Music promo is broken. It’s a mess. It’s misunderstood. It’s disingenuous. A large majority of the general public thinks the way to ‘get on’ or ‘blow up’ is all 'pay-to-play'. Unfortunately, they’re not that wrong. A lot of pay-to-play does go on, especially with social media and influencer marketing. Worldstar was probably one of the first to really wholeheartedly embrace the straight-up, pay-to-post business model. At the same time, large media outlets like Vice and Gawker developed their advertorial verticals, charging big brands to write corporate-sponsored articles that were much less identifiable by readers as an advertisement.
But pay-to-play and promo are not just the big players' revenue models. They have proliferated as THE business model of the social media creator industry from Instagram to TikTok. Micro social marketing is a macro business. You've no doubt seen Instagram accounts like @SayCheeseTV, @OurGeneration, @rap, generating millions of impressions and their owners being hailed as New Media Moguls. Artists like Trippie Red promoting giveaways, featuring brands and accounts to follow for your chance to win a (insert expensive item). The list goes on.
Now pay-to-play isn’t a problem in itself, it’s really just advertising. The problem is, for a long time and even now, most of this advertising is unofficial, handshake-under-the-table nature, which is confusing or sometimes intentionally misleading to consumers. And because of that, the industry is full of scammers, and it's inefficient and unproductive to everyone involved.
READ: How Your Favorite Artists Like Trippie Red Make A Killing From Instagram Promo
The Federal Communication Commission has rules explicitly prohibiting misleading consumers; any time money exchanges hands for promotional services, it is required that the promotion be clearly labeled as such, usually “promotion”, “ad” or “advertisement”. But that is only true for some forms of advertising, but now I’m leading you to a rabbit hole you’ll have to explore on your own by watching this video from YouTuber Tom Scott.
These regulations are the reason you see big content promoters like Worldstar and advertiser-funded publications like Vice Media adding content labels or advertising indicators to their published content and pages explaining their advertising policies. Platforms like YouTube and Instagram have created features that give content creators the ability to indicate whether their posts “includes paid promotion”. But the social-marketing ecosystem is too vast for the FCC to police; social media can’t even police themselves. And unless they find a way to monetize the rules to their benefit, or it begins to hurt their bottom line, or you go full Jay Manzini scamming people out of millions and get called out by internet sleuth CoffeeZilla, I wouldn’t count on them ever seriously enforcing them.
How does this affect the music industry? Well if you haven’t realized, music is a product. Streams generate revenue from advertisers, subscriptions, and ticket sales. How are these streams marketed to you as the listener? The Radio, TikTok Kids, Instagram Promoters, and Media Outlets, like us. How exactly that process works, is a total shit show of emails, text messages, spreadsheets, price haggling, and PayPal accounts.
Labels pay PR companies to email hassle media outlets and writers to write articles or post content for free. Most of these thousands of emails go ignored, benefitting nobody. Promo companies dm/email/text influencers to post or make videos to the songs and have to send dozens of individual payments. Now in any other industry, promoting or reviewing products and placing an amazon link or embed to buy the product, would net you a percentage of the sale. Not so in the music business. Anyone promoting music, or anyone who creates content with music is no stranger to YouTube's ContentID system and copyright claims, which essentially siphon your ad revenue out from under the content creator to the copyright holder of the music. So smart promoters or outlets without big media deals just straight-up charge for the promo. Some promoters will post whatever you pay them for, some won't. If content gets turned down often times the label or PR company will try and find a back door. I can't tell you the number of times I’ve had to fire a writer due to finding out they were soliciting artists to pay for posts, neatly disguised as ‘pr packages’ or taking money from record labels under the table to either post their new artists or send new artists the record labels way.
As for efficiency, more often than not nobody is tracking any of the actual success of any of these campaigns. Artists don't share articles or content and the outlets and promoters don't tag or mention all the creators. Fans don't know who paid for what if anyone genuinely likes a song or just got handed a few hundred bucks. And scammers impersonate all of these people and just rip people off looking to pay for promotions. Like I said It's a mess. 😖🤯
So is there a better way? We think so.
What Is ELEVATOR Doing To Fix It?
We've spent a long time thinking about these issues in trying to come up with a better way for us to handle this business. It's been about 16 months from concept, design, and development (S/O the ELEVATOR Dev Team) but we've finally arrived. Yesterday we quietly pushed an update live, introducing some new features to our submission system that includes new submission services for advertising and promotion (and a lot of awesome new features! You can read about all the new features of the ELEVATOR beta v0.57 update here). You can read the specifics about these new services in our new ELEVATOR Help Center.
We’re hoping these new updates help with a few of these issues by
- Reduce under the table PR and Promo that is disingenuous and misleading to consumers
- Reduce scammers ability to steal from people by legitimately offering the promotional services
- Help writers profit from their creative writing services
- Create an efficient and effective system for consistently vetting and sharing high-quality creative talent and servicing advertising and promotional clients
We hope you guys like it and what's to come!