Filed under: Rumors, Products and services, Competitive strategy, Marketing and advertising
While privately-held EMI Group announced plans yesterday to cut around 2,000 jobs worldwide, the company also announced intentions to grant corporate sponsors to brand artists. According to British music journal NME, the plan will encompass connections to new releases from such massive name acts as Coldplay, Kylie Minogue, and Babyshambles. This announcement coincides with several comments from EMI acts that they intend to withhold pending releases from the company until assurances can be made about marketing and digital promotion. Radiohead reportedly left EMI after assurances in those areas were not made by the record label, and when the company balked at giving the band rights to its back catalog.
A move like this should not be surprising, especially considering that other media and entertainment outlets have long used promotions of this sort to sell new products and releases. Most prominently are the deals film studios make for product placement and tie-ins with new films. Last year’s Transformers comes to mind more than any other recent film in that regard. But where it is simple to insert a vehicle for product promotion into a scene, the same cannot be stated about music. Although it is unlikely Coldplay will start to sing about some new model vehicle about to be revealed, the amount of control that artists may lose is daunting. The basic amount of attachment artists have toward albums seems to make this kind of deal unmanageable. If it is Britney Spears though, who would want to attach their brand to her at this point?
Unless the promotion is for some brand of musical device or instrument, this arrangement just seems hard to manage and especially hard to sell to artists that are very willing to withhold albums in light of issues already out of their control.
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