Marketing Mix (7Ps) and The Impact of The Internet, Digital Technology on The Music Industry

The impact of the internet and digital technologies through the past decade has been crazy as new technology gets developed every year. From the approach of the advanced society, brought forth by the development of the PC and ENIAC, one of the main computerized PCs in 1946, to the present day, advanced innovation and registering have worked their way into more everyday issues, from communications to finance to social cooperation (Techwalla, 2019).

The marketing mix is the series of four key variables which are: Product, Place, Promotion and price, but then was extended to 7P’s which result in adding, people, physical evidence and process. The marketing mix has been characterized as the “set of marketing tools that the firm uses to seek after its marketing ideas in the target market” (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2019).

In this Blog entry we will discuss the impact of the internet and digital technologies with the marketing mix elements of the 7P’s on the music industry. As you all know when it comes to music, I am a massive fan as I share and repost music every single day on my social media outlets and I’m always looking for when my favourite artists are dropping new singles or albums.

The music industry includes the production, spreading, and clearance of music in a variety of structures just as the advancement of live musical performances. Individuals allegedly have purchased, sold, and bargained music for whatever length of time that it has been made. Road vocalists, wandering minstrels, broadside dealers, and voyaging music instructors created stopgap grassroots music industries that have contrasted more in scale than in kind when contrasted with the cutting-edge music industry (Encyclopedia.com, 2019).

Product: the internet in terms of music is a worldwide source and platform to either downloading music or streaming music. Nowadays majority of artists when bringing out new musical content come out with albums with track numbers from 1 – 15 songs per album. With these albums the internet is the main source to sell digital copies, which is the best way to maximise sales which has made a huge impact within the music industry. In terms of the quality of the product although in the current world all music is digitised but back in the old days were music and albums were on CDs and Vinyls the quality would allegedly be better. Now with music being focused and displayed with different audio formats streaming services might generally not get the best sounding songs.

Place: before the means of music being on streaming services such as, Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube etc, music use to be on compacted CD disc’s which were the means of listening to music. Now with new technology over the years music has generally been encoded and decoded to fit on different formats and files such as, WAV, ACC, MP3 and MP4, this has made a huge impact in terms of spreading and developing new innovative ways to listen to music as now we have personal digital devices such as phones, iPod’s which makes it easier. By having just, the internet only it would make it hard for people to listen to music without buying a hardcopy, this generally would lead to websites where there were pirated files online which people would download, which is illegal. So that we have these new and developed subscription streaming services for music it has impacted the music industry tremendously.

Price: Before the means of streaming services, CDs were the key products of music, I remember paying about $20 – $30 for an Album which was loaded on to a CD. Now with new digital technology and subscriptions to apple music and Spotify, you can listen to all he music you want with subscriptions from $5.99 – $7.99 a month on either of those platforms. Even on iTunes for you to own a song you can own it just for $2.00 or so depending on the song and the popularity of the song. Although this has had an effect on majority of artists within the music industry, most of them are trying to differentiate themselves with new strategies when it comes to musical production and price. For example, Jay-Z and Tidal or Dr. Dre Beats.

Promotion: A technique of promotion that has been used for the music industry has been musical based channel on TV services such as Foxtel, SKY and more. Within these TV outlets they have channels such as MTV, V, or channels specifically just for music, with these channels promoting the top 100 songs, genre-based music or newest music out, this helps artists in promoting their music. As to a couple of years ago when there was no pay TV the only way you could hear about music would be over broadcasts or radio shows. This new innovative way of advertising and promoting music through TV programs has yet again made the music industry a lot more focused in terms of promotion of music. Although artists use social media platforms to try and connect with their fans to showcase their music through applications like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and Twitter.

Process: The process of how music has been innovated throughout the years has been extremely better as you can now listen to music not just from live Concerts but through digital electronic devices and now within  a lot of products like cars and smart phones/ watches they have features to where you can listen to music such as Carplay in new modern cars or Bluetooth audio systems which connect to your personal devices. As now through the past years you can say that the music industry has most definitely improved in terms of being more technically involved with modern society and the new means of digital technology.

People: In terms of the music industry, people have played a big role when it results to staying in touch with music, now that the internet is where most accessible music is people generally engage and try and stay digitally active and involved to keep up to date with music. Even with artists and celebrities constantly sharing musical content of new artists that they have discovered or songs they like people tend to interact more as it is so easy with new technology.  

Physical Evidence: Now with every song or album being digitised on streaming platforms, there is not many physical copies of albums being sold unless of course you prefer listening to hard copies, but now with new and innovative digital technology everyone is starting to adapt to listening to music online. So, in terms of using the marketing mix framework physical evidence isn’t really relevant to the music industry as technology is slowly taking over.

References

Chaffey, D., Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2019). Digital Marketing. 7^th edition. Pearson

Encyclopedia.com. (2019). Music Industry | Encyclopedia.com. [online] Available at: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/music-industry [Accessed 10 Sep. 2019].

Musicedmasters.kent.edu. (2019). The Music Industry | See the Impact of Digitization | Kent State Online Master of Music in Music Education. [online] Available at: https://musicedmasters.kent.edu/the-digitization-of-the-music-industry/ [Accessed 9 Sep. 2019].

Silcox. A. (2018). Marketing Mix Best Practices – Effective Examples of the Seven P’s. available at: https://www.leadagency.com.au/marketing-mix-best-practice-effective-examples-of-the-seven-ps/

Techwalla. (2019). The Impact of Digital Technology on Human Life. [online] Available at: https://www.techwalla.com/articles/the-impact-of-digital-technology-on-human-life [Accessed 10 Sep. 2019].

Wikström, P. (2013. The Music Industry in an Age of Digital Distribution. Available at: https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/articles/the-music-industry-in-an-age-of-digital-distribution/