This post is an updated version of a post I did sometime ago on our sister blog that deals with music artists and widgets. Most artists are aware of how web-based widgets have become! One could argue that MySpace (and music) were responsible for taking widgets mainstream, and the growth of other social networks (Facebook) has only fueled people use and desire for widgets! Today, widgets continue to provided probably one of the best viral mechanism for music artists to let fans share their music.
Music artist widgets generally solve the following problems for recording artists and labels:
- Fan Acquisition: Widgets allow bands to virally grow your fan base by enabling fans to share your music via the widget. Atlantic Record’s Eric Snowden talks about the same widget traffic driving phenomenon as well.
- Information Distribution: Widget make it easier to keep fans up to date on upcoming releases and events
- Fan Retention: It is a known fact that widgets increase the amount of time fans spend on artist sites by keeping fans “engaged”
- Digital Music Sales: Widgets are about demand creation and fulfillment when it comes to online digital track sales as artists link widgets directly to Apple’s iTune, Amazon or their own fulfillment ecommerce service.
Growing Digital Track Sales
Digital music track sales are hitting record highs! According to Billboard Magazine, in December 2008 US weekly digital track sales have set a new record of 47.7 million ). And this phenomena is not limited to North America, global digital music sales hit $2.9 billion in 2007, up from $2.1 billion in 2006! Although digital sales only account for 18% of the U.S. music market (15% of the world) today, Forrester Research expects this figure will grow to 41% in five years.
This digital music sales trend continues and is evident from the recent numbers from Nielsen/Soundscan.
Digital Marketing through Widgets
If sales are digital, marketing has to be digital! Record labels like Interscope and Warner are taking to the web to drive music sales. (Interscope Record’s artist Lady GaGa’s “Just Dance,” topped the charts in December 200 with 419,000 downloads). Being big fans of social media in general, Interscope Records has pushed digital sales by encouraging artists to use widgets and have used their own social media apps (See Interscope Songcard on Facebook) to drive sales. Some credit Warner music with pioneering directly selling music through widgets as well.
Getting on the Widget Band Wagon:
Music arists and labels have a number of options when it comes to designing and developing widget that include:
- Custom “Single Use” Widgets: Probably the most common route for artist and labels is to simply build a custom Flash-based widget either internally or using a company like Metablocks. We build a lot of these. The problem with “single-use” widgets, however, is they have a limited life-span and they tend to be static. They usually focus on a single artist, album or event and over time are “discarded” by fans as they loose their relavence.
- Do-It-Yourself (DIY) “Single Use” Widgets: A number of “free” widget toolkits exist that allow artists and labels to quickly assemble a simple widget. Unlike a custom solution, many of these offerings come with limited functionality, third-party branding and most are no long “free”. Worst of all, almost all depend on third-party infrastructure that may not scale or may be retired if the provider exits the market.
- Standards-Based Widget Platform: A widget content delivery platform is the only solution that gives music labels “total ownership” of your widget content management and deployment. This is the idea behind Metablock’s Widgetmatic platform (which is currently in beta). Widgetmatic shifts the focus from “flash development” to “content delivery”, and from a “single use” mindset to a “fan lifecycle” mentality. It enables labels to launch and manage multiple artists on the same platform, using the widget as “portal” to continually and dynamically deliver new and relavent rich-media content to an artist’s fan. This content is not limited to music or news but includes dynamic “mini-applications” such as twitter feeds, interactive maps, and dozens of others.
