What will you bring to the table?
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The task is to answer: what will you bring to the table?
Such a question is intriguing. One usually gets excited and enumerates a list, similar to grocery lists, of every possible thing that can be done.
Without a good understanding of the particulars of the business, if you get 10 different entries from 10 applicants, you will find their answers astoundingly similar.
The reason being that there is no professional, no matter how experienced or smart they might be, who can understand a business context within a couple of days, a week or even a month.
Experienced people from within the industry mostly stick to what they know, disregarding change in dynamics; new people may lean towards playing it safe and blow the non-negotiables out of proportion.
There is an alternative, though. One can demonstrate how well they can understand the components, constraints and context of the business. If done well, this shows that the marketer can define a coherent possibility space where their actions will be rewarded commercially. Let this be my goal for this task.
According to Dr. Lia DiBello1, to build business expertise, one has to understand a business triad. The triad consists of supply, demand and capital.
This defines the skeleton of our discussion here. We will walk through each leg of the triad and discuss how it applies to Awakening, starting with capital.
The fundamental operation of the music business is high-volume / low-margin. This is doubly true when a large number of listeners live in the Middle East, where revenue per stream is considerably lower. The same goes for ad platforms like AdSense, concerts and live shows.
A song or an album is just a part of a portfolio. We can argue that for some singers, the goal of a song is traction, not profit. High-margin products like synchronization, merch and commercials are where the real money is made. This balance between high- and low-margin offerings helps a singer grow, both in craft and in business, like no other thing.
Based on the Music in the Air report by Luminate, a super fan is “a music listener aged 13+ who engages with an artist and their content in multiple ways, from streaming to social media to purchasing physical music or merch items to attending live shows. More specifically, the super fans who were identified in the studies referenced in this report were participants that self-reported engaging with their favorite artists in 5+ ways.”
Super fans augment whatever results a singer may enjoy. They are an exponential power in our toolkit. The effect of super fans transcends their direct spend. They help in distribution and in getting a singer in front of a wider audience too. They get the mood. They sell it. And they are happy to do so.
The underlying principle of a healthy portfolio for a singer is the simple fact that the more people care about a song, an album, and most importantly the singer, the higher the margins will be.
“Our ideas and music were fresh, our standard was the western standard. We wanted to raise the bar and compete with our western contemporaries, as most other nasheeds [Islamic music] was cheaply produced.”
Wali-ur Rahman, Awakening co-founder“Her message and artistry celebrate the creativity, strength, and representation of women in Islamic music, and we are honoured to walk this path alongside her.”
Bara Kherigi, Co-Founder and Director, on signing Jaqlyn“Recording ‘This Is Who I Am’ felt natural and effortless — it poured straight from my heart.”
JaqlynAwakening has a clear direction that has obviously worked out. My take would be that we need to pin it down and expand on it. How, then?
Over the past decade, the definition of what is value-inspired has changed a bit. Moving from simply celebrating tradition and praising the sacred to exploring the connection between people and their surroundings. Shifting from a time of stability and habit to a time of constant change and trend cycles. The average person has more unanswered questions in a year than the average person a century ago had in a lifetime (clearly not backed by solid research, but I fathom you will get my point).
Having so many unanswered questions leads people to seek the meaning behind everything. In this journey, faith and values should be a cornerstone. That is why Awakening can capitalize on the idea of meaningful music. This is the music that helps you express that feeling you were not able to put into words. It helps you connect with the divine and with others around you.
To make this a little bit more accessible, I made a diagram that shows all the ways Awakening can produce meaningful music.
Fig. 1 The Five-Axis Meaning Map
Defined this way, Awakening’s direction is so defined yet aspirational that it can provide us with breadth of topics to cover and depth of meaning behind everything we do.
The most significant contributor to a singer’s success is, well, the singer. This is not cliché. The personality of a singer defines how many people may like them, the type of music we can help them produce and how far they can go towards becoming a cultural icon.
There are other elements for sure, like business acumen, consistency and definitely luck. But all of this is redundant if we cannot align it with the singer. A reductionist take may be that it is the singer’s voice that matters. Reality disagrees. A lot of singers have become a cultural hit by embodying a mood, a style or even an idea. There are many ways to build a good career for a singer, but all of them revolve around their characteristics.
Niche is the new mainstream. Gaining relevance within one subculture after another is the most sensible way for an artist to grow nowadays. You cannot make it your strategy to make someone relevant to as many people as possible at once. Becoming familiar and favored by people takes time. Every song gets the singer closer to one subculture than to others. This needs to be strategic.
Fig. 2 The Culture-Algorithm Loop
Culture affects what the algorithm recommends. The algorithm affects how culture reacts. It is a collaborative process of manufacturing hits, heroes and enemies. This means that for a song to be a hit, it needs to optimize for cultural and algorithmic constraints at the same time.
To optimize for the algorithm, you have to start way before a release is on schedule. To optimize for cultural reaction, you should not stop when a release is done. Launching an album becomes a marathon, not a sprint. Yes, you need to invest in the launch itself, but it is only one big step towards creating a hit.