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BEHAVIORAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC FANS
Reflective Report
Bret S. Ewen
Berklee College of Music
June 27, 2014
Table of Contents
Page
I.
Summary .................................................................................................... 1
a. Project Overview ......................................................................... 2
b. Context & Inspiration ................................................................. 2
c. Personal Motivation .................................................................... 4
II.
Process ........................................................................................................ 5
a. Proposal & Initial Ideas .............................................................. 5
b. Survey Design .............................................................................. 6
c. Data Collection …........................................................................ 8
d. Data Analysis ............................................................................... 9
III.
Results & Expectations …....................................................................... 9
IV.
Next Step ...................................................................................................12
V.
Industry Contribution …........................................................................ 13
VI.
Personal Impact ....................................................................................... 14
VII.
Bibliography …........................................................................................ 16
1
I. Summary
Project Overview
A survey was undertaken in which 4,404 respondents participated to
share their behavioral habits with regard to their interaction with music and its
marketplace. Analysis of the responses was performed in order to discover
relevant differences in behavior between those who identify as electronic music
fans and those who identify as fans of other genres. Various behaviors were
questioned in relation to listening habits, social media engagement, spending
history, willingness to pay, and more. The data show that electronic music fans
do behave differently from fans of other genres in a variety of respects (e.g. price
expectations, music format preferences, and methods of music discovery –
among others). The data have the potential to be useful in aiding the
development of business and marketing strategies for artists, record labels, and
others by providing a more accurate view of the marketplace.
Context & Inspiration
Due to improvements in information technology, niche and segmented
areas of music now have greater accessibility and availability to consumers than
ever before. With the increase in the amount and variation of available goods
comes a need to understand the particular characteristics of consumers in each
segment of the market. This research focused on discovering the behavioral
tendencies unique to those people who identify primarily as electronic music
fans. The motivation to conduct this research stemmed from several music
industry reports and other studies that have shown that the business and the
consumers surrounding electronic music have certain characteristics that differ
2
from the rest of the music market. This research aimed to expand upon the
existing information and provide a deeper analysis of why this is the case. The
intention was to find answers for any previously observed cross-genre
behavioral anomalies as well as to explore other potential differences in behavior
not yet studied. One example highlighting the differences between electronic
music and other genres was a 2012 Nielsen industry report which showed that
digital track sales of electronic music grew 36% that year while over all digital
track sales growth for the industry was a mere 5%.1 An assumption was made
that in order to achieve such a relatively high level of growth, consumers of
electronic music must be behaving differently than consumers of other styles of
music.
Upon further investigation, this assumption was supported by a 2013
study performed by ticketing company Eventbrite in partnership with the Harris
Interactive Service Bureau. The study took the form of a survey of 1,019
respondents through which they were able to show some clear differences in the
behavioral patterns of electronic music fans compared to fans of other genres.
For instance, the study found that 67% of electronic music fans heard about the
events that they attended via social media compared to only 40% for “other”
concertgoers.2 The study also found that 73% of electronic music fans have an
increased desire to attend an event after seeing friends post about the event on
1. Nielsen Holdings. “The Nielsen Company & Billboard’s 2012 Music Industry Report.”
BusinessWire.com. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130104005149/en/NielsenCompany-Billboard%E2%80%99s-2012-Music-Industry-Report (accessed June 20, 2014).
2.
“EDM
Fans:
Not
Your
Average
Music
Fans.”
Eventbrite.com.
http://blog.eventbrite.com/edm-‐fans-‐are-‐not-‐your-‐average-‐music-‐fan/
(accessed
June
20,
2014).
3
social media. This was compared to other music fans where only 36% reported
the same response.3
Several other sources of information served indirectly to raise questions
that could potentially be answered by performing this research. For example, the
Ibiza International Music Summit (IMS) reported in 2013 that popular electronic
DJ, Hardwell, increased his number of social media followers per day by 300%
while performing at Ultra Music Festival in 2013. 4 This raised the more
philosophical question of whether social media was promoting the live
performance or vice versa, which then led to the bigger question of trying to
decipher what role social media actually plays in the eyes of the consumer. Is
that role consistent throughout all music genres? The ambiguity of the purpose
of social media has been called into question before by the online magazine Social
Media Examiner, who found that only 26% of marketers agreed that they are able
to accurately measure the ROI from their efforts on social media.5 With no clear
answer as to what social media is achieving, why are so many artists active
across a whole spectrum of different platforms?
By attempting to shed light onto these and other issues concerning the
music business (and specifically electronic music), results were uncovered that
can potentially be used by artists, record labels, distribution companies,
marketers, and others in order to better serve the greater community of music
3. “EDM Fans: Not Your Average Music Fans.” Eventbrite.com
4. Watson, Kevin. “IMS Business Report 2013.” InternationalMusicSummit.com.
http://www.internationalmusicsummit.com/img/stand_alone_files/file/original/imsbusiness-report-2013-final2-10.pdf (accessed June 20, 2014).
5. Stelzner, Michael A. “2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.”
SocialMediaExaminer.com. (pg. 10)
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2013.pdf
(accessed June 20, 2014).
4
fans. A better understanding of consumers can improve the health of the music
industry ecosystem by providing more valuable products, more appropriate
distribution methods, and more agreeable pricing strategies.
Personal Motivation
I am an electronic musician at heart. I have a strong interest in discovering
the preferences of electronic music fans in order to provide my own music in a
method that meets the demands of those who wish to consume it. Combining
business and art can be a delicate matter, so I aimed to build a project that would
aid in creating a better synergy between consumers and suppliers of music and
to make the relationship between business and art more fluid. Although
producing electronic music is currently an ambition I pursue in my free time, I
also have a strong interest in developing a full-time career within the same
business. That career could be centered on myself as an artist, but I would also
like to pursue gaining experience working with other artists, record labels,
distribution companies, marketing companies, or anyone else who has a hand in
taking the music from its creation into the hands of consumers. I wanted to carry
out a project that would better equip me to be able to consult and develop
relevant business strategies so as to make myself useful to companies operating
within the marketplace. The format of this project allowed me to explore several
key areas related to pricing strategies, release methods, and social media
marketing – among other issues. I sought to design a project that could create
value for myself and also for those I wish to work with in the future. By creating
this value, I believe I will better position myself to enter the work force as a
contributing member of the electronic music industry.
5
II. Process
Proposal & Initial Ideas
The beginning stages of this project were quite different from the final
result. Initially, the proposal centered on researching existing marketing methods
and trying to discover their relative efficiencies. The original research question
was “Which marketing and distribution tactics are able to best encourage
sustained brand loyalty and reach new potential fans for modern electronic
music artists and why?”. This meant that I was to be comparing various
marketing methods only within the world of electronic music. The plan was to
undertake significant qualitative research and collect information from
professional marketers about their own experiences with various marketing
tactics. I also planned to conduct quantitative research to support whatever
conclusions I could gather from the qualitative research.
After some time of preparing this course of action, I realized that with my
plan I would not be providing a significant level of value to anyone other than
myself. The marketing methods used by electronic music marketers are mostly
already able to be analyzed, and therefore the companies making decisions about
marketing already have a foundation of information to support their strategies.
Furthermore, there was no real focus on electronic music as I had originally
intended. By performing the research as initially laid out, I would have no
comparison to the music industry as a whole and my findings would become
nothing more than generic and fundamental data about the most basic marketing
techniques in the industry. Instead, after meeting with my advisor, I decided to
shift the focus of the work from looking directly at marketing techniques to
6
looking at consumer behavior and psychology. This would allow me to collect
information that could potentially be used to develop new marketing methods.
By having a more accurate view of consumers, it is possible to better predict how
they will react to new ideas. The data could discover certain consumer
characteristics that were previously unknown as well as discover behaviors
which could suggest that alternative business strategies might perform better
than current ones.
Additionally, I formed the idea to carry out the research on a wide
spectrum of consumers, including those outside of electronic music. By doing so,
I would allow for comparisons in the data, which could be used to specifically
show the characteristics of electronic music fans in relationship to fans of other
genres. This would be much more useful than finding generic data which may or
may not apply to each segment of the market. From the studies and reports
mentioned in the introduction, I already knew that there were some distinct
characteristics that were unique to electronic music fans that were causing them
to behave differently and creating a massive affect on the growth of electronic
music in relation to the rest of the music industry. Thus, my final idea was
formed to carry out large-scale data collection in the form of a quantitative
consumer survey with various qualitative aspects sewn throughout.
Survey Design
The first step of the creation of the survey was to find some electronic
survey tools that would meet the needs of the project. Several different options
were
considered
and
analyzed
including
Forms,
Zoomerang,
SurveyGizmo, and SurveyMonkey. After careful consideration, SurveyMonkey
7
with the upgraded “Gold” account was chosen. Although it was a pricey option,
it was necessary to be able to handle the functions needed in order to perform
the best collection and analysis of the data. Some important features were that
had no question limits, no response limits, filtering, comparing, data export, text
analysis, trend reporting, and individual respondent analysis. In hindsight, this
was the best option especially due to the unlimited number of responses since
the survey turned out to have a huge number of respondents.
The next step of the survey design was to research effective survey
methodology. I do not have a background in statistics, so I felt it was necessary
to at least study some fundamental concepts in order to steer clear of any easily
avoidable mistakes. I studied confidence intervals, sample design, mode effects,
question and format biases, odds ratios, and probabilities among other topics.
While the survey was not perfect in the end, I do feel that I was able to improve
what it would have been had I not researched these topics. This knowledge
helped improve my confidence for the decisions I was making and helped me to
realize the flaws of mistakes I made as well as to recognize the general problems
with a self-reporting survey that I need to take into account in considering the
impact and meaning of the results.
After this stage, a draft of the survey was created. This draft was sent to
my CE advisor as well as my jury member for feedback and advice. I then
distributed the survey to a selection of trial respondents in order to detect any
confusion in the format, writing, or logistical completion of the survey. I took all
of this feedback into account and reworked what needed to be changed in order
to make the survey more efficient, accurate, and dynamic. Through these trial
respondents, I was also able to test the survey tools and the limits of the analysis
8
capabilities in an effort to revise any questions so that the final data could be
analyzed more completely and accurately. A post-analysis critique of the survey
can be found in the “Results & Expectations” section.
Data Collection
After completion of the survey design, it was time to collect data. The data
collection period lasted for two week from May 26 – June 8. In total, 4,404
respondents participated. I was able to collect 90,559 individual answers
including 54,211 multiple-choice style answers and 36,348 open response
answers (some open responses were simple quantitative answers and some were
longer more qualitative answers).
There were two strategies in place to collect this data. The first was
personal requests to friends, family, and acquaintances. The second was through
online communities of various types of music fans. The survey was distributed to
62 music and audio forums related to different genres of music including
everything from Jazz to Chiptune. Some of these forums required registration
and prior participation before posting outside links and others were
communities I was already a member of which I believe helped lend some
credibility to my request. In the end, there was a lot of discussion. The survey
generated 478 comments with many people asking questions, giving feedback on
the survey, or writing longer comments about their views on the music industry.
To validate my identity and personalize the request that I was making of the
forum members, I felt the need to participate in these discussions. I answered
specific questions, defended the merits of my methodology, and generally gave
people a sense that there was a real human behind the survey. I think this
9
participation helped immensely in creating a sustained interest in the project,
which was a key success factor in gathering results.
Data Analysis
The data analysis phase comprised a significant portion of the overall
work involved with this project. The survey received an unexpectedly large
number of responses and despite having some survey tools available, there was a
lot of time spent formatting, categorizing, organizing, and comparing data. This
required using filters, text analysis algorithms, excel spreadsheets, and graphing
software to discover trends and interesting outcomes. In addition, the data was
compared to some of the reports and studies mentioned in the inspiration for this
project. The statistics research I performed also needed to be applied in order to
carry out various ratios and probabilities accurately. The data was compared asis as well as through multi-variable comparisons to execute a deep analysis in
search of any pertinent information. The full text of the analysis along with all of
the data can be found in the results section and appendix section of the outcome
paper respectively.
III. Results & Expectations
Despite the trial respondents and revisions on the survey, there were still
problems that arose with the survey design that were only recognized after the
data was collected. One of the biggest problems that had to be overcome was
with the design of the first – and most important – question. Question 1 asked
“Of the following, what is your preferred genre of music?” Nine genre options
were given (Rock, Electronic, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Folk, Classical, Pop, R&B, and
10
Country) as well as an option to declare “Other” with an open-response box to
write the unlisted genre. The issue was that the “Other” option wasn’t an official
selection in the survey as it should have been – it was only an additional
comment box. This means that respondents who selected a genre from the list
were still able to write in the box. Therefore, in my data all of the genre-selectors’
open responses were listed alongside those from the non-genre-selectors. This
required me to manually go through the 1,296 responses and look at each
respondent individually to separate the genre-selectors from the non-genreselectors. There turned out to be 401 non-genre-selectors. This gave me some
good information on those particular respondents, however it did not solve the
problem completely.
For the purposes of comparisons, I had devised two genre categories:
“Electronic Fans” and “Other Genre Fans.” Hypothetically, I could have used
those respondents by placing them into the category of “Other Genre Fans.” But,
since “Other” was not an official option on the survey, it would require me to
both enter all 90,559 individual data points manually into excel as well as lose all
use of the survey tools (i.e. filtering and comparing). I was not willing to do
either of those things, much less both. Those 401 respondents’ data would still be
available on any overall analysis of the data, but would have to be excluded from
any direct comparisons between the two genre categories I had devised. I
decided that this was the only acceptable solution. Furthermore, since the
category of “Other Genre Fans” already contained 2,963 respondents, I believe
the sample size was already large enough to successfully make meaningful
comparisons between the two fan types.
11
Nonetheless, due to this situation it was necessary in the results to be very
clear that I was comparing people who identified as electronic music fans only
with people who identified with one of the other genres listed in Question 1 and
not with all music fans in general. Table 1 below shows the open-response
answers to Question 1 for those who did not identify with one of the given
genres. The table shows that there were numerous responses that overlapped
with the genres listed in the question (e.g. other forms of electronic music along
with metal, post-rock, prog-rock and others that could be classified under
“Rock”). I looked into the open-responses of Question 1 for those who did select a
genre and many of those responses were the same as those who did not select a
genre. There were entries for Metal, Punk, Alternative, and others that
respondents found possible to categorize under one the listed genres. I believe
this also helped to mitigate the problems of excluding this data from the
comparisons because most of the genres were still represented within the overall
data.
Table 1 – “Other” responses to survey Question 1.
Response
Total
Metal
Multiple / No Clear Answer
Alternative / Indie
Other (< 3 responses each)
Punk
Electronic (other)
Ska / Reggae
Blues
Post-Rock
Funk
Prog Rock
Total
258
36
32
21
15
13
9
6
5
3
3
401
12
Despite some of these procedural flaws with the survey, I was quite
pleased with the results. I feel as though, under the circumstances, my
expectations for the data collection were exceeded. As my initial proposal stated,
I had planned on perhaps doing multiple rounds of quantitative analysis and
possible a strictly qualitative data session as well, but with the overwhelming
response that I received it was clear that this should be the main focus of the
project.
As far as my classes at Berklee are concerned, I felt better prepared for this
project especially after completing the “International Marketing & Branding”
course as well as the “Online & Social Media Management” course. These
courses gave me some good foundational knowledge about what sort of new
practices were happening in the realm of recorded music. They led me to better
create questions that reflected the current state of the industry (e.g. asking about
social media and streaming platforms, “free” goods, as well as online music
discovery methods). Although most of the project relied on statistics, which
wasn’t a course offering for me, I was still able to use what I have learned in
order to better craft the project.
IV. Next Step
The next step of this project will be to create an abridged version of these
documents suitable to publicize and distribute via music news websites and
blogs. This will involve writing an article geared towards the public that can be
easily read and understood. It could involve creating some sort of infographic to
visualize the most relevant data in a meaningful way. I will hopefully be able to
13
partner with someone from Berklee, such as my advisor Alexandre Perrin, to
lend more credibility to the article and the data. Then, I will contact the relevant
music news companies in an effort to create some press about the findings of the
research. The Eventbrite studies mentioned in the summary were publicized in
the same way, so there is already precedence for a public interest in this sort of
data. The only challenge will be creating something compelling both visually and
intellectually in a concise format that is easily digestible.
V. Industry Contribution
This research will provide insight into the modern landscape of marketing
efficiencies and practical possibilities for marketing professionals, artist managers, public
relations specialists, and artists themselves. It can help to make clear which aspects of the
recorded music marketplace are engaging consumers and promoting healthy interactions
for all parties. Consumer satisfaction is incredibly significant to the length and depth of
the potential career of artists in that it is a product of the foundation for which all
monetization occurs. By understanding the consumer, various revenue streams can be
more easily created and the risk associated with those new financial ventures can be
minimized. The fate of many companies – publishers, distributors, live operations,
venues, etc. – is heavily dependent on the success of the artist and it is in all of their best
interests that the artist is able to connect with consumers in a meaningful way. And,
although there are many new mediums and methods for marketing arising from the
digital era, there is also a decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio from which consumers
select what will and will not become a part of their lives and habits. Finding which of
these new mediums and methods are genuinely engaging the consumer base will help to
14
eliminate arbitrary time and resource allocation, making an easier pathway for marketers
to accomplish their goals and in turn will help to create a simpler and more navigable
environment for the consumer. Unsurprisingly, according to Social Media Examiner, “the
number-one question marketers want answered (90%) is which tactics work best.”6 By
directly reaching out to consumers, this research may be able to provide real insight into
consumer behavior and preferences regarding not only marketing tactics that currently
exist, but also potential avenues for new marketing and consumer engagement in the
future.
VI. Personal Impact
Through this project I was able to study and learn more about statistics
and marketing. I learned new methods to collect and analyze data sets as well as
learned about the tools and software available to do so. I gave myself a
foundational knowledge in research methodology and bias issues that can carry
over in the future to any marketing work I will do. This project also gave me a
tool to market myself, if I wish to do so – especially if the information can
eventually be publicized (as mentioned in the “Next Step” section of this paper).
Most importantly, through this work I was able to gain a deeper insight into the
minds of electronic music fans. My career goals are to work closely with
electronic music, especially with independent artists and labels that may need
more specialized marketing expertise. This project has made me better equipped
6. Stelzner, Michael A. “How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their
Businesses.” Social Media Examiner. (pg 6)
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2013.pdf
(accessed June 20, 2014).
15
to consult and develop strategies for artists or labels regarding pricing, release
methods, and social media – among other things.
16
VII. Bibliography
Nielsen Holdings. “The Nielsen Company & Billboard’s 2012 Music Industry Report.”
BusinessWire.com. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130104005149/en/NielsenCompany-Billboard%E2%80%99s-2012-Music-Industry-Report (accessed June 20, 2014).
“EDM Fans: Not Your Average Music Fans.” Eventbrite.com.
http://blog.eventbrite.com/edm-fans-are-not-your-average-music-fan/ (accessed June 20, 2014).
Watson, Kevin. “IMS Business Report 2013.” InternationalMusicSummit.com.
http://www.internationalmusicsummit.com/img/stand_alone_files/file/original/imsbusiness-report-2013-final2-10.pdf (accessed June 20, 2014).
Stelzner, Michael A. “2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.”
SocialMediaExaminer.com. (pg. 6 &10)
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2013.pdf
(accessed June 20, 2014).
