Music Marketing

When culture meet the business

Art Grilli



Music has been transformed by capitalism in to a giant business enterprise, from the record labels
to the large music distribution, companies up to the composer and performer, all is business.
The Music Label Industry is a place where the culture meet business. In this essay we focus about
recording labels internal organization, market and marketing strategies.

The recording label is a real corporation with an internal organization a CRS and an ethical code.
The internal system of a label is very complex whit a number of parts that interacts and the
organization model is functional to the specific characteristic of product and service offered.
There are three fundamental company archetypes: Functional Structure, Divisional Structure and
Matrix Structure. Any recording label may have slightly different organization structure, the
archetype used by a music labels is a Functional Structure, in fact the work is divided in
functional units that shares the same specialization and a predictable activities.

The recording labels have a separate departments, here are the major divisions of fully staffed
record companies: Artist and Repertoire, Sales, Marketing, Promotion, Product Management, New
Media, Production, Finance, Business Affair, International.
The Artist and Repertoire department is the most fascinating and is very important for a success
music label.

"These are the people with ears who find and nurture new talent, and who work creatively with
the artists" *

The Music Label Marketing are based of four elements also referred to as the 4P's of marketing:
Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Product what a music labels offer to a customer: Their cd physical attributes, how they differ
from a competitors and what benefit they provide.

Price How price the product so that the price remains competitive but allows to make a good
profit.

Place Where the music label sells its products and how it gets those products to customers.

Promotion The methods used by a music label to communicate the features and benefits of
products to target customers.








* (p.178 of Donald S. Passman. All You Need to Know About the Music Business. RosettaBooks, 2009.)

A respectable Recording label also must have a Mission that represent the actual company goals
and the Vision that shows what the company want to realize in future perspective projection.

The EMI Music Publishing's mission is: bring fans together around high quality music
entertainment programming, while also creating business value wherever music is experienced.

The EMI Music Publishing Vision is: to be a leader company in the world recorded music
industry.

A Marketing Research is a valuable instrument for the Recording Label, It's a wide research that
consider all the possible market element to make decisions about a product, distribution,
promotional techniques and advertising. Through this research the company can make the correct
marketing related decisions that have value for customers, clients and partners.

"Marketing research is about knowing, understanding and evaluating. As human being, we want to
know what's happening in our world and understand why those thing are happening" **


For a good product placement the music label also must conduit a Market Research that is a more
specific and restricted research based on a specific product to a specific market segmentation.



























**( p.9 of Marketing Research Kit for Dummies Business & Personal Finance by Michael Hyman PhD, Jeremy Sierra
PhD. Ed. For Dummies )