Peter Ruppert's Blog

So the two worlds are finally getting to know one another. The Music world and the Online world. Both have their own currencies and an exchange rate is becoming apparent.

Love is the currency that makes the music industry tick. Love for an artist or a song is what generates the cash. But the models are changing and hyper availability and accessibility of music discourages people from paying for it like they used to. While the concept of free music slowly creeps into our consciousness people now pay with their attention. Online, the currency is traffic. Traffic makes or breaks a site. Traffic is what made Myspace, Google, Bebo and Youtube what they are today regardless of their actual cash flows.

The music industry is a big player in the traffic business but it isn’t yet generating serious income from it while all of the above mentioned sites wouldn’t be where they are without music.

The most viewed video on Youtube of all time “Evolution Of Dance” wouldn’t be there without music and 8 of the top ten titles of all time are music videos, a combined traffic value of around 451 million plays. However, if we consider these plays as world wide plays with repeat viewing and suddenly the number of plays appear in a different light. In comparison, a single play on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show instantly will expose a track to 5 million listeners; a rotation will easily expose a song to 15 million people.

Still, music and online fit very well together. Love generates attention and that means traffic and traffic generates cash. Traffic works like a commodity and you can deal with traffic like you can deal with frozen orange juice. Not all traffic is equal and converts to cash the same way. Depending on the traffic quality it can convert differently for different industries. Traffic is what everyone who operates in the online environment wants most and it’s a huge market.

It’s up to the traffic owner to identify the best converters. No traffic, no income. Remember how the music industry sent their “traffic” to MTV by supplying free programming, the videos? Whilst for most businesses it’s acceptable to turn their traffic into hard cash and advertising and affiliate sales are the core money generators.

To date the music industry generally only converts its traffic into own product sales ie albums, digital tracks and maybe a tour. The problem is that there isn’t a sales opportunity every day and conversion rates are low because of the increasing perception of free music. There is an album a year and a few singles and if you’re lucky a tour.

What happens to the rest of the year? There isn’t enough product to generate significant amounts of money and the traffic travels around until it hits a site that knows how to convert it. A goldmine owned by the music industry, but it’s keeping the miners away.

Naturally, advertising and affiliate sales have to be handled very carefully to avoid diluting an artist’s brand value but affiliate marketing has become the core traffic purchase model by businesses all over the world so that there is a matching product or programme for everyone. Amazon has one of the most successful affiliate networks and has been buying traffic through it for many years as has eBay, Napster and a number of seriously cool, music, textile and cult-photo retailers.

If you have an artist site generating more then 500 visits per day then let us help you implement a money-making affiliate strategy.