Interrogating Popular Culture: Key Questions by Takacs Stacy

Author:Takacs, Stacy [Takacs, Stacy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781135020699
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

Risk Minimization Strategy Four: Maximize Exposure

Commercial cultural production revolves as much around marketing and promotion as its does around the production of cultural commodities. The RIAA’s breakdown of a typical contract for new artists includes a $200,000 advance, for example, and $300,000 for marketing and promotion. If we add in the costs of making videos to promote the artist (a separate category in the table, but clearly a marketing expense), the total expenditure on marketing and promotion jumps to 50 percent of the contract (or $500,000). 19 Where does this money go? Much of it goes toward drafting various gatekeepers and social influencers—those with the capacity to “spread the word” about an artist. For example, the music industry has a long history of bribing disk jockeys with money, gifts, and sex to play their artists on the air. Such “payola” schemes were formally outlawed in the US in the 1960s, but major distributors simply used “independent record promoters” to get around the restrictions until that practice, too, was declared illegal in 2006. Promoters may also go directly to “social influencers” like club DJs, music reviewers, lifestyle bloggers, and even prominent Twitter users to promote an artist, event, or song. Often this involves the exchange of cash, free merchandise, or a “meet-and-greet” for a positive review.

Since word-of-mouth advertising is generally more effective than corporate advertising, record promoters also use “street teams” of youthful fans to promote bands and concerts in a seemingly unmotivated fashion. In the past, this has involved spreading band stickers and posters around town, wearing band merchandise in the “right” locales, and passing out free CDs (“ripped” to look authentically user-generated). Today, however, it involves social networking. Promoters enlist fans to participate in online chat forums, post videos on MySpace or YouTube, tag and comment on the artist’s material on these sites, and even produce band-oriented podcasts or blogs themselves. In Italy, for example, Universal Music Italia hosts a web portal for its street teams called UTeam. 20 Managers construct “missions” for fans to enact in exchange for receiving CDs, concert tickets, or a meet-and-greet with the artist. One mission to support Lady Gaga asked her fans to incorporate Gaga’s portrait into their Facebook pages; another promoted a “download day” in which fans buy copies of a designated single on iTunes in hopes of pushing it into the iTunes top ten. Promoters may also try to inspire “flash mob” activity by distributing video tutorials of an artist’s choreographed dance routines and inviting fans to go out and perform the routines in public. They may offer prizes for the best flash mob videos posted on YouTube. All of this activity is designed to seem spontaneous, and fans are hardly compensated for their efforts, but the marketers who facilitate the activity are highly paid apparatchiks of the major labels. As we will see, these attempts to transform fan love into labor are the new trend, but they are also unpredictable and can sometimes backfire.

Multimedia conglomerates have much easier means to get the word out about their products—namely, forms of cross-promotion and synergy.

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