Diversification and Marketing in the Recording Industry

The life of a recording engineer or marketer can sometimes be a difficult one in these days. The technology that is currently creating such shifts in the television industry hit the recording industry years ago, and in many ways companies are still reeling. The creation of digital marketplace has helped to solve some of the problems caused by free exchange of information and the pirating of recorded music, but the problems are affecting how recording companies create music in the first place, and how they advertise new talent to a world that now expects or even counts on free digital distribution.

Most recording companies are surviving by practicing diversification. Since they can no longer count as much on album sales as they once could, they are incorporating a number of other revenue streams into the recording process. This opens opportunities for those interested in different positions in the recording industry, positions that did not even exist only a few years ago. Merchandising, for example, has quickly grown as the revenue from music sales has dropped. Since merchandise cannot easily be copied and cannot be pirated illegally online, it can be counted on as a more reliable profit source, and merchandising specialist positions are being created.

Online Marketing has also become very important. Most musical groups now make use of social networking sites such as MySpace to advertise their work. These sites allow visitors to play songs from artists, not only samples but entire songs and often entire albums. This curtails much of the pirating activity that might otherwise develop, and relegates the albums themselves to a merchandise status--a nice memento for fans, but not necessary. Recording engineers are now regularly rendering tracks fit for downloading to MySpace and other sites, and recording marketers are integrating album and product management into the same type of social networking areas.

Concerts are also rising in popularity. While most people assume that concerts and recording specialists are two separate fields, they actually influence each other on a regular basis. As concerts become a more important method for artists to earn revenue, it also becomes important that they are produced efficiently and with high quality. While modern recording technology allows for a great deal of improvement, if recording engineers make artists sound too different from the way they sound live, fans will be disappointed and the recording company will often end up losing money.

Recording engineers and marketers are also becoming involved in many other growing ventures. Promotional activities once only part of MTV are now becoming regular parts of the online community, so artist interviews or live concert recordings can be immediately shared by the recording company on personal websites, YouTube, and other sites designed to raise artist interest. Although this new world of marketing was forced on the recording company, the number of new tactics it has inspired is impressive and opportunities are growing for the adventurous looking for positions in the recording industry.