In today’s music event industry, every festival must have a satisfactory social media campaign in order just to survive, long have gone the days of music fans congregating offline through music magazines and word of mouth.
As shown by Brandwatch, music is the third biggest conversation topic on Twitter (2013 results), showing the platform for promotion is viable (Juame, 2013). With this type of disruption, the music industry has to adapt, sales are mainly online now, making the business model much more accessible to a worldwide market and in turn more complicated. Fragmented platforms have now risen such as file sharing, videos etc. and in turn making music festivals evolve to coincide with these changes.
A crucial point is how music festival have been used to directly market to customers, due to various factors such as Facebook likes, Spotify playlist etc., festival can now directly market to potential customers more likely to attend there music festival, based on their music preferences. It has also made the relationship between festival and customer a lot closer as it has improved communication, meaning festivals can now improve and expand based on customers’ expectations.
Festivals have gotten innovative to compete with each for the social media stakes, there needs to be more than just a standard Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram etc. page. Major American music festival ‘Coachella’ has incorporated social media into every customers experience (Stringcaninteractive. 2012). By issuing each customer with a wristband which can be linked to their Facebook accounts, which meant that users were entered into a prize draw to win special prizes and VIP passes. On top of this there were also social check-in scanners placed at each stage, where users could simply wave their bracelet and be checked-in on Facebook that their watching a band at that stage at Coachella. This marketing strategy got people talking about this festival, even in the midst of its operation, was personal to customers and acted as a great PR strategy for the festival as well. Coachella was the biggest selling music festival of 2015, with an $84.26 million sales revenue and 198,000 attendees, making it an ideal platform for this type of social media campaign, as it has such a wide coverage of users (McIntyre, 2015).
As competition between festivals is rising, each festival is doing their own unique social media campaigns to try and outdo each other. Belgium music festival ‘Tomorrowland’ produce a 30 minute YouTube marketing advertisement as shown in there video ‘Tomorrowland 2014 | official aftermovie’. This video has over 46 million views and over 280,000 likes, showing the power of a good social media strategy (Tomorrowland, 2014).
As Van Vilet stated, social media is not just limited to the marketing of the event, but has relations with the actual experience, for example if customers use social media to state they are having a good time, upload pictures etc. it will help promote the festival to friends and family on that persons social media networks, which is all good promotion and public relations for any festival, and it if was the adverse effect of negative feedback, the festival can then take action to adhere any problems.
With that in mind, a social media monitoring tool like Brandwatch has many uses for music festivals such as, the volume of conversation, coupled with the agnostic nature of social media means a vast body of opinion, which can be used for insight into trends, taste and purchasing behaviour all to a specific point. For example Glastonbury festival used Brandwatch analytics to find the different genders favourite acts for future marketing techniques as shown in the graph below, research like this is crucial for the festivals future development, to gain key insights, so that festivals can directly market specific artists to a certain demographic group. (Beard,2015).
In relation to academic reference SWOT analysis correlates perfectly with music’s social media strategies. With the increase of social media creativity in music festival the strengths are that it means music festival can now personally market and cater to customers’ needs and wants (Braassington et al, 2013). With the high competitive aspect between festivals it does mean they will all try and outdo each other, Coachella example is a key one, offering customers incentives to stay loyal to them. It also makes festivals more accessible, customer friendly and builds festival relationship with customers as well. The weaknesses is that such research might violate the customers privacy and over marketing can also get annoying (too much promotion of acts and festivals can put people of going, due to pop up’s, direct messaging etc. promoting directly to the customer without consent).
Opportunities for music festivals are the emergence of new social media platforms, such as Snapchat and Shazam, they can also invest heathier into social media analytic tools such as Brandwatch and Talkwalker as well as sharing logistical information. Threats are that in today’s society many people are going back to basics with music in a sense of rebellion, such as vinyl sales being at a highest point since 1989 (Britton,2015), this could easily coincide with peoples use of social media in terms of music.
By Isaac Roblett
References
Beard, M . (2015). React: Toilets, Cows & Kate Moss – The Glastonbury ’15 Social Primer. [Online]: https://www.brandwatch.com/2015/06/react-toilets-cows-kate-moss-the-glastonbury-15-social-primer/. Accessed 22 January, 2015.
Brassington, F. & Pettitt, S. (2013) Essentials of Marketing 3rd ed. Harlow:Pearson
Britton, L (2015) Millennials push 2015 vinyl sales to 26-year high in US [Online] http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/89616. Accessed 23 January 2016
Jaume,J. (2013). The Twitter Landscape Report: A Study of Conversation on Twitter. [Online}: https://www.brandwatch.com/2013/02/introducing-the-twitter-landscape-report-a-study-of-conversation-and-behaviour-on-twitter//. Accessed 20 January 2016.
McIntyre, H. (2015). Coachella Leads The Highest-Grossing Music Festivals Of 2015. [Online}: http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2016/01/15/coachella-leads-the-highest-grossing-music-festivals-of-2015/#6779ce553732. Accessed 21 January 2016.
Stringcaninteractive. (2012). 5 Key Coachella Lessons Learned From A Digital Marketing Perspective. [Online}: http://www.stringcaninteractive.com/blog/5-key-coachella-lessons-learned-from-a-digital-marketing-perspective/. Accessed 22 Jan 2016.
Tomorrowland (2014) Tomorrowland 2014 | official aftermovie. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtDG-Cnj-pw. Accessed 30 January 2016
Van Vliet, H. (2011) A meta-analysis of festival motivations research: a comparison of items and factors. Hogeschool Utrecht: Crossmedialab.