Labels have been caught in a financial loop for the last decade. Dedicating higher budgets for platform marketing and facing intense competition on daily release counts, labels both leading and emerging, are at a crossroads on how to make their artists shine. There are no magic solutions, unfortunately. The soundest strategy is to partner with high-performance agencies. But what defines a high-performance agency in the music industry?
The following comes from MPT Agency (MusicPromoToday), a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.
- 5-6x times the reach on ads vs your in house team
- Steady 5-7k streams daily on Spotify
- No phantom shares on socials
- In house or native AI
- Pitch & placement options (not only guarantees)
- Artist monetization solutions
- Publications and Outlets they own personally
- Scaled ad budgets
- Fluid communications
- Transparent outreach
Just recently inking a deal with Warner music, MPT Agency has been expanding its resources, assets and capabilities to fit the new dynamic landscape of music marketing and promotion.
Anto Dotcom and Raffi Keuhnelian are well known in the industry for their high-performance tactics, but the firm has taken a new direction to accommodate their independent and big label clients.
With a much denser market to navigate through, the firm has invested heavily in both AI and a string of media acquisitions to exponentially grow their artists digital reach.
For one, the firm just released their own AI platform Virtual Publicist. An intelligent search engine that relies on artist data to aggregate media and outlet contacts from the four corners of the world. Having used the technology internally for the last few years, the team launched the beta version to test the waters and improve the user experience. Virtual Publicist is set to launch in full form by the end of Q3 2023.
So far, managers, label executives and artists are using the platform as a means of streamlining outlet discovery and optimizing their communications.
With a response rate of 37% for the AI’s targeting and messaging feature, Virtual Publicist is allowing a lot of professionals to scale their game and save valuable time throughout their campaign.
For their clients, the team helps coordinate the campaign using the software and pass contacts back and forth. With higher fluidity and transparency, both agency and label now benefit from a dynamic communications infrastructure.
Ahead of the technology, digital assets are another angle the agency jumped on to bonify their offer to labels. With the acquisition of 4 music magazines: Sweet n Sour Magazine, Pinch of Sol, Popcultr & Stereo Saints, MPT Agency has just integrated 4 niche communities with thousands of active fans into their network.
Why does this matter more than traditional PR pitching?
Labels now have direct access for press and gain access to engaged fans on all social media platforms. This simplifies & amplifies giveaways, announcements, tour promotions, ticket sales, and content reactions.
It also gives labels a hold of a 3rd party community they can innovate and test artist engagement with. This can double down to listening parties, demo releases, and exclusive features that would normally cost a hundreds of hours of relationship building or thousands of dollars for payola style placement.
By bridging the gap with the global media communities, high-performance marketing and promo firms like MPT Agency are creating a more accessible industry ecosystem.
“This funding round was a huge success, and our mission is nothing short of empowering the artist’s journey to create a more fair and open exposure path for their work.” Raffi Keuhnelian explains, “There are 100,000 songs released each day. Ironically, discoverability is becoming more and more complex despite the exponential growth of the world’s access to music through streaming. With the fractionalization of fanbases, it will be imperative for labels to have access to niche communities in emerging markets and digital tools to connect them directly to outlets”.
“The big 3 are a powerhouse, representing almost 3⁄4 of the music market cap, their need to access both novel talent, and regional or community audiences is an absolute necessity to perpetuate their growth.” Anto Dotcom continues to explain “With a string of acquisitions in our iron site, our capacity to grow both big and small acts is about to be multiplied.”
Over the last year, MPT Agency has been working closely with their new subsidiaries. In the case of Sweet n Sour, the blog launched its first print magazine in 2022 and is now a content partner with top labels like Armada, Mau5trap, Monstercat, Wall Records, Hau5trap and Ministry of Sound. 
With labels requiring greater access to niche market listeners, and high-performance / low-latency campaigns, it is imperative that they team up with agencies in order to maximize their artist exposure.
Without a proper monetization strategy, propelled by the access to direct networks, labels will continue to lose market relevance in favor of digital solutions.
A stellar example is MPT Agency, who in time of recession has doubled down on tech and traditional media and is now reaping the benefits with its global partnerships. Redefining this independence of artists and reimagining campaign reach are what it will take for the new generation of artists to make it in this globalized market.
