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Knowing When To Adjust Your Marketing

The music industry continues to be a great barometer for understanding when to adjust your Marketing initiatives. There’s no denying that the music industry was built on Marketing, and that there are plenty of lessons Marketers can pull from the current shifts it is experiencing.

This came through blaring like a Marshall stack the other day. While Steve Jobs was presenting his keynote at the MacWorld Conference where everything Apple is celebrated, EMI Music (one of the largest record labels in the world) had this news rolling off the press: EMI’s Hands To Cut Up To 2000 Jobs To Revive Profit, plus this: No More Multi-Million Advances From EMI and then this: Rolling Stones Move New Album From EMI.

What does Steve Jobs think about the music industry? He could not be happier about the growth it is experiencing. Here are the statistics he shared with the MacWorld crowd about iTunes and how the music industry has been to him:

– Since iTunes started over four billion songs have been sold to date.

– On Christmas day, alone, over twenty million songs were sold (their best one-day record to-date).

– Over 125 million TV shows have been purchased.

– Over seven million movies.

– There are over 125,000 Podcasts listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory.

In terms of expanding that thought, we already know that Apple surpassed 100 million iPods sold last April, making it the fastest selling music player in history. If you add the iPhone into the equation (and you should because the iPhone is as much a media player as it is a phone), Apple has sold over four million iPhones since it rolled out the device only two hundred days ago (that’s 20,000 iPhones sold per day).

The most telling line in that keynote from Steve Jobs was when he introduced the new rental component of films for iTunes. Jobs started off by saying: "music is one of our heritages now."

For some perspective, iTunes launched in 2001 but it was not until many versions later when the iTunes Store opened shop and started selling music.

Legacy and success can come fast and hard for some industries, and the shift in the tides can be equally challenging.

Seth Godin has some salient points on the Music Industry here: Seth Godin – Music Lessons.

If music is now part of Apple’s legacy, what will the legacy of the Music Industry be?

This all reminds me of that infamous quote from General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army (that I snipped from Tom Peters‘ book, Re-Imagine): "If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less."

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.