Music producers hope to put social networks to work

Music record labels are trying to convince the users of social networks to advertise their goods for free, Reuters writes on MSNBC. At 77 we’re not convinced the record labels will be able to have the youth working for them. Not after years of threats of hunting them down for the illegal music they distributed through the Internet, that is.

The labels are working on widgets that users of social networks such as MySpace or Facebook can use on their pages. Visitors can listen to the label’s songs through the widget, and immediately buy a digital track from the record label if they like it. The owner of the page can ask whatever they want for the songs, thus possibly making some money out of it (although we imagine this will not be much with thousands of competitors) Relatively small label Snocap has already put these possibilities on their MySpace page, and large labels as EMI and Warner Music Group (WMG) have now adopted it.

It seems like a good strategy, but young people really involved in music – the group that is most likely to apply a widget like that – might not have forgotten that EMI and Warner have been trying to get their personal details in order to sue them for copyright infringements, when they had shared a CD online. So they might think twice about helping them market their products for free.

Social advertising is not an advertising medium you can just put your marketing material and some cash into and then wait for the results. If you want to appeal to the opinion leaders of social networks, you need to have a product and a brand that appeal to them. In that light, threatening to sue them into bankruptcy generally doesn’t work well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 1:59 am and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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