Def Jam – A 21st Century Music Group
In 2003 the Island Def Jam Music Group embarked on a mission to instantly connect with consumers. Taking full advantage of the rise of the digital age Def Jam, a division of Universal Music Group, made songs available for purchase online to fans as soon as they hit the radio airwaves. Nowadays this sort of instant access to products across all mediums is nothing new, but seven years ago this was a very farsighted move that made Def Jam pioneers of digital music.
The songs were made available for purchase as digital downloads to consumers through a host of leading retail and music Web sites, as well as legitimate subscription services that had licensing agreements with Universal Music Group. One must bare in mind that this was before the explosion of social media on the internet and before torrent and controversial download web sites gained the huge popularity they enjoy today.
The move came a few years ahead of most of the chasing pack and has prepared Def Jam perfectly for today’s world of intense, interactive social media advertising.
The music industry is notorious for being a harsh and unforgiving place in which there is little space for young guns still wet behind the ears. However the download hungry youth of today changed all that and are now the lifeblood of the industry and the music business has had to adapt quickly to avoid being left behind by the new age listener.
Learning new skills
Just like the compact disc made LP’s and cassette tapes endangered species, digitalized music has threatened to see off all tangible, traditional forms of listening to music. But in a wider sense, the change has forced companies, like Def Jam, to learn whole new sets of skills in order to remain at the head of the curve.
Adam Burns, editor-in-chief of Meet The Boss TV, spoke with Christian Jorg, SVP, New Media and Commerce for Island Def Jam Records about how the music industry will profit from change, and why new media will revolutionize the way companies sell their products and interact with consumers.
When asked about how the music industry in general is coping with the rise of digital media Jorg said, “I think we’re getting closer. It’s not even just music we create any more, it’s visual content, it’s content that can be remixed by the consumer.”
There were fears that digital could seriously damage the music industry if it was too slow to react to the change, but a recent report by Nielsen Soundscan reveals that music sales have actually increased in the past year. Sales were up 2.1 percent in 2009 from 2008, with consumers snagging 1.16 million digital tracks (an 8.3 percent increase from ‘08) and 76.4 million digital albums (a 16.1 percent bump). In fact, 40 percent of all music purchases in 2009 were digital.
Achieving global success
Def Jam have evolved their whole operations process to keep up with the change and they now deal with companies that they would’ve had no business with when they started out, “Today we will deal with Proctor & Gamble and other large brands to help us make our artists successful and in turn making the brand successful.”
In today’s digital world where consumers are far less patient in the hunt for immediate gratification, companies creating the content must look to exploit relationships with service providers to enhance next generation new media sales and consumption.
Jorg says the key is to make the whole process “very, very simple”. Def Jam aim to use new mediums to allow them to do what they couldn’t do before, insisting that the excitement doesn’t lie in simple “re-purposing” but remaking how we use media completely. According to Jorg record companies now have to “bring more to the table” than they did in the past in order to make full use of next generation digital media and make their artists globally successful.
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Ben Thompson
Editor and Presenter at MeetTheBoss TV
As a journalist, editor and now presenter at MeetTheBoss TV, Ben has been writing and speaking about the intersection between business, people and technology for the past 15 years. In a career that’s taken him from working for consumer music and style mags to Editor-in-Chief of Business Management magazine – via work for the likes of The Guardian, Frost & Sullivan and Bloomberg, amongst others – he’s interviewed some of the biggest names in business, spoken at international events and moderated countless roundtable discussions.