Digital Marketing for Music Publishing Companies

Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating in the training sessions of the AEDEM, (the Spanish Association of Music Publishers) a non-profit, independent entity whose purpose is to integrate Music Publishers who operate in Spain.

For those who are not familiar with the sector, music publishing companies work with three types of products: the copyright of the musicians they represent, the publishing of scores and the distribution of scores, both for classical music and light music.

Their clients are performing musicians, schools and conservatories, choirs and associations, music producers, advertising producers, film producers, etc. When, for example, a performer like David Bustamante wants to expand his repertoire of songs, his production company goes to one of the companies associated with AEDEM and buys the rights to use some of the songs of the authors that these companies represent.

In an internet where a good part of people believe that all music should be free and where managing copyrights seems to be an almost diabolical practice, it is really complicated to do Digital Marketing, so I confess that this has been one of the most difficult presentations to prepare since it is a real challenge to reach the target audience of this type of companies. I do not envy the professionals who have to fight, with their websites, to attract qualified traffic and convert it into business contacts or clients of their music publishing companies. If this is already a complicated task, in this subsector of the music industry, it is even more so.

Another issue that concerns the subsector is its relationship with the SGAE, since AEDEM is under the umbrella of SGAE, but maintains a love-hate relationship with them. Well, I don't know if the word love-hate would really be the right one in this case, but the truth is that on the one hand SGAE defends the rights of AEDEM members, but on the other hand the bad reputation of this entity in some circles also affects the association and that worries them. So AEDEM is with them, but at the same time it wants its image not to be directly linked to that of SGAE... seen from the outside, it is a bit curious, to say the least.

Well, the day went well. It took me a lot of effort to prepare the presentation, but I think people were happy, or at least they saw that there was work to be done and that if they adapted their websites well, there were ways to attract potential clients.

Here is the presentation in case anyone wants to see it or thinks it might be useful.

We talk to each other.