Labels have been caught in a financial loop for the past decade. Both leading and emerging labels, who allocate higher budgets to platform marketing and face intense competition in the number of daily releases, are at a crossroads on how to make their artists shine. Unfortunately, there are no magic solutions. The best strategy is to work with powerful agencies. But what characterizes a powerful agency in the music industry?
The following is from Music Promo Today, a company DMN is proud to work with.
- 5x to 6x the reach of ads compared to your internal team
- Daily 5-7,000 streams on Spotify
- No phantom shares on social networks
- Internal or native AI
- Pitch and placement opportunities (not just guarantees)
- Artist monetization solutions
- Publications and outlets that are personally owned by them
- Scaled advertising budgets
- Fluid communication
- Transparent range
Just recently signed a deal with Warner Music, MPT agency has expanded its resources, assets and capabilities to adapt to the new dynamic landscape of music marketing and music promotion.
Anto Dotcom and Raffi Keuhnelian are known in the industry for their powerful tactics, but the company has taken a new direction to cater to its independent and large label clients.
With a much denser market to contend with, the company has invested heavily in AI and a series of media acquisitions to exponentially expand the digital reach of its artists.
For one, the company just released its own AI platform Virtual Publicist. An intelligent search engine based on artist data to collect media and outlet contacts from all corners of the world. After using the technology internally for the last several years, the team released the beta version to test the waters and improve the user experience. Virtual Publicist is scheduled to launch in full form in late Q3 2023.
So far, managers, label managers and artists have used the platform to simplify the discovery of outlets and to optimize their communication.
With a 37% response rate for AI targeting and messaging, Virtual Publicist allows many professionals to up their game and save valuable time during their campaign.
For its customers, the team helps to coordinate the campaign using the software and forward contacts. With greater fluidity and transparency, both agency and label now benefit from a dynamic communication infrastructure.
Ahead of technology, digital assets are another aspect the agency used to reward their offering of labels. With the acquisition of 4 music magazines: Sweet n’ Sour Magazine, pinch of sol, pop culture & Stereo SaintsMPT Agency just integrated 4 niche communities with thousands of active fans into their network.
Why is this more important than traditional PR pitching?
Labels now have direct access for the press and gain access to engaged fans across all social media platforms. This simplifies and amplifies giveaways, announcements, tour promotions, ticket sales and content reactions.
Additionally, labels gain access to a third-party community to innovate and test artist interaction. This can affect listening parties, demo releases, and exclusive features that would normally cost hundreds of hours to build relationships or thousands of dollars to place Payola-style.
By bridging the gap to the global media communities, powerful marketing and advertising firms like MPT agency create a more accessible industry ecosystem.
“This round of funding has been a huge success and our mission is no less to empower the artist’s journey to create a fairer and more open way to showcase their work.” Raffi Keuhnelian explains: “There are 100,000 songs published every day. Ironically, despite the exponential growth in global access to music through streaming, discoverability is becoming increasingly complex. With fan bases fractionated, it will be essential for labels to have access to niche communities in emerging markets and digital tools to connect them directly to point of sale.”
“The Big 3 are a powerhouseRepresenting nearly 3⁄4 of the music market’s market cap, their need to gain access to both new talent and a regional or community audience is an absolute necessity to sustain their growth.”
Over the past year, MPT Agency has worked closely with its new subsidiaries. In the case of Sweet n Sour, the blog launched its first print magazine in 2022 and is now a content partner with top labels like armada, Mau5trap, monster cat, wall records, skin trap And Ministry of Sound.
As labels require greater access to niche market listeners and high performing, low latency campaigns, it is imperative that they work with agencies to maximize their artist exposure.
Without a suitable monetization strategy, driven by access to direct networks, labels will continue to lose market relevance in favor of digital solutions.
A prominent example is MPT agency, which relies on technology and traditional media in times of recession and is now benefiting with its global partnerships. The new generation of artists must redefine artist independence and redefine the reach of their campaigns to compete in this globalized marketplace.