Atlantic Records and Social Media Marketing

I recently ran across this interest presentation by Eric Snowden, Senior Creative Director for Atlantic Records (a wholly owned subsidiary of Warner Music Group). Atlantic’s new media group has tripled in size in the last year and Atlantic has made significant investment both in-house and working with outside agencies.

Eric discusses how Atlantic Records is using social media to try and better connect fans and artists, the presentation also talks about their use of Adobe technologies such as Flash, Flash Lite and AIR. Here are some of the good points Eric makes:

  • Artist Websites: Atlantic records has focused on the artist website (ARTIST.COM) and building out other offerings around the core site to include desktop applications, widgets and games, mobile apps and on disc connect. This is true (in general) for the entire family of Warner Music companies who are standardizing on the Drupal platform.
  • Widgets and Games: According to Eric Snowden, “Widgets and games are a big part of driving traffic”. Totally agree with Eric here! Primary purpose of the Widgetmatic platform is attract and drive traffic.
  • Feeds and Reusable Components: Keeping content consistent and have tried to build reusable elements and reusable common feeds. This is key! It still boggles my mind when I see an artist website or worse “blog” that doesn’t support RSS and feeds.
  • Flash Technology: Atlantic uses Flash and other Adobe technologies heavily in artists sites.
  • Band-Generated Content: Atlantic records are big fans of band generated content such as blogs, mobile streams, and a big source of traffic and fan discussions (get as many as a thousand comments on a post).
  • Mobile: Atlantic pushes the site’s mobile companion site as a “first class citizen”.
  • Artist Communities: Have 3 people on the rock and 3 on the urban side that moderate artist communities. Eric also talks about their use of Ning and other technologies to build artist communities.

Eric also talks about moving from being a “music company” to being a “content company”. I also like the fact that his team tries and do something for every artist, every day – believe me, this can be a challenge for most labels. My suggestion to labels is they explore ways of automating content creation and saving time and money by synchronizing information between web properties (publish once approach) to keep content fresh and new.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Music, Widgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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