The chart speaks for itself. Little wonder the record companies are crumbling and deservedly so.

While Creative Director and partner at the ad agency, Holmes and Lee, I worked on the launch of the "Beatles 1" record on behalf of the label. We wrote billboard headlines such as "Ringo needs a new house." and other irreverent stuff with re-chopped Richard Avedon photos. But the record company said no. They wanted safe and bland. To be frank, I'm not sure they even knew what safe and bland was.

As with most record companies, the marketing people weren't overly intelligent, or experienced - they were former A&R people. In my opinion, this also contributed to the demise of the industry. They really didn't understand marketing outside of their shallow bubble. But then, I guess you don't have to if you control the distribution system.

But that's mostly over now.

I think bands and labels that hire authentic, experienced marketing help now have a chance to do some interesting things. The Black Keys video, though not overly creative and surprising, does add some credibility to the band. Especially if you haven't heard of them, or aren't a listener.

Devo did a more interesting job working with the ad agency 'Mother' to launch their new album.

And rather than doing a video with hopes of it going viral, why not give it a bump by buying your own surprisingly inexpensive National TV campaign through Google TV ads?

Whether you do it yourself, or can afford to hire an ad agency (many might even cut their rates, if you let them have fun), music marketing is potentially in a better space than it once was.

In a previous blog post I argued that a business model Seth Godin proposed in an interview with Derek Sivers was, well, just plain wrong.

He proposes that a musician should be selling "souvenirs, intimacy, experiences, memories and limited things of value." As for actual music sales? He says that’s over, comparing an attempt to sell an actual track to a bakery attempting to sell the sniff of fresh bread.

Another article, "The future of the music business" on the blog, Techdirt, champions pretty much the same model. They define it as:

Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model.

Examples of “reason to buy” runs the course from Trent Reznor’s $300 Ultra Deluxe Limited Edition Package of the album “Ghosts I-IV” to Josh Freese (a session drummer) who offered several options and price points on purchasing his album, from a $50, 5 minute thank-you phone call to a $20,000 spend the week with Josh event.

Today it seems musicians have to be master promoters first and foremost and a jack-of–all-trades, second. A P.T. Barnum carni surrounded by mysteries and illusions of their own making.

The audience? Well, as Barnum said himself, “There’s a sucker born everyday.”

I might disagree with the business plan, but Seth Godin is right. Unless digital coding becomes so robust and tamper proof that piracy is no longer an issue, the idea of people paying for music by itself is probably coming to a crashing end.

So, I suppose like a lot of people these digital days, musicians have to adapt to and become expert in new and additional occupations. Everything from social media marketers to web masters, to promotional experts, to t-shirt designers.

Though, I'm not sure where that will leave the actual creation of music.

Like pretty much every other article on the future of music, an L.A. Times article, “The path to success is no longer labeled” describes the change, or implosion, depending on your pov, of the music business. In it, the writer, Geoff Boucher describes another approach to music marketing:

…a novel approach to music marketing called Music Tees, a New York-based venture that puts band art on the front of high-end T-shirts and a track listing on the back. The $40 shirts come with a code to download the band's music; other acts involved in the venture include Mos Def, David Gray, Third Eye Blind, Regina Spektor and Devendra Banhart, and a recent contract with Warner Bros. suggests that the apparel approach to a hardscrabble music market is gaining some traction.

He goes on to sum up his thoughts on this development:

It's a topsy-turvy concept. It was music that used to sell T-shirts at arena shows; now a T-shirt can be the commodity, with music as the hopeful passenger in the transaction.

Music is now second fiddle to t-shirts.

Derek Sivers interviewed Seth Godin on his new book, Linchpin.

I agree with Seth's first bit in the interview. And I'd like to summarize it, "Good is the enemy of great."

This is true in everything. Especially music.

Overall, I think what he's saying is that the herd is still following the record company example - trying to be successful by being commercial, rather than having the balls to be passionately original and possibly great.

But this is where I begin to disagree with him:

So, if the radio is already there, and music is free-er than ever, it's not clear that music is valueless. There's more music being listened to (not just played, but being listened to) than ever before in history, and that listening is proof that people value it. At least they value it enough to spend their time.

True, time is the most precious commodity we have. Once spent, we can't earn it back. But...

Get over the idea that your success is equated with selling the right to listen, or selling control over when people listen. Relinquish the opportunity to make money by controlling who can listen and when. That's gone. It's over. It would be like a bakery selling the right to sniff the fresh bread or a wine maker selling the right to look at the cool label. It's now a public good, something you see as you walk by.

A classic non sequitur.

What you can sell, what you better be able to sell, is intimacy. It's interactions in public. Souvenirs. Limited things of value. Experiences. Memories. People will pay for those things, IF: your art is actually great and if you make it possible for them to buy them.

True, the smell of fresh bread is free, but it sells bread. However, by Seth's reasoning, a free song sells intimacy and t-shirts?

Totally the wrong business model.

In a short NYTimes article, “The End of Music,” published this past November, Glenn Branca argues that old music is the death of any sort of innovation in music. In other words, new music.

He might be right. The ubiquity of music, brought on by cheap to free digital sources has certainly opened up access for newer generations to the unknown old and for older generations to the comfortably familiar.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

Branca’s theory is summarized in his last paragraph:

Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got “growth”? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music (sic).

If you're going to play jazz, your music will be compared to 100 years of recordings of jazz artists. If you're going to play classical music, you've got to deal with the fact that audiences can stay home and listen to fantastic recordings of their favorite classical standards. And pop music? Innovation there often seems limited to visual design and fashion.

People like to pin the blame for the relatively tame output of the music industry on the major labels. The labels are just giving people what they want, though.

But the numbers that truly rocked the decade were the 1s and 0s of digital files. And it was all thanks to a dude named Shawn Fanning and a program called Napster. The former developed and launched the latter in, yes, 1999 so music lovers could share mp3 files online. And share they did; at Napster's peak, more than 26 million global users were swapping songs by everyone from Madonna to Metallica.

Net result: A world where you can now stream, download and burn - legally or not - virtually any piece of music ever recorded, at the click of a button.

Let’s start with the digital format most people listen to. It's pretty much agreed upon that Mp3’s represent a horrible way to listen to music. All the dynamics and sound quality are compromised, right from the digital file to the buds stuck in your ears. Admittedly, I even find myself listening to music through my laptop speakers occasionally. For sound quality this is as terrible, if not worse than kids in the ‘60’s listening to am music on tiny transistor radios hidden under their pillows at night so their parents wouldn’t know.

Certainly, the monster analogue stereo systems of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s reproduced music far superior to this.

Yet, this is how most people experience music today. Just walk down any street and you’ll see that everybody is doing it.

Why? Convenience.

Apart from the personal, when music is shared with others, new and different music is compromised again, so as not to offend anybody. It’s much more convenient to chuck on tunes that everybody is undoubtedly familiar with. No explanation or new music evangelism required.

How about the making of music?

Who needs to know chords or music theory anymore when you’ve got guitar tabs and software programs? In fact, who even needs to sing in key anymore when you’ve got Antares Autotune and live lip-sycing? Hell, even Britney Spears knows that.

What’s more, according to an article in the Village Voice, titled, “The Decade in Music Genre Hype” - new mish mashes - incorrectly known as genres, only last an average 9 months. The article is pretty much summed up in the first couple of paragraphs:

If Spin was right to name "Your Hard Drive" the best album of 2000, we'd like to formally nominate "The Internet" as Most Unforgiving Asshole of the 2000s. As of '09, bands have an official life span of about nine months dating from the launch of their MySpace pages, thanks to the comically accelerated, DSL-enhanced hype cycle. Faster than you can tweet "Serena Maneesh," entire genres of music are "discovered" by attention-starved writers; bloggers engage in hilarious slap-fights about who was there first; magazines feel pressured into writing clueless, hackazoid, late-pass trend pieces; bands get elevated to a critical mass of attention they can't possibly handle; and the phenomenon is promptly abandoned once we find a newer, shinier toy to play with.

Thanks to high-speed connections and low expectations, this scenario has played itself out over and over again lo these past 10 years. Here are but a few examples of the decade's Next Temporarily Big Things, each one pushed out of its tiny, insular spotlight by something a little lower on the list.

To Glenn Branca’s point, the ubiquity of all music and the convenience of accessing it has influenced today’s song writers, musicians and the audience. It’s much easier to rip-off something old, than it is to create something new. Inspiration and creativity have been replaced by convenience and laziness. Perhaps for good reason. Afterall, there’s little money in music anymore. Therefore, there’s little motivation in creating something truly new, if not moving an existing genre forward.

Is music the victim? No, we are the victims.

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Over the course of a couple of years, my musical taste radically changed from rock, to progressive rock, to fusion, to straight-ahead jazz and bebop.  During those mid-teenage years, I also went from playing electric bass, to fretless, to upright. I ended up privately studying with a couple of great teachers and was admitted to York University’s jazz program when I was eighteen.

Jazz for me was the greatest, most creative music ever invented. In fact, it wasn’t just invented, it was reinvented every time a standard was called out and improvisation began.

I became so obsessed with jazz that it was musical heresy to listen to anything else. I sold, or traded all of my rock, progressive rock and fusion albums for jazz recordings.

This all abruptly ended when I got married and had to support a family. It was obvious that I couldn’t feed my new family off the business of playing jazz.

Since then, I’ve had plenty of time to open my ears again to other forms of music. It’s also given me some time to consider the problems and opportunities of what still remains my favourite form of music.

In a Wall Street Journal article, titled “Can Jazz Be Saved?” Terry Teachout says:

“In 1987, Congress passed a joint resolution declaring jazz to be “a rare and valuable national treasure.” Nowadays the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis is taught in public schools, heard on TV commercials and performed at prestigious venues such as New York’s Lincoln Center, which even runs its own nightclub, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.

Here’s the catch: Nobody’s listening.”

He goes on to pull data from the National Endowment for the Arts’ latest Survey, which presents a picture far less than hopeful on the survival of jazz.

• In 2002, the year of the last survey, 10.8% of adult Americans attended at least one jazz performance. In 2008, that figure fell to 7.8%.
• Not only is the audience for jazz shrinking, but it’s growing older, fast. The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29.
• Older people are also much less likely to attend jazz performances today than they were a few years ago. The percentage of Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 9.8%. In 2002, it was 13.9%. That s a 30% drop in attendance.
• Even among college-educated adults, the audience for live jazz has shrunk significantly, to 14.9% in 2008 from 19.4% in 1982.

He then finds direct correlation between the median age of the jazz audience with classical music (49 in 2008 vs. 40 in 1982), opera (48 in 2008 vs. 43 in 1982), nonmusical plays (47 in 2008 vs. 39 in 1982) and ballet (46 in 2008 vs. 37 in 1982) - concluding that the average American sees jazz as a form of high art.

Hey, I’d agree with that. At least I would have, back in the woodshed days when all I did was practice, or perform 12 hours a day. I was a jazz snob. And jazz snobs aren’t just limited to jazz musicians. There’s the aging audience too. Often, and quite understandably accused of being the jazz police. They’re the ones who are always ready with an acid stare or, if that doesn’t work, a bellicose hush, if you dare to even pass wind during a performance.

Jazz wasn’t always like that. Take a look at some of the old Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, or Count Basie film clips. Read some of the biographies. These were party bands. There were the juke joints, after hour jams and the notorious speak easy clubs. There the bands and musicians provided hip, crowd-pleasing entertainment that was anything but stodgy.

Then there were the writers of the standards: Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and the rest. These guys could write words as well as music. Listen to ‘Strange Fruit’ by Billie Holliday. Few songs since have come close to the deep emotions and cultural insight of that song.

That in a nutshell is both the problem and the opportunity.

Jazz needs new standards, both in writing and performance. If music is about anything, it’s about songs and audience engagement. Jazz has to be in the now to gain back an audience.

Any musical art form that considers itself as the sole, core reason for its own existence, rather than placing the audience at the core, is doomed to fail. Any art form that only caters to an aging demographic made up of snobs and fellow musicians, will fail. And anything that depends on government grants, university support and trust fund endowments to survive, is already dead.

To connect, jazz needs an injection of emotion. It needs to be new and important to a broader audience. It needs to take itself less seriously and have more fun. It needs to be simplified – a cascade of clichéd notes and mathematical cycles doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t connect.

But most importantly, it needs songwriters. Not jazz writers. It needs lyrics that are relevant to today. Insights based on current cultural cues. It needs to get hip with the times and become at least vibrant, if not the leading light like it once was. And, yes, it needs to look to and draw from the past, but without being permanently stuck there.

The world doesn’t need another version of ‘All Of Me,’ or ‘How High The Moon.’ It needs new songs.

Still, the question remains, even with change, can jazz make a comeback?  As the 1921 New York Times article clearly shows – it’s not like as if we haven’t been here before.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much research available that proves what works better in advertising – a known hit, or an unknown song. There is, however, research based on music in retail environments, comparing the two.

A study conducted by Washington State University’s Business School, titled, “The Effects of Music in a Retail Setting on Real & Perceived Shopping Times” concluded that individuals who had a choice as to the duration of their shopping experience shopped longer when listening to less familiar music compared to more familiar music. And that individuals reported being more aroused while listening to unfamiliar music compared to familiar music.

The authors added, “These results are counter-intuitive to the expectation that listening to familiar music would encourage longer shopping.” To add a little more weight to the findings, the research cites other studies which more or less end up with, or at least point towards the same conclusion.

Paul Anthony, founder/CEO of Rumblefish, a music branding company based in Portland adds, “We have found that you can increase the length of stay for a customer at a retail store by 28 percent by playing less familiar music rather than more familiar music.”

Although it could be argued that you can’t make a direct correlation between the effects of unfamiliar music in retail environments and unfamiliar music, as opposed to ‘hit’ music used in brand advertising, it’s at least interesting.

What I find most interesting is that if the research is right, unfamiliar music tends to make people stick around longer. For advertising purposes, and given that the song has to have an engaging hook, the use of unfamiliar music may cause people to stick with a commercial longer, rather than zapping it.

Advertising has always relied on music, mostly original music that bragged and boasted about the brand, called the jingle. In fact, David Ogilvy once famously said, “If you can’t write it, sing it.”

Licensing popular songs for campaigns only began taking hold in the late 80’s and today has become common practice. A few years ago, an article in The New York Times, titled, “Forget Jingles. Viewers Prefer Familiar Tunes in Commercials” had this contrary observation, “One difference lately is that many songs being used are not mass-market hits. Indeed, many might not even ring a bell with the general public -- and that is one big reason they are used. Madison Avenue's newest idea is to discover innovative music that reaches a particular audience, usually young people.”

“The move to less widely known music reflects the rise of niche brands, niche media and niche marketing. An advertiser doesn't need an expensive mass hit when a more obscure, semi-pop song might be the track that reaches its niche youth market.”

As well, there are other reasons a brand marketer should consider using original, yet unfamiliar music as opposed to known, ‘hit’ music:

• The most obvious is cost. According to experts cited in the NY Times article, the fee to use a hit song in a commercial starts at about $150,000. To use the actual recording might cost another $150,000. The fees usually cover use for one year and are renegotiated for long-running campaigns. Tracks from unknown artists are considerably less than that. In fact, most are happy just getting the exposure, along with a nominal fee.
• Using new music can give a brand, especially a youth-oriented brand an added cachet as a patron of emerging music. In other words, the “cool” factor.
• A logical problem with using familiar ‘hit’ music from recognized stars is that the advertising often promotes the celebrity’s brand more so than the corporate brand paying the freight. A recent example of this is Blackberry’s pairing with U2, with the commercial's super informing us that "Blackberry loves U2." Something we all, apparently, need to know.

In conclusion, we recently experienced a lot of success in writing an original track for a Credit Canada TV commercial. Immediately after it went on air the client was bombarded with requests as to the details of the song.

Although I’ll post a more detailed case study later, the short version is that from the beginning of the campaign we planned on producing and promoting the full length track, titled ‘Two Scoops.’ In order to do this, we extended the campaign into social media, primarily using the track as the social object.

So far, the results are that ‘Two Scoops’ has been picked up and is being distributed by Universal Music and is now on medium to high rotation on radio across Canada (at the same time the TV commercial is running another flight). In the month of September, according to Trendr, the singer, Michelle Harding, was receiving 125,000 hits a day on her MySpace page. The music video, just launched at the end of August, has had well over 200,000 complete views online. It’s currently at number 20 on the California Music Channel. And apart from many good reviews, the song has been nominated for a Hollywood Music in Media Award.

Michelle and her band will be going on a 42-city tour starting in November, coinciding with her full length record being released in February.

Credit Canada has had a banner year and is delighted the song has helped bring the brand message to a much larger audience than traditional thinking and media would have allowed.

Regardless of money, I don’t think this would have happened with a hit song by Beyonce, or the Beatles for that matter.

Flatacre is a music branding agency. Its purpose is to help build client brands as well as promote its own music content. Apart from its own writers, producers and existing content, Flatacre also sources original music for cooperative promotion. The music is made available for a fraction of the price of typical original music creation, production and leasing arrangements. The potential is that the music can help make the client’s brand famous and through media exposure, the brand makes the music famous. This partnership creates further opportunities such as branded music videos, entertainment based promotions, virals and live performance. The client’s brand benefits by engaging with the audience through channels which typically have not been available. There are few things more potentially viral, engaging, or voluntarily repetitive than a good song.

• 82% of consumers think there are few brands that are genuinely interested in music and others are jumping on the bandwagon.
• And, 86% state brands need to do more than logo placement to gain respect.

• Make Sure Your Song Fits the Brand "Whether you're a person pitching music or a person making ads, the song has to make sense" says Beth Urdang, of Agoraphone.
• Be Flexible: This particularly applies if you are writing specifically for an ad campaign. Beth Urdang cautions "you have to be prepared for the back and forth of writing original music for an ad spot versus just licensing music where it either works or it doesn't."

Music can be an extremely effective tool in a brand’s toolbox. It should be given the same careful consideration as all the visual cues and aids in telling the brand’s story.

Music as part of brand communications should be developed from the brand up, rather than the entertainment and celebrity down. Music must connect with the target audience and be authentic to the brand.

Oh, and you don’t need the expense and hype of Beyonce, or the record companies producing your music - as much as you don’t need Hollywood studios and Brad Pitt producing your commercials.

If you want the cross-platform engagement that only music can provide, a great original song from unknown talent will do just fine. In fact, probably even better. But I'll get into that in a later post.