Saturday, 31 August 2013

Trent Reznor and the Formula for Future Music Business Models


            Trent Reznor is considered a genius among the music industry, he has developed the formula of the success of music business models. He had started out in working with a record labels to help him produce his music, while he had been thinking of ways to increase his success he had thought of this formula:


Connect With Fans (CwF) + Reason To Buy (RtB)
=
 The Business Model ($$$$)

            When he had thought of it the first thing that he did was try to connect to the audience by Alternative Reality Games (ARG) on his website, by selecting all the highlighted letters of a t-shirt that he was selling in a concert would then create a link to show some secret message, this had brought excitement for the audiences and interest to the artist. Another thing that he did was put out some of his new songs in USB’s and scattered it around the concert stadium in order for fans to find them, this again had brought excitement towards the audience. As for the his record label they did not like what he did because he was giving out new free music which was later shared around the internet. From then on he had started doing things his way without the record label, he had even started out giving free music to the audience; they were able to get the first 9 songs of his new album but then if you want you were able to buy the rest of the album for 5 dollars (which consisted of 36 tracks), it is a much better price than the iTunes 1 dollar for 1 song deal. One important part of what he did was that he had given options to the audience rather than giving only one deal, the biggest deal that he had done was a Ultra Deluxe Limited Edition Pack (as seen on the bottom picture) which consisted of all of his albums along with a personal autograph from Trent Reznor, in total the pack cost 300 dollars. Well only under 30 hours of it being online to purchase it had become sold out, and he had made 750,000 dollars just from that pack. There are so many example that he had used the formula for.
 
            A lot of different artists had become to use this formula due to the success of Trent Reznor, and it had helped the artist to connect more to the fan base and to make it stronger. The best thing about the formula is that it has no possibilities to what could be done with the formula. In usual music groups the record labels set up some band merchandise for the audience to buy, but Reznor had stated that it is more difficult to sell products without doing a very good job convincing fans why they should buy it. If you don’t put any effort to connect to the fans, then you might not have as many fans.

            Although there are new technologies being created in this point in life which also means that more and more possibilities to connect with the audience, by doing so then you will make them happy, and by making the fans happy they give you money that you deserve. The more you think about it the more you understand that it is a huge chain of actions.

Everything on this subject is in a presentation given by Michael Masnick:


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