Music is an integral part of most media. Movies, radio, video-games and television all depend on music as the core or the enhancement of their products. The music industry on the other hand is completely dependent on the media, as a promoter, user and distributer of it’s products. Most professional musical Artists/Bands communicate with their audience primarily via some kind of electronic medium and only a fraction of the audience is able to experience the Artists/Band’s live performance. The dynamics of this interplay between the audience, the music and the media can be illustrated by the ‘Audience - Media - Engine’ model. The model is constituted by four variables: Media Presence, Audience Reach, Audience Approval and Audience Action. Media presence represents the number of media outlets (television shows, radio shows, websites, video-games etc) where the Artist/Band appears during a specific period of time. A music firm may try to improve its media presence through various marketing and licensing activities. Audience reach represents the percentage of the total audience which the firm is able to reach through it’s media presence. For example, an appearance in a high-profile media event is able to reach a greater share of total audience than an appearance on a media event of less significant.
Audience approval is defined as the fraction of the entire audience who respond positively when they encounter the works of a musical Artist/Band. This variable is of course affected by several other factors, but the audience-media engine focuses entirely on how the audience approval is driven by the Artist/Band’s presence in the media.
Audience approval is important in both the old and new music economy, but it’s not able to pay the firms bills. Rather, it is various kids of audience actions that are traditionally supposed to generate the majority of the firms revenues. The actions spurred by the audience’s approval might for instance be the purchase of a song, music merchandise, concert tickets or some other music related product.
There are many kinds of audience action, which have the similar interplay with the media presence. The structure is currently manifested all over the Cloud, for example on social network services such as MySpace, Lala, Twitter or Facebook.
The links which connect media presence, audience reach, audience approval and audience action constitute a reinforcing feedback loop which plays a crucial role in the music industry dynamics. The loop may serve as an engine which gives rise to fads, brands, acts or genres. If the audience - media engine works against an artist or a music firm, it will be difficult to reach any kind of success.
The ability to control the audience-media engine has been at the core of music business strategy since the very beginning of the industry.
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