Peter Ruppert's Blog

At music conferences all over the world you’ll hear the mantra that every artist is a brand. In truth, everyone is a brand but only a few are strong brands. Ask yourself who are the most successful music brands and you’ll probably come up with the same list as us: Madonna, U2, The Beatles, Coldplay, The Rolling Stones and so on.

Whilst it’s eminently possible to deconstruct a brand into its components eg image, music, credibility etc there’s only one thing that matters and that’s the amount of Love consumers have for the artist. To be liked is a good start but it won’t monetize a brand. Love is the only currency of value. Whilst love for a song starts the process of building emotional connection, what drives it is the level of love that connects artist and consumer. PopScores monitors exactly this

The two artists with currently the strongest growth in emotional connection are Lily Allen and The Kings Of Leon.  Lily’s new album is helping her recover from the decline in emotional connection she suffered towards the end of last year. Her PopScore is now back at an all-time peak of 24 and her negative score is at an all time low at 21%

The Kings Of Leon continue to enjoy an extraordinary growth in emotional connection as their familiarity rises. In just over a year the band’s purchase propensity has almost tripled from 5% to a remarkable 14%. This places them 4^th in the purchase propensity tables ranked together with Snow Patrol and The Killers.

Kings Of Leon

Emotional connection can all too easily drain away. Take Chris Brown for example; his behaviour has cost him dearly. Driven by the quality of his music Chris Brown has been a rising star since early 2008. His PopScore chart above shows a consistently improving Score up from 10 to 16 over 10 months. It then took only one month to drop back to 14. The biggest set-back has been with his core fan base of 13-19 year old females who knocked 4 love points off an outstanding connection of 28%. We expect to report a further decline in the May results.

Chris Brown

  Amy Winehouse is another artist whose brand has been stronger. In 2007/08 she was one of the artists with greatest brand building potential but over the last year the opposite has happened. In just 12 months Amy’s PopScore has dropped from an impressive 28 down to a more modest17. This decline is largely driven by an increase in negative perception. Dislike for Amy increased from 29% in March 08 to 36% this month. On top of this, her purchase propensity has dropped by over 30% in just over a year, from 13 down to 9.

Obviously, building an emotional connection with consumers depends significantly on the artist’s musical output. However, the industry persists with the old school release pattern of an album once every 1- 3 years. This makes it difficult to maintain brand momentum. It would be far better to release product when it’s ready and retain brand visibility.

This would be consistent with purchase patterns in the digital world in which consumers like to buy single tracks. There’s always time to bundle an album and release a physical product at some point. Aside from the release of songs artists can continue to communicate with consumers through blogs & diaries and social networks; something which still happens only inconsistently.

 Coldplay are ahead of the pack. Their Twitter following now exceeds 400,000. The benefit from having that number of people simultaneously listening to what they have to say can be immense.

 In the digital world, Out of Sight equals Out of Money.