Music industry, music advertising, and music in commercial environments

Music Industry

The majority of people’s musical preferences are heavily influenced by their exposure to specific styles of music. The multi-million dollar music industry of record companies dating back to Tin Pan Alley and the like, are a large reason for this. Today, record companies are often a conglomeration of instrument manufacturers, film studios, and retailers that allow for the cross-promotion of specific styles of music that dominate the sound waves and dictate music buying behavior. Often, creativity is limited by a lack of innovation and diversity directly related to the financial gains of huge sales of a small number of albums.

Superstardom (attained by promotional campaigns or reliance on existing stardom) is the result of and promotion of record company’s musical choices. An excellent example of disproportionate sales compared to ability i.e. an artist’s talent is not necessarily indicative of their sales and visa versa and talent is not always a deciding factor in consumer spending. Consumers are driven by familiarity with an artist, irrespective of their talent.

Research

-Music consumption (Lacher & Mizerski, 1994) shows that consumer’s need to re-experience music is the strongest predictor of whether an album will be purchased (affective and experiential response also included in this research).

-Product life-cycles of popular songs (Meenaghan & Turnball, 1981) follow similar patterns (pre-release, buzz creation, pre-threshold, commercial life, final decline) and predictors such as a song’s initial chart entry often determines its highest position.

-Positive correlations between performance of artists and their number of years since #1 chart were positively related to amount of space allocated in msuic encyclopedias (North & Hargreaves, 1995).

-Pricing strategies and online music purchasing (delay of 4 seconds affects online purchases)

-Music piracy (Jones & Lenhart), disproportionately male, experienced internet users, lower income, educational groups

-Radio programming (Ahlkvist & Faulkner, 2002) determined by subjective repertoire of DJ’s, objective repertoire of market research, populist repertoire, and synergistic repertoire of record companies.

Music and advertising

Music heavily influences consumption habits and is used in commercials to attract attention, carry a message, create emotion, acts as a mnemonic cue. The impact of music in commercials is based on:

1) Classical condition – (Gorn, 1982) associate liked music with a product to produce same effect

2) Elaboration likelihood – ELM (elaboration likelihood Model). There are two routes to persuasion, central (considering information about product) and peripheral (associating product with positive/negative cues-conditioning method)

3) Sonic branding (auditory equivalent of a visual company logo)

4) Music fit – music that fits with the target audience who are actively processing the messages in advertising, corresponds with consumers perceptions

Music in commercial environments

Elevator music (piped music, muzak)

Research

-The speed of consumer activity (Smith & Curnow, 1966). Loud music discouraged people to stay in store long. (Milliman, 1982) tempo of music influences speed of shopping. The same research was conducted on restaurants, with similar outcomes.

-Approach and avoidance behavior research (Mehrabia & Russell, 1974). Responses to an environment involving pleasure increase the likelihood of approach behavior.

-‘Knowledge activation effects’ research seeks to establish the associations people make with specific styles/pieces with the intent of influencing atmosphere and purchasing (specific atmospheric music establishes consumers perception of store e.g. playing French music to promote French wine, classical music in expensive jewelery store)(North, Hargreaves, & McKendrick, 2000).

-Time perception and waiting time. Fast music leads to longer time estimates, requires more processing . “Time flies when you’re having fun” and “Pollyanna principle” (pleasant information is processed and recalled faster) (Mantel, 1989)

-workplace morale and productivity of workers for boring/repetitive tasks

-Physical work and exercise (synchronous), office noise, and driving