At the heart of the internet there are lists. Lists are traffic drivers. Most viewed, Most discussed, Most listened to, most this and most that. People use lists to filter their exposure to new music. People want the best of things. For anyone serious about spreading their creative content, getting on a popular list is an absolute requirement.

Once on that list, the Mathew Effect takes over. Listed content will always grow in popularity, the extent determined only by the level of emotional connection. The more it grows, the more it will grow. That’s cumulative advantage or in simple terms, snowballing.

It’s not just the lists as we know them. It’s also about visibility, about “dressing up” content. A search on YouTube for a specific video may show up the same video several times. Tests have shown that the clip with the most views is the chosen one; the Matthew Effect at its best.

This of course also applies to different clips within the same subject.

While we’re all seeding content in the hope that people will ultimately share or recommend it, the sharing dynamic only applies when the content is perceived to be worth sharing. Generally it’s not individuals who discover music that they then share but a group or community who decide what’s best.

This of course is why social network marketing is so attractive.

Getting on the list to take advantage of the Matthew effect is the most difficult hurdle. Becoming richer when you’re already rich is much easier than going from poor to rich.

Matthew Effect Marketing is the art of bypassing the natural and often slow selection process and moving directly to relevant lists where visibility can create its own impetus.

Today’s debate on A La Carte versus Subscription digital models is intensifying, driven primarily by new unlimited download offerings from the mobile telcos. In time they will presumably be joined by the ISPs. The force is seemingly with these utility service providers whose single download services have thus far failed to achieve mass market traction. So what consumer evidence is there that supports the case for unlimited music supply?

PopScores is a useful source of information to help inform the argument. For starters there are the Love scores. We know that Love is the ultimate driver of sales. For every 10 people who Love an artist, 7 will definitely consider purchasing new music by that artist. We also know from PopScores that people only love a few artists at a time; on average a little over 4 artists at once. This does vary with age & gender but not so much as to matter. Women on average love 5 artists at any one time while men love 4. Males in their teens love 3 artists whilst males 20-29 love 5 artists. Females love 6 artists when they are teenagers and progressively fewer as they age.

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Radio tells a similar story. When the first jukeboxes were installed in clubs and bars in the US, a station owner noticed that despite the large choice of songs, patrons tended to choose the same songs. That was the birth of Top 40 radio. However, 40 songs were still far too many for radio listeners and CHR was born out of necessity to play fewer songs more often. The same Love principle applies today. There aren’t enough songs around that are loved at the same time by the same people. The implication sounds very unappealing but this truth clears up many of the mysteries around music sales.

So, choice is certainly no winning argument for subscription services. The “millions of songs” available mantra will be meaningless to consumers if they feel they have to pay for the right to access them all.

Furthermore, there is always the risk of overestimating familiarity. The vast majority of the millions of songs potentially available are unfamiliar to the target consumer who is generally aware of hundreds of songs rather than thousands. Why would millions matter to them? Even an advertising-supported model may struggle to attract enough consumers to build a mass-market presence. Music is unlike TV where subscription and advertising work. MTV knew a long time ago that people wouldn’t pay an additional fee to subscribe to their Music TV offering and so it was offered free as part of a package. TV stimulates us differently from music. We spend much of our lives watching TV as a primary activity while music is often a secondary or background activity. Radio still works as an advertising-supported model but the most successful stations have small playlists and drive ratings with celebrity-based entertainment and local, relevant non music content.

PopScores shows us that people are willing to pay for music if they love it. Music doesn’t have to rely on being supported by advertising or to be thrown into a pool of millions of songs that one might eventually stream. What music relies on is Love. The love a consumer has for an artist and/or song which is seemingly at odds with a volume for volume sake proposition.

At the same time free music affords huge value to businesses like YouTube. Let me make this clear - YouTube would not be remotely where it is without music and companies like Viacom and artists like Prince have long understood this and want to be compensated accordingly. Check it out if you don’t believe me - YouTube’s Top 100 most viewed clips of all time are dominated by music. No other content category delivers as much permanent value as music. What I mean by this is simple. Other categories do drive short term traffic to YouTube and do make Today’s most viewed honours, but after the short term limelight they quickly disappear pretty much forever. Compare Katy Perry’s I kissed A Girl with a Sarah Palin Interview. Which one do you think we’ll still be watching in 10, maybe 20 years time? Which therefore has permanent value?

Music never stops generating traffic. Kids know to go to YouTube for a brand new Panic! At The Disco c lip and thousands of others watch 50 year old Beatles clips over and over again.

Sure , the value depends up on demand like everything else but don’t tell me that music has no value. Without music or without having infringed copyright on a huge scale, YouTube would just be another copyright-respecting Spike (iFilm) and therefore way less successful. The music industry has learned its lesson and now keeps licensing deals very short knowing that soon it will be time to get some of that value back.

Sometimes I hear people talking about how YouTube showed giants like MTV how it’s done and that frustrates me. When you respect copyright, there ’s very little one can do to compete with those who infringe.

YouTube had its big break with the embedded player. Suddenly millions of websites were pointing to YouTube and breaching copyright. Their message was something like “hey kid, you like this clip so just play it on your profile page”. And the Google bots started indexing links to YouTube on a never seen before scale, sending traffic to YouTube in the millions. End of story.

We are in an age where a lot of self-interested business development execs and snake-oil digital strategists talk about paradigm shifts, pulling culture, music democracy and so on.

The fact is music comes attached with copyright and has huge value for businesses and consumers alike. Permanent value.

For this reason established artists can make extraordinary use of new media and rely less on the pushing power of record companies hence Nettwerks’s achievement with Avril Lavigne and Live Nation’s ideas with Madonna. However, until an artist commands that level of familiarity, nothing can replace the traditional push strategy.

The average chart video is 23% less familiar than the song. That’s because songs are pushed on the radio making it incredibly hard for new artists to break-through without radio. Radio works because it filters product for its listeners and exposes them to music they eventually love. Pushing can work online just the same. We like to believe that when something is right for a market it will take-off simply through word of mouse but that’s rarely the case, especially when it comes to music. An extremely funny music video may work virally but may still not sell music. Visuals are important but even more important is the story told and to whom.

Recently, a new artist’s music video on YouTube was scoring about 100 plays per day globally which was credible but wholly insufficient to build substantial familiarity and a following. Few people where paying with their attention. The very same video was then featured by YouTube and generated 120,000 views in twenty four hours and was able to build a substantial subscriber base. The video now scores about 1,000-2,000 views per day and the artist is building a large following. The power of push.

In the 90’s, 70% of video product couldn’t find a home and was never played. Today there is a home on the internet for every piece of content but without getting selected, filtered and eventually pushed by a trusted entity, it remains unplayed. Distributing content is not pushing content. Too often we expect songs and videos to fly just because they are good and deserve success and are then disappointed when success eludes them. It may not be fashionable to admit it but the push model is as relevant as ever

Music testing for radio has been around since the early 80’s and radio programmers are highly adept at knowing when to back the song and when to support the artist. We make this point because there are artists around that manage to build a bridge with a single song and there are those that go almost unnoticed despite numerous hits.

Let’s take the winner in this month PopScores - Katy Perry. Her familiarity just increased by 14% and her PopScore by 19 points in the female teen market. She’s grown on average across all demos by a stunning 4 points. These scores are driven largely by her increased familiarity and overall likeability. However, her Love score is still low at just 2%. This compares to the 28% Love score for her song “I Kissed A Girl” which has put her on the consumer map. Which goes to show it takes more than just a song to generate that emotional connection that is a precursor to album selling success..

At its peak Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” scored around 35% Love and familiarity climbed incredibly quickly. Today, however, his Love score is just 5% despite nearly 90% familiarity which begs the question, how much do we really know about Gnarls Barkley?

Compare this situation to Snow Patrol, who also had a massive hit with love scores around 35% but today manage a handsome19% Love, which is more than 3 times the UK average.

If you just look at the five most loved artists in the UK , they have two things in common.

1. They all have at least one song that still scores 30% or more love with consumers

2. They all possess a compelling and highly differentiated story

The Beatles, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, REM, Kaiser Chiefs and Snow Patrol have managed to build incredibly strong relationships with consumers through their music and their stories.

Conversely, there is P Diddy, whose song “I’ll Be Missing You” scored well above 30% Love in song tests, yet himself manages only 4% Love despite 96% Name Awareness.

Jay Z had a number of hits with Hard Knock Life also achieving record-breaking research scores, yet his Love score is a lowly 6%. Even Joss Stone has a below average Love score (5%) despite a 96% Name Awareness.

What this highlights is simple: it’s not as easy as just having a great song, a song that receives saturation playlisting and people fall in love with. That’s difficult enough and happens only too rarely (just look at the amount of new music on commercial radio). What success also demands, and is non-negotiable, is a unique and truly engaging story. No wonder the US presidential elections are so much about each candidate’s life. They draw from the same well as artists although often unknowingly. So if you sell a government airplane on Ebay, make sure you tell the world!

Top 20 artists ranked by Informed Awareness

Reaching 100% familiarity takes an immense amount of investment and in most cases requires many years of commercial success. For most of these artists there isn’t a week that goes by without a headline and many of them still have active recording / touring lives. Being talked about is critical to building an emotional connection. An artist that isn’t talked about will not gain in familiarity and will have problems selling. Sure, there is room in the long tail for these artists but this shouldn’t be an excuse. Great music alone isn’t enough to enter the 100 Club. Despite his massive songs Gnarls Barkley still stands at about 80% informed awareness; Lenny Kravitz has been around for 20 years and still only scores 80% while former Blue star Simon Webbe, with a double platinum album under his belt scores just 64% informed awareness. Conversely, Leona Lewis is close to entering the club with her current 92% informed awareness.

For many new artists this is a positive challenge. Commercial album success on the back of low informed awareness indicates the potential scope. Number one album sellers Scouting For Girls score just 64%; The Ting Tings 33% and Alphabeat 30%.

Whilst the digital age presents its all too familiar challenges to the music industry, it does offer great opportunities for growing informed awareness. Never has it been easier to spread a message. There are countless opportunities to broadcast your message to millions of people - the challenge is to have a message, a story that connects by being distinctive and relevant and is capable of standing out from the rest of the noise.

Ignoring teenagers isn’t the smartest move even if they aren’t music buyers. If a song or an act connects with them then their much larger network of friends becomes active and with today’s technology, the word can spread quickly via social networks.

From a modest PopScore of 5 in September 2007 to 24 this month, Scouting For Girls have grown significantly above the average. Why we highlight this is because the key driver segment has been the teens putting SFG safely into the Top 20 most loved artists with that demographic.

The graph above shows the steady growth in familiarity and popularity over the life-span of their campaign. This is an image of 3 singles. (and it’s likely to continue for a few more singles considering the purchase propensity score is 2 points above the average)

What’s important to understand is that love doesn’t grow equally across all demos and often there are sizeable variations between the demos. The lead demo for SFG is the core demo for probably 90% of all artists namely 13-19 year olds.

Why does this matter?

As SFG is demonstrating (and the Kaiser Chiefs, The Kooks and many others before them) one of the most effective routes to achieving an established and unifying status for an artist is by breaking that artist with teenagers before moving on to an older and more lucrative market. Of course, teens are the most fickle and unreliable audience, they tend not to buy music and retaining their interest over the long run is perhaps the most difficult thing to do. Consequently, the careers of many teen-oriented artists expire prematurely. However, targeting them is relatively easy and leveraging their connections is what music marketing is almost all about right now.

If you don’t want to wait and build love organically, you will need a megahit. These rarely come these days. We have aggregated a lot of them over time, but today it’s exciting if we hear one a year. Last year we had Chasing Cars.

It accelerated the growth of love for the artist from nowhere to 30% in during the life of the song.. And guess what? Chasing cars is still the number one testing song in the UK across pretty much all formats. An it’s not burned. People are not tired of it.

You can find evidence for this passion everywhere, on the likes of On Myspace, YouTube and broadcasting sites. Songs like this attract huge audiences.

But this love is not just great for the artists, it transfers right over to whoever ,manages to get involved, to ride along. Be it the Radio Station, A Tv Show, a website or a product.

Brands know how powerful music is and they do want to get involved. But its not the music that’s powerful, it’s the love some music generates. Without Love, there is little point. For a brand to play in music matters only if the can access love.

Ever wondered why many radio stations sound so much alike? They fighting for the same love. Love generated by a number of tunes, old and new. Now whilst we’re all subscribing to the idea that music has never been more important then it is today, its also never been more accessible then today and there lies the problem. There is still only a small number of tunes that attract large numbers of people. Yes, and we all subscribe to the long tail and target micro segments and we try and unify a smaller number of people, suggesting that we still can make money selling our music and tickets and merchandise to these small segments. The truth however is that music is a social medium, it carries a message that wants to spread and so by nature it is only the big songes that unite big crowdes and can create such phenomena’s as Youtube and Myspace. Its not the many small segments, the many not so popular tracks that in the end unite large crowds, else we would have seen the likes of MP3.com, Peoplesound, Vitaminic etc come far further then they have.

So please let’s not think it’s technology or new ideas that matter, what makes them work in the first place is nothing but the love for content.

Let’s keep finding the big songs!

The list is driven by all aspects of popularity which means familiarity, love, like and low dislikes. Many of these artists are very familiar with teens and deeply respected by them but this doesn’t necessarily equate to most loved which is what really matters.

The way to get a more accurate picture is to isolate the Love scores and disregard all other aspects of popularity. So who are the top 20 most loved artists in the teenage segment? (13-19)

The Chili Peppers still make it to number one but the Stereophonics, Bon Jovi, Plain White T’s and Kasabian don’t quite cut it and their places are now taken by My Chemical Romance and surprisingly three solo artists, Justin Timberlake, Amy Winehouse and Rihanna.

The main reason why these solo artists haven’t made it into the Top 20 PopScores is because of their degree of polarisation. By that we mean they are much Loved but also greatly Disliked. For example Amy Winehouse scores a dislike of 36%, Justin Timberlake 35%, Rihanna 29%.

Does this tell us something - are solo artists generally more polarising?

The average Love for top 50 solo artists is 12%, the average Dislike is 18%.

The average Love for a band in the Top 50 is 14% and the average Dislike is 12%. That’s 50% greater Dislike on average for Solo artists.

The same exercise for teens reveals:

The average Love for Top 50 solo artists is 13% and the average Dislike is 25%.

The average Love for a band is 17% and the average Dislike is 15%

So, there’s clearly less Love for solo artists and an incredible 67% greater Dislike. This is reason enough to expect very few solo artists, male or female, in the most popular lists with teens.

So what does all this mean? For labels, solo artists are often a lot less hassle than signing bands and therefore the attraction of running solo projects is well appreciated. However, whilst one can’t deny the success of artists like Robbie Williams, Paolo Nutini, James Morrisson, Justin Timberlake, Pink and many others it’s far harder and takes a lot longer to build a lasting emotional connection with audiences.

Why? Because that long-term emotional connection with an audience typically needs to start in the young segment, which is notoriously difficult to keep entertained whilst maintaining credibility.

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If in doubt join a band….

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.