iTunes Festival could be a triumph… of email marketing
// July 1st, 2011 // 0 Comments // Content, Marketing, Music
In my email inbox this morning was an invitation from Apple to watch a live music festival in London starting tonight, my time. The festival has been running since 2007 but it’s been gradually morphing from focusing on attending the live event towards leveraging Apple’s extraordinary distribution pipeline to deliver to a worldwide audience. This year I think they’ve cracked it.
Via a dedicated free live event app you’ll be able to watch the three nights of performances from 62 artists, live or on-demand, free. And we’re not talking B-list bands here either, there’s Paul Simon, Moby, Duran Duran and Coldplay (yes, I’m that old).
As in previous years, tickets will also be available to attend the festival if you’re in the UK, and they’ll be available only to contest winners.
Could this be bigger — and more profitable — than Glastonbury?
From today you can buy the latest album from each artist performing from iTunes Store or from the app and I’m guessing that’s part of the reason why artist management agree to the concept.
The other reason, and the reason why the festival is most interesting, is the email marketing opportunity. Here’s why:
How many people do you know these days who own an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone? Lots, right? It’s not a static number either, it’s still growing fast.
If they’ve ever used iTunes Store to buy music, TV, movies or apps, Apple has their email address, and unless they’ve opted out, their permission to send them weekly emails about content for sale in iTunes Store.
No big deal, right? Every online retailer and content publisher has an email database. But this is an email database unlike any other, since it now represents arguably the biggest and fastest-growing entertainment content marketing database the entertainment industry has ever seen. There’s an iPod Touch, iPad or iPhone in the bag of nearly every person on the train with you, in the pocket of nearly everyone jogging in the morning. There might be as many Android phones out there as iPhones, or Kindles as iPads, but add up iPhones, iPods and iPads? Big number.
The music industry created the commercial radio industry to market new content to consumers, but never knew who those consumers were, what they listened to, and where they were at. Then, MTV added a little granularity for marketers, was able to provide some logbook data on audience size, viewing habits and geo location.
Today, businesses as diverse as Amazon, CDBaby, MySpace and Facebook have a database of content customers they can market to via email, but with nothing like the detailed purchase and consumption data Apple has access to. And not only does Apple have the biggest database of entertainment content consumers, they also own the whole stack, from bringing major labels and artists together for an event, to reaching an enormous global market of music consumers via email, to actually selling and delivering and tracking the consumption of the end content.
Analysts studying Apple’s market performance look at profit per device shipped, app sales volume, and PC and handset market share. Does anybody know what the open rates are on emails from iTunes Store? What their click-thru rates are? Perhaps Apple’s biggest untapped and unvalued asset is the ability to reach more of the world’s music fans than any other media publisher?
iTunes: what a truly global retailer looks like (yes, even in Kazakhstan)
iTunes Festival is a big endeavour, and while Apple is the king of hardware, it doesn’t yet have enough entertainment content culture in its DNA, so along the way there have been mistakes made, goals reached for but unmet, and lessons learned.
But Apple is also the king of execution — it learns perhaps better than any other major brand. This year you can watch the whole event from your iDevice of choice instead of on YouTube, and for the first time, you can watch in HD on a TV equipped with an AppleTV using AirPlay.
The world’s number one retailer of music is on the cusp of becoming the next MTV and the next Glastonbury, all rolled into one. Like, wow.
