detailing changes to the company with the aim of providing increased levels of artist-focused support by incrementally upping monetization and providing additional distribution tools for artists at all levels of their careers. In this year alone, the company has teamed up with Pandora and Splice, acquired artificial intelligence company, Musiio, and also entered a joint venture with management and creative services company, Solid Foundation.
The music industry is paying tribute to powerhouse record executive Mo Ostin who died “peacefully in his sleep” on Sunday evening, according to a statement from Warner Records. He was 95 years old.
Ostin oversaw the careers of a long list of marquee talent: The Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Prince among them.
Born in New York to Russian immigrants, Ostin’s early years in the business were spent at the jazz label Verve. In 1960, when Frank Sinatra started his own record label, Reprise, he hired Ostin as its administrative vice president. Reprise was eventually bought by Warner Records.
In 1970, Ostin became president of Warner Bros. Records. Under his leadership, the company was home to both mainstream pop stars like James Taylor and Fleetwood Mac to edgier artists such as Frank Zappa and The Sex Pistols.
ByteDance may be preparing for a global launch of TikTok Music service, according to trademarks filed in several countries found by TechCrunch. The China-based conglomerate has filed TikTok Music trademark in countries like the U.K., Singapore, New Zealand, Mexico, Malaysia and Costa Rica.
All of these trademark filings include similar text about the application’s functionality of listening to music, creating playlists, commenting on songs and participating in karaoke.
The trademark application says it would allow “users to purchase, play, share, download music, songs, albums, lyrics, quotes, create, recommend, share his/her playlists, lyrics, quotes, take, edit and upload photographs as the cover of playlists, comment on music, songs and albums.”
ByteDance already operates a music streaming service called Resso in India, Brazil and Indonesia, and a former ByteDance employee told us it had previously considered bringing this service to more markets under a “TikTok Music” title. Specifically, it had been considering launches in mature markets like the U.K. and Australia, the source said.
A new partnership with Ticketmaster pushes TikTok further into the musical space, and fans everywhere are reaping the rewards.
TikTok is where the vast majority of human beings go to discover music.
There is no typo in that sentence. TikTok is a global phenomenon, and in three short years, it has helped hundreds, maybe even thousands of acts elevate their careers.
Everyone is looking at TikTok for music, meaning everyone selling music wants a piece of the action.
Ticketmaster and TikTok are partnering to launch an in-app feature that lets users discover events through the popular short-form video app. With this new partnership, TikTok users can buy tickets for events they’re interested in directly through TikTok. Creators can now search for relevant Ticketmaster events and add destination links to their videos. Ticketmaster says the new feature will only be available to select creators at launch and will scale to more users over time.
Eligible creators can now select the “Add link” option after tapping and selecting the new Ticketmaster option before posting a video. Creators can search for any event on Ticketmaster and select “Add to video” to add the link. Once creators share their video, it will display the event link on the bottom-left, allowing viewers to click and purchase tickets via an in-app browser.
Many artists and personalities have already signed on to begin using the ticketing mini app including Demi Lovato, OneRepublic, Usher, the Backstreet Boys, WWE and more, Ticketmaster says.
News of Ticketmaster’s partnership with TikTok comes less than six months after a similar partnership was launched with Snapchat. It’s clear the ticketing giant is staying atop trends in consumer behavior, but the adoption rate remains to be seen.
Would you purchase concert tickets on TikTok? Email james@haulix.com and let me know!
A recent trend on TikTok allows users to showcase their favorite artist’s best song, and fans can’t get enough.
Let me set the scene: You’re scrolling through TikTok when suddenly, a video featuring a lone human walking through a doorway as an unfamiliar song begins to play. They pass through the room, grabbing headphones or other objects, as their friends, family, or coworkers slowly circle them. As soon as the song kicks into high gear, the room goes dark but is quickly illuminated by flashing lights as the protagonist begins performing the song, backed by everyone else in the room. It’s the kind of rowdy moment that previously would’ve happened during a sleepover or late night with friends, but in the digital age, it’s called content, and people love to see it unfold.
The #StudioChallenge, which has been blowing up on the video-sharing app, is centered around people acting as if they’re about to record a song. It is usually started by someone walking into a room, dapping people up, and grabbing the necessary equipment they need to deliver their act.
What makes the #StudioChallenge unique is its format. Unlike most TikTok trends involving dances or other act-outs, this challenge does not rely on a specific song. Users can pick a song that makes them feel the most alive. The content they create is an extension of themselves and their tastes, which makes their commitment to the bit more convincing for viewers.
Here are a few examples of the challenge in action.
No marketing rep could have developed a more perfect promotional tool than the #StudioChallenge. Labels and artists want fans to use their songs in content. This challenge presents an opportunity to do so while putting the music front and center. For every viewer, one more person is hearing what is—most likely—one of the best moments in that artist’s catalog. That’s the perfect bait to hook a new listener, and it takes virtually no effort to execute.
As TikTok continues to evolve and music marketers place greater emphasis on navigating its vast community, we will likely see more trends with room for variety emerge. The age of song-specific dances and reenactments is slowly giving way to more personalized user-generated content (UGC).
Why artists need to pay attention
Your fans are on TikTok. Maybe not all of them, but you have a community of followers, and they are likely making content. You can sit idly by, hoping they use your music, or you can encourage them to take action. There are many ways to accomplish this, starting with competitions for the best video, but the key to your success will be engagement, not from outsiders but from you. Listeners want to know you notice them, and they want to interact with you. By engaging your TikTok audience, you encourage them to include you in future creative efforts.
But encouragement alone is not enough.
Every artist with the bandwidth to experiment on a new social network owes it to themselves and their audience to explore TikTok.
I’ve yet to see a rock or metal band participate in the #StudioChallenge, but it seems like an easy win.
Picture a band using the framework of the challenge to tease a new breakdown or highlight one of their biggest hooks. They can keep things simple and follow the blueprint or use their stage production to take the whole affair to an entirely new level. Either way, people will be hooked.
Take a chance on yourself.
It’s easy to understand why people hesitated to make video content three or four years ago. But it’s 2022, and the entire planet is spending free time scrolling through looping videos made by strangers. Everyone is doing it, and you should too!
I know, I know. This sounds like one of those” “if your friends jumped off a bridge” scenarios, but it’s not.
The cultural focus has shifted from still images and written word to video. The artists making waves of any size right now are doing so—at least in some small part—with the aid of video.
It’s no longer a question of “if” you need video content. You absolutely need it. The only question is, how creative are you?
BeReal is the hottest social media app on the planet, and musicians everywhere are rushing to catch up.
The hardest thing to find on social media is people you know. Sounds crazy, right? Most started using social media to connect with family and friends, but it is increasingly clear that such connections are no longer the primary focus of most platforms. Twitter is where people go to scream into the void. Facebook is where your parents go to share photos from last Thanksgiving in between advertisements and random posts from that local restaurant you only ever engaged with for a one-time 10% discount. Even Instagram—the onetime hub of all things personal life—is pivoting more and more to resemble TikTok, a platform that emphasizes entertainment over individual connections.
BeReal may be a solution.
What Is BeReal?
As our friends at Hypebot succinctly explain, BeReal is a photo-sharing app that prompts users to post one unfiltered photo daily.
The app sends a push notification [⚠️ Time to BeReal. ⚠️] to all users at a random time daily. Users in the same time zone get it simultaneously and have two minutes to take a picture and share it with their followers.
BeReal uses the front and back cameras of the user’s phone to chronicle the user and what they are doing simultaneously.
In addition to the two-minute window, the app has no filters, thus forcing you to—you guessed it—BeReal.
New social media platforms rarely garner global attention, so that alone warrants giving BeReal a moment of consideration. Beyond that, the app has garnered more than 30 million downloads worldwide, many of which are Gen Z users. Analysts suspect this is due to an underlying need for genuine personal connection in an increasingly fragmented and filtered world.
How can BeReal help me?
BeReal offers all users the simplest path to recurring content creation.
Users do not worry about lighting, filters, or trending sounds. The only thing that matters is capturing the present moment.
For artists, that means a once-daily opportunity to share your activity with fans. No more, no less. The two minutes you have to capture a photo is all the effort you must put into remaining active on BeReal.
Compare that to expert suggestions that people on TikTok post multiple times daily, and BeReal suddenly likes far more appealing.
Let’s talk strategy. How do I maximize the impact of my presence?
To be clear: BeReal does not have native advertising.
There are no promoted posts or explore pages packed with influencer content meant to sell false ideas of high-quality fast food or overnight weight loss.
To succeed on BeReal, you must play by the rules.
In other words, be real. Be as real as humanly possible. Share your journey, warts and all, anytime the opportunity presents itself.
Chipotle is a great example. Most people wouldn’t suspect a fast-casual chain to participate in a filter-free social media world, but the burrito company is one of the biggest brands on BeReal.
Don’t you have any tips and tricks?
Serendipity is the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
BeReal may seek to capture the mundane, but your life is not mundane! Depending on when the prompt arrives, you may be able to capture tour life, studio life, the writing process, video shoots, or any one of a hundred important but small moments in your career. Those microdoses of your life and career will help your fans feel closer to you, and that bond will strengthen your community.
The best BeReal strategy is essentially no strategy. Be yourself. Be vulnerable like you are through your craft, and people will respond.
A new report from Luminate proves what analysts have been suspecting for some time: that popular music is no longer popular.
A midyear report by US market monitor Luminate—the same company behind the Billboard charts—has revealed the alarming fact that “new”/”current” music is becoming less popular in the country, and this statement can be backed up by facts and statistics, as first reported by Music Business Worldwide.
In the first half of 2022, Total Album Consumption (all streams and downloads, as well as physical album sales) of “Current” music (which means released in the 18 months before being streamed or purchased) dropped by 1.4% when compared to 2021.
With 131.3 million album sale-equivalent units reported for this year, “Current” music dropped almost 2 million units from the first half of 2021, which means that new music is not only selling less but is also being less popular in terms of streaming platforms. There was a drop of 3.7 between 2020 and 2021, which officially makes this a downward trend.
This tendency is opposed to the Total Album Consumption for “All” music in the US, which grew by 9.3% in comparison with 2021, standing at 475.4 million units sold.
Even more surprising is the news that “Catalog” music, which includes any release older than 18 months, grew by 14% in the year’s first half.
The report also found that “Current” music’s on-demand audio streams dropped by 2.6% this year, with an even more drastic decrease of 10.4% in video streaming platforms versus a 19% increase by “Catalog” music.
In his latest update, Music Biz host James Shotwell examines the possible contributing factors to our declining interest in current music. As he touches on the inherent lucrative nature of legacy acts, he also ponders who—if anyone—will become the next generation of “timeless” musicians.
A lack of blockbuster releases is potentially contributing to the decline in current music consumption. Over twenty fewer albums from the first half of 2022 debuted on the Billboard 200 chart compared to the same period in 2021.
The pandemic is another potential explanation. As the industry shut down, listeners turned to the artists and albums that brought them a sense of peace. So-called “comfort listening” became common while many big artists delayed their records until their teams could implement a more traditional promotional cycle.
There’s also a mathematical explanation. There is far more catalog music and much more written, created, shared, posted, and said about those artists and their material than anything released in the last 18 months. Even Harry Styles can’t outpace Paul McCartney when it comes to press.
But the problem we obsess over is two-fold.
The first is a lack of clear pathways to long-term industry success in the modern era. How does a new musician starting today become the next Aerosmith or Madonna? Will we ever see another world-changing talent like Elvis? Will they emerge from a platform like TikTok? Can streaming services create ecosystems that support sustaining one’s career and nurturing it into a long-term (decade-plus) run of success?
Until we can succinctly explain how anyone goes from unknown to arena headlining in 2022 (or 2023, etc), we as an industry have work to accomplish, which leads us to the second point:
Very few artists are afforded the support system or time needed to flourish nationally or internationally. The margins in music have become so slim that the slightest deviation from an upward trajectory can send any musician’s career into turmoil. Fans want more content than ever at a rate the traditional industry workflows were not designed to meet. When artists come alone and deliver on consumers’ expectations, they only have a short distance to grow before aging industry architecture prevents them from meaningful growth (in other words, festival appearances, world tours, radio promotion, physical distribution). A select few have found workarounds, but they are always exceptions to the rule, not the norm.
If we want people to care about new music more, we must do more to support it.
Go to your local Target tonight after work. When you get to the clothing section, scan the t-shirts to see which musicians are promoted on the shelves. Carrying rock band merchandise is still relatively new for the company, but it’s lucrative. Target stores nationwide often have a half dozen rock shirt designs for all ages and genders, if not more. But you’re unlikely to find anything resembling a current artist: no Post Malone shirts or Justin Bieber sweatpants. You won’t find anything related to Kendrick Lamar or Drake, but there will probably be at least one Wu-Tang Clan design.
The music section in Target or any other box store is equally bleak.
In everyday life, most people encountering music branding do so through legacy acts. Most kids of rock fans know “Welcome To The Jungle” and “Enter Sandman” before anything from the catalog of Shinedown or Three Days Grace (the two bands tied for the most #1 singles in modern rock radio history).
Music must celebrate its current successes with the same effort it does in its cornerstone acts. When that happens, maybe—and that is a big maybe—everyday people will also start to care about the new stuff.
Leaving your mark in music is increasingly difficult, but Sweden’s Sator has been making it look easy for nearly four decades. Today, they share their secrets with Haulix.
Sator has been making music longer than many of our readers have been alive. If that is not impressive enough, the band has done it with friendships and members (mostly) intact. Formed in 1983 under a different name, the group found its footing and changed its identity in 1987. From there, the band remained active in the studio and on the road until today.
Early in their career, the men of Sator knew they needed a hook to help gain widespread attention. The answer came in the form of a covers album, but not in the traditional sense.
Cover songs are a dime a dozen, and they share one big problem: Everyone already knows the song. Finding an element of surprise in most cover songs is impossible. You can make a pop song sound like a rock track and vice versa, but the core elements remain the same.
Sator found the answer in scraps of the artists they love. Rather than recreate well-received songs, the band wrote musicians and asked for permission to record any unreleased material the artist or group might have in their possession. To their surprise, people said yes!
That one decision—to deliver original takes on other people’s unreleased songs—gave Sator something nobody else could offer. It was enough to propel the band onto the international, which they then remained on thanks to their original songwriting.
Nearly thirty years since the release of that first covers album, the band is back with another collection of other people’s songs. We asked Sator to tell us the secret behind gaining access to this material and how they’ve managed to stay relevant for decades, and they were more than happy to respond. Check it out:
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
