Content. Music. Message. It all boils down to the actual product eventually.

When you think about the old model of record industry, hit music wasn’t the music that people would normally like. Major record companies made people like music with huge marketing and advertising campaigns. Today when I first time hear MTVs hit songs I really don’t like 95% of them, but after being bombarded I kind of start liking many of the songs that sounded horrible in the beginning. It’s one form of brainwashing. We are just absorbing what our environment feeds to us and adapting to it as good as we possibly can.

Major record companies are good at brainwashing, but not so good at marketing. I believe that good music marketing is bringing consumers music that they naturally like, music that is in their opinion already exceptional without the need of playing it over 50 times to start liking it. On closer inspection we all belong to some niche group of music listeners.

Gladly more and more music listeners are now realizing this and thanks to new technology we can now discover new music through channels that are actually playing music that we naturally like, e.g. Pandora and Last.fm. What I’m trying to say is that if a starting band can create music that is exceptional to some niche group, they already have a good chance of creating a fan base and a career out of music. In the end it is the music, the content, that is best marketing tool.