Music as a Commodity vs. an Experience
In a business roudtable-style discussion today at the APSU Summer Guitar Workshop a participant asked me what I thought about CD sales. He asked if I thought that was a dead end — an unprofitable business. I’ll tell you my answer in a bit, but first a story.
Richard Smith, the most fun guitarist on the planet.
Richard Smith is the man. He’s a great, fun-loving guy who plays the crap out of his guitar. When I saw him in concert last night, he blew the audience away. And he also sold a ton of CD’s afterward.
When Stephen Aron gave a concert of his own music, he sold it to the audience because he played with a passion that made it appealing to anyone. Steve writes great music, but his played sealed the deal. And he sold more than a few copies of his arrangements and compositions at the merch table after the performance.
I could go through every performer at this festival and talk about how they sold their product after the concert. They did very well, and they all created fans.
Take Home the Experience
When you buy a CD at a concert, it’s taking home part of the experience — it’s grabbing a chunk of the performer to put in your pocket for later. You catch the audience member right after they’ve had a euphoric experience in the concert hall. They are ready to buy something from you because you’ve spent the last hour tell them a story. Marketers do this all the time to sell us products: they make us believe a story. Musician’s do the same thing, but with a different language. A CD bought at a concert is forever associated with that euphoric, intense concert experience. People with cherish those CD’s forever because they cherish the memory of the concert. In short, the audience member told themselves that they loved the performer in concert and, therefore, would love them on a CD.
The CD is no longer a commodity. It’s now part of an experience.
Selling music is not a dead business, musicians just need to find a way to make the same product more of an experience than a commodity. Maybe that has to do with creating passionate fans — finding a way to instill the same, post-concert feeling no matter what the distance. Creating true fans, in other words, by mimicking the post-concert feeling.
PS: what everyone should have done at this event was encourage folks to sign up for their email mailing lists, gaining permission to interact with them on a continual basis. No one did that, however.
