So Jill’s cousin Sally has written the song for the new iPOD ad …
… and apart from it to being a license to print money, it demonstrates how the music industry is far better at understanding how to make money in a World of piracy than the film companies.
OK … OK … so alot of the record labels have shown a level of buffoonery that makes Mr Bean look like a Harvard Professor – however interms of diversifying their revenue models, you can’t deny that bands/singers are far more ahead of the game than their film counterparts.
Take Prince and his Daily Mail album giveaway …
This wasn’t some act of madness by the purple midget – he used it as the ultimate ‘marketing tool’.
The thing Prince realised is that music piracy is an almost unstoppable force – so rather than rely on it as a core revenue source, he decided to use it as a tool to reach the widest possible audience possible.
What this meant was that when he announced his tour, not only would more people know about it, but it would probably encourage more people to attend, given they’d not had to pay anything for his latest album.
The other benefit – and this is the really big one – is that while albums CAN be pirated, a live concert can’t – so potential revenues stand a far greater chance of being realised PLUS at live concerts, there’s all sorts of ‘added revenue’ channels like t-shirts, programmes and food etc.
In short this marketing policy made Prince more money than he probably would have achieved if he’d stuck with the old ‘album revenue model’ of the past.
There’s a load of record company experts that think this is the future – and while it could [and probably would] ultimately destroy the monolithic record company model – it is a pragmatic strategy for musicians to maintain a profitable career despite piracy becoming bigger and bigger all over the World.
Now compare that to the Film Industry …
OK, so they’ve tried a few things, but the one they’ve seemed to focus on are putting those “IT’S STEALING” ads at the beginning of every film/DVD they release.
Oooooooh, that’s scary isn’t it … that’ll put people off buying a flick for $2 instead of $30, especially when it’s a rehash of a movie that was crap in the first place.
Hell, even the video pirates take the piss out of this strategy by including the ‘ad’ at the beginning of all their dodgy movies. Allegedly. Ahem.
OK, I appreciate the film industry is different to the music industry and that the issues are not easily comparable – however, if the film studios stopped paying such massive flat fee’s to their ‘actors’ as well as invested in creativity rather than just rehashing the old then maybe, just maybe they’d start moving people away from seeing the movies as ‘disposable entertainment’ and something worth paying more than $2 for.
[NB: I did say ‘maybe’]
Somehow I’ve married into Australia’s most creative family because another member of Jill’s mob is the Film Director, Philip Noyce [a man who has directed Angelina Jolie so immediately is one my favourite ‘relations’] … so maybe at the next Christmas get-together I should get Sally and Philip together so they can discuss how the movie industry can innovate to maintain their profits because if they don’t, Hollywood could end up being about as glamouress as Luton!