kevin rothermel

The 20th Century Anomaly

kevin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:32:06 +0000

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Leveled Up Resume

kevin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:39:33 +0000

This is a resume made by a fellow named Sean McNally from Brisbane.

(Via David Griner) (actually via his Twitter…not sure how to properly source that on a blog)

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Happy Halloween

kevin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:12:27 +0000

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Chris Berman

kevin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:16:16 +0000

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Marketing music in a crazy, mixed-up, digital world.

kevin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:33:07 +0000

After spending the past few years developing marketing strategy, I’ve recently gotten back into my original passion: making music. And ironically, being in a band again has reminded me of how I became interested in marketing strategy in the first place.

Marketing a band has always been a difficult thing. From thinking of a name that’s only a little terrible to actually getting your friends to pay money to come watch and hopefully bring some others along, it’s fraught with peril. There’s only so many times you can get your friends to come see you, so eventually you need to start catching on with others. This is a terribly difficult thing to do, because in order for people to become fans, they have to believe in a level of realness…your has to seem legit enough for people to want to grab a hold of it.

But a lot has happened in the past few years that has completely changed the way bands can bring their music to the masses. Using commonly available software and ever-cheaper computer equipment, it’s easier than ever to get professional quality recordings at home (though it still takes the patients of a zen master, and there’s still no replacing the skills and ear of a good producer/engineer). After the record is made, there are countless Websites that specialize in giving musicians a platform to get their music heard like Pandora and Myspace Music and Last.FM and Reverb Nation and Facebook and thousands upon thousands of other online services that musicians can promote themselves on.

While all of this is undoubtedly great for unsigned musicians, it has changed music marketing in strange, unforeseen ways, presenting new challenges as well as new twists on the challenges of years past.

Fake it till you make it: If there was any industry where this mantra has been more widely embraced than in music, I haven’t found it. People need to believe that a musical act is good enough before they are willing to become a fan. The pursuit of this “real-bandness” has taken many forms as people have obsessed over seeming more legit. Stickers, t-shirts, going on tours, getting CDs pressed complete with artwork, stage shows, stage costumes, stage names, and trying to get on the radio. However, as it’s become easier and cheaper to do all of the above, does it even make sense to try to play this game anymore? What is necessary, and what is just left over from another time?
Rethinking distribution: The modern music industry is what it is largely thanks to the logistics and costs behind distribution. However, as distribution has changed, shouldn’t the packaging and selling of music change as well? It used to make sense, from a distribution perspective, to package a dozen songs on a disc every couple of years, then tour to support the sales of that product. Unsigned bands saw this as a mark of “real-bandness,” and have spent what I’m sure amounts to billions of dollars on creating professional looking albums over the years, but is this still necessary? Apart from thematic albums, is there still a need to release large collections of songs at the same time, or can musicians get more bang for the buck by forgoing expensive CDs, and releasing songs under a different model? Would it make more sense for a local band to release one song a month on the Internet?
Competing with Beethoven and The Beatles: The same technology that has opened up distribution options for unsigned bands has also opened up distribution for the pros. Essentially, when you put a song on the Internet now, you are competing with every single piece of music that has ever been recorded. George Clinton, Guns and Roses, The Big Bopper. Everything. Ever. How does one stand out in this environment?
The musical blur: Now that we have everything that has ever been recorded at our fingertips, many people are listening to more music than they can actually pay attention to. There’s no longer the sense of commitment and personal investment in a band that used to come from buying an album. Record collections used to reveal a lot about their owners. Now people’s music collections are more likely to be a collection of favorites, passing fancies, and whatever else they happened to stumble across and have hard drive space for. As I’ve seen argued in countless places, music is no longer a thing. It’s a blur. How can bands that no one really wants to pay attention to in the first place grab attention once they are thrown into this sonic blur?
Music is free: It doesn’t matter what your stance is on file sharing and music piracy, get on your soapbox and scream as loud as you can, but the simple fact of the matter is that music is free. Some people I’ve talked to don’t think it’s fair, but my point back to them is that it doesn’t matter what they think. Music is still free, and will be increasingly available for free. This means that the idea of recouping expenses for the creation of an album is going to increasingly not come from selling that album. Especially for unsigned bands. Most bands still don’t think like this though, and are selling 10 dollar CDs at their shows. Does this still make sense? Isn’t it better to have as many people as possible hearing your music than it is to sell it to 3 people for 30 bucks?
Better things to do: It’s always been difficult to get people to come out to shows. but now bands are competing with everything that has ever been created, available for free, in the comfort of home. Are you sure that you would rather come to a filthy club, pay too much money to get in, buy over priced drinks, and rub elbows with drunks while having your ears blown out? Or would you rather stay at home and play guitar hero over a case of beer with your best friends? Bands are now competing with so much else out there that getting people to shows has become like getting people to do some kind of chore.

I have no solutions for the above. Only the thought that musicians are going to need to evolve the experience they are offering to entice people to pay attention again, or just become satisfied by playing every once in a while in front of 6 or 7 people.

As for my band, in an attempt to defeat musical blur and give people something to pay attention to, we made a video. At this point it has about 380 views on YouTube, which is far more than an audio version would’ve accumulated in such a short amount of time. And the bonus is that because it’s a video, it rises above the blur and becomes an event, so people are actively sitting down to watch.

Anyways, enough rambling. Here’s the video:

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Economic indicator: What’s NOT on sale.

kevin — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:37:10 +0000

What does it mean when it becomes more efficient to just put signage on the things that aren’t on sale?

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Marketing has turned into Jazz

kevin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:48:01 +0000

So I’ve been neglecting the blog for a little while (which increased my subscriber numbers dramatically for some reason), but it’s not my fault. Work has been crazy. Or at least it was until a couple of weeks ago. Which made me wonder what ever happened to the good old days of summer hours. I suppose the Internet is responsible for this. The old seasonal cycle of creation is over. Which made me think about this unnecessary music metaphor:

Old school marketing : Pop Music

as

New school marketing : Improvisational Jazz

Pop Songs:

Pop songs begin life being written by a team of professionals, who based on research and past experience know the details that go into making the perfect pop song that the maximum number of people will want to buy.
Each song is then recorded over a series of months, where every detail is agonized over, voices are optimized digitally, and extremely talented professional session musicians are brought in to make sure the track is perfect.
When those musicians show up to record, they already have every note that they will play planned out for them.
Once perfected, the track is then packaged and shipped off to the world, and it is performed live in concert, in exactly the same way as it was recorded.
Once it’s created, it never, ever changes again.

Basically, the emphasis is on the ability to craft a perfect song in advance, then send it to musicians to record and then push it out into the world to make money. The skills needed for this are much more about careful planning and creation in advance. Sounds familiar to the ad making process, no?

The Jazz Music

Jazz tunes are written with a theme and it’s resulting chord changes.
The real work happens when a group of musicians gets a hold of it and make it their own.
As the tune is played, musicians are constantly adjusting according to each other and to the reactions of their audience.
In this way, the music is a living organism, always evolving, always changing, always adapting … but always within the overall chord progression.
When jazz musicians record, it takes a weekend, they just nail their takes. There’s no such thing as a jazz record that takes 6 months to make.

The emphasis here is less on planning things in advance, and more on relying on the skills of the musicians to bring the music to life as they play it. This is much more about intuition, knowing the instrument, reading an audience, and the ability to instantaneously translate all of this inspirational input into creative output without causing a musical train wreck.

It seems like marketing is moving rapidly away from the huge, blockbuster, preplanned campaign, and more towards an improvisation model. While there will still be up front work for strategic and creative considerations, I would expect to see more and more emphasis being placed on the ability to optimize as a campaign is running. Change what isn’t working, build on what is working, all of which is going to require new skills out of marketing agencies. Mostly, the ability to read in real time how the campaign is working out in culture, how people are reacting to it, using it, changing it, and then the ability to work with that information to help push things to be better.

We talk a lot about how advertising is no longer a one way street when it comes to communications, but I think it goes beyond actually having a dialog with customers. I think the ability to improvise well is going to be the hallmark of great marketing agencies as we move into the future.

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W+K Platform

kevin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:14:55 +0000

Way back in October, Russell reached out to me to see if I wouldn’t mind meeting with Sam and Lucy from W+K London while they were in the Bay Area. Naturally, given that it was Russell, given that it was people from W+K, and given that I was offered free coffee, I agreed. They were interested in talking to people who had gone to ad school, as well as people who worked in various kinds of creative places to get a feel for how to best implement a school/internship type thing at W+K London.

Well, it looks like they’ve got the program up and running. They’ve now officially launched the site and are recruiting 12 folks from a myriad of disciplines. What’s interesting about it is the thought that the future of marketing communications might involve more than the what agencies are currently set up to deliver.

“You will learn by doing which means being involved in everything from building prototypes, enabling and assisting in research development to curating your very own event space and programme.”

Awesome. I’d apply if I weren’t already an ad wonk.

They are taking applications through Friday, July 10th (London time). Visit their site for more (better) info.

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Cultural icons dropping like flies.

kevin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:38:02 +0000

Wow, a lot of big news from the celebrity death newsdesk in the past couple of weeks:

Michael Jackson
Ed McMahon
Farah Fawcett
and now, Billy Mays.

Nothing really to add to this, but it’s interesting that beyond being typical celebrity deaths, these are all people who became cultural icons of one sort or another. Maybe they are the four horsemen of a pop-culture apocalypse? Maybe not. I just can’t remember the last time so many icons passed in the same month.

Also, Axel Rose has moved to the top of my imaginary celebrity death pool.

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The Correct Answer.

kevin — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:21:41 +0000

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