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THE BUSINESS OF BRANDING BANDS

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“At music festivals, we have a marquee with a Cherry Rock masseuse there,” says Young. “So I am not sure if I will be managing bands, looking after brands or running a massage empire in five years time.” Young adds that he is one of the owners of the Cherry Bar in AC DC Lane, has a company called Cherry Rock Presents which concentrates on international tours, and has founded a music festival called Cherry Rock, a rock and roll street festival hosted in Melbourne (AC DC Lane).

For the past eight years Young was the executive director of SEE an advertising and brand experience agency. He sold out of the company a year ago but says his time in advertising helped him to understand the many possibilities for music. “I actually feel that the future of all marketing and advertising is shifting into the brand experience area,” says Young. “The most connective form of brand experience is music.”

“Increasingly in the American market you are seeing so called brand alignment. There is a little bit of softening of the understanding of that. Ten years ago, if a band aligned itself with a corporate that was considered to be selling out. Now I think the bands that associate themselves with brands are considered to be canny, aspirational, good business people.”

“More open minded people are interested in doing something different, whereas I think major record companies were guilty of sticking their vampire teeth into the corpse of an old model, which is all about physical CD sales and they were not really interested in investing in a model that is sustainable. They said: ‘Let’s just re-issue the entire Elvis back catalogue and I will make some money before I leave.’”

“The record companies, instead of trying to sue Napster, and being worried about the digital revolution, should have actually collaborated with (Napster). They would probably be doing well these days instead of crumbling.”

Young’s approach to brands is to look to create a sound that reflects a mood or a belief system. “Music is with us from the cradle to the grave and we all have different musical tastes It affects us all. It is about seizing that gap in the market, people want to connect with music and bands want to produce music. There is an opportunity to step into the middle.”

Young is critical of many conventional uses of music for branding. “Some in advertising industries have tried to align brands with music, but they have done it in a very predictable and ultimately failed way. They think that aligning a brand with music is logo slapping. Let’s go out to The Big Day Out and slap an enormous logo on the marquee. That is completely wrong. All that logo slapping does is denigrate the music festival and in some sense, ostracise the young people who are there for the music, and probably damage all three parties.”

“I don’t know of any Australian artist who has an alignment with a brand, other than ‘Wear our sunglasses - we will give you free sunglasses.’ There is a real lot of catching up to be done in that area. The brands that are more open-minded are the international brands. They are remarkably open about alignment. The more subtle the alignment is, the more significant it can be.”

Young doubts that record companies can adjust to the changes in the music industry.

“Before the world became more of an open market we were being extorted as CD buyers paying up to $35 for CDs. And people were buying a lot more. Now it’s the same business but they can’t sell the CDs at $18 retail, and they are selling a lot less. I believe the looming revolution for artists is going to be in the area of content for mobile phones."

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EU collection effort under attack
In further European news the EU wants to standardise the performance royalty collection system. They claim that replacing the current multitude of national collection societies with a single system will offer a better deal for musos and composers. A coalition, which includes Robin Gibb, Charles Aznavour, Sade, David Gilmour, Julio Iglesias, Maurice Jarre, Mark Knopfler and Michel Legrand, disagrees and is opposing the move.

OZ first then Broadway
The musical “Billy Elliot” based on the film of the same name is going to Broadway after its Australian opening. If this “London first, Oz second, Broadway third” approach catches on there could be a lot more work for local pit musos.

Phone a trend
Warners, Universal and Sony BMG are now all part of Nokia’s Music Store. The entertainment/communication mixer uses a subscription model - how well the acts get paid is not known at this stage.

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