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Media Decoder Blog: WPP to Invest in SFX Entertainment

March 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

When the media mogul Robert F.X. Sillerman returned to the music business last year after more than a decade, he said he wanted to use online media to unite the huge but disconnected audience for electronic dance music. One aspect of his plan involves the role of marketing and advertising, as evidenced by a new investment from the ad giant, WPP.

WPP, a $20 billion company with major agencies like JWT, Grey and Young Rubicam under its umbrella, will invest an estimated $10 million in Mr. Sillerman’s company, SFX Entertainment.

Mr. Sillerman has said that he plans to build a $1 billion empire largely around the appeal of dance music, and his acquisitions so far have included festival promoters, nightclubs and a music download store, Beatport. WPP’s involvement, he said, could help attract sponsors to those properties.

WPP “recognizes the power of dance music to coalesce and address an increasingly difficult-to-reach audience,” Mr. Sillerman said in an interview. “Clearly their endorsement to the overall marketing community, and in particular to their clients, provides a jump start to fascinating sponsorship and marketing opportunities.”

Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, said that the SFX investment was a smaller one for his company; he compared it to WPP’s investments in Vice, the Weinstein Company and others.

“These are areas of content that we think are interesting to the younger age groups, particularly in digital, which are the age groups of interest to our clients,” Mr. Sorrell said.

The investment is expected to be disclosed on Monday.

In the 1990s, Mr. Sillerman, through an earlier incarnation of SFX, spent $1.2 billion acquiring dozens of regional rock promoters, establishing a national network to attract corporate sponsors. Those assets, sold to Clear Channel Communications in 2000 for $4.4 billion, now form the basis of the concert division of Live Nation Entertainment, where sponsorship represents more than a third of the company’s adjusted operating income.

Exactly what form sponsorship might take at SFX’s events was unclear. The dance world has largely been run independently, with minimal corporate branding, and that ethos persists even as the genre has become big business. Furthermore, Mr. Sillerman said, the classic model of celebrity endorsement is old-fashioned, necessitating more subtle forms of marketing.

“The days of Yogi Berra holding up a can of Yoo-Hoo are long gone,” he said. “Association with those forms of entertainment that people love is a much more powerful endorsement than a direct one.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/wpp-invests-in-sfx-entertainment/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: SFX Entertainment Buys Electronic Dance Music Site

February 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment

SFX Entertainment, the company led by the media executive Robert F. X. Sillerman, has agreed to buy the music download site Beatport, part of the company’s plan to build a $1 billion empire centered on the electronic dance music craze.

Mr. Sillerman declined on Tuesday to reveal the price. But two people with direct knowledge of the transaction, who were not authorized to speak about it, said it was for a little more than $50 million.

Beatport, founded in Denver in 2004, has become the pre-eminent download store for electronic dance music, or E.D.M., with a catalog of more than one million tracks, many of them exclusive to the service. It says it has nearly 40 million users, and while the company does not disclose sales numbers, it is said to be profitable.

The site has also become an all-purpose online destination for dance music, with features like a news feed, remix contests and D.J. profiles. Those features, and its reach, could help in Mr. Sillerman’s plan to unite the disparate dance audience through media.

“Beatport gives us direct contact with the D.J.’s and lets us see what’s popular and what’s not,” Mr. Sillerman said in an interview. “Most important, it gives us a massive platform for everything related to E.D.M.”

Since the company was revived last year, SFX has focused mostly on live events, with the promoters Disco Donnie Presents and Life in Color; recently it also invested in a string of nightclubs in Miami and formed a joint venture with IDT, the European company behind festivals like Sensation, to put on its events in North America.

In the 1990s, Mr. Sillerman spent $1.2 billion creating a nationwide network of concert promoters under the name SFX, which he sold to Clear Channel Entertainment in 2000 for $4.4 billion; those promoters are now the basis of Live Nation’s concert division.

Matthew Adell, Beatport’s chief executive, said that being part of SFX could help the company extend its business into live events, and also into countries where the dance genre is exploding, like India and Brazil.

“We already are by far the largest online destination of qualified fans and talent in the market,” Mr. Adell said, “and we can continue to grow that.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/sfx-entertainment-buys-electronic-dance-music-site/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: Folk and Rock are Ascendant at the Grammys, and a Belated Focus on Drones

February 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Blues-rock band the Black Keys and their frontman Dan Auerbach were the big winners at the Grammy Awards Sunday night, walking away with four statues, but folk-rock group Mumford Sons won the album of the year for “Babel,” James C. McKinley Jr. writes. Belgian-Australian songwriter Gotye won three trophies, including record of the year and best pop duo, and Fun. won best new artist and song of the year for “We Are Young.” Adele became the first woman since Barbra Streisand to win the award for best pop solo performance two years in a row, Frank Ocean won for best contemporary urban album, and Kanye West and Jay-Z won three awards for their collaboration album, “Watch the Throne.” The nominations for the top four awards favored rock and folk while ignoring electronic dance music, hip-hop and country.

The Grammy Awards were an exercise in anachronism, Ben Ratliff writes, and the big winners were strummed strings, whomped drumheads and massed, inexact unisons. The awards are a perennially flawed metric for honoring popular music because the winners invariably conform to the biases of older voters who are well past their prime in the industry, Jon Caramanica gripes. If the Grammy narrative is to be believed, the last time there was musical innovation to be celebrated was in the mid-1980s. The Grammys of 2045 will probably not be any different. Think of the complaints future critics will lodge: the Grammy Awards favor familiar modes! Youthful innovation is not being rewarded!

The public and Congress did not seem engaged in debate over the Obama administration’s frequent use of unmanned drones before the confirmation hearings for John O. Brennan, President Obama’s prospective head of the Central Intelligence Agency. The lack of interest was not because journalists ignored the issue, David Carr writes in The Media Equation. Perhaps the reason we remain in the dark is because we want it that way — if the bad guys are on the run without boots on the ground, what’s not to like? The government has carefully shielded the drone project every step of the way, he writes, but the fact remains that drone strikes will require a new legal framework, much like nuclear weapons in the 1940s.

NBC Universal will announce Monday that it has concluded a deal with Hearst magazines to rebrand one of NBC’s cable properties as the Esquire Network, after the magazine of the same name, Bill Carter writes. Bonnie Hammer, NBC’s top cable executive, said the channel G4, currently devoted to gaming, would be changed into a kind of “upscale Bravo for men.” The channel will not be duplicative of the magazine, though there will be some crossover. The Esquire network will feature two new original shows and will rebroadcast the comedies “Parks and Recreation” and “Party Down,” both of which star Adam Scott, who is something of an ideal for the network.

The women’s magazine Self is rebranding in hopes of reaching a somewhat younger audience, Tanzina Vega reports. Self, published by Condé Nast, is broadening its tight focus on exercise and wellness to become a more general lifestyle magazine infused with beauty and fashion, an effort that will include editorial changes, a new cover design and logo. The editorial shift is most evident in the chatty headlines for subsections of the magazine and more fashion-focused images. The redesign has already interested new advertisers like LeSportSac.

The Financial Times is celebrating its 125th birthday on Wednesday and, unlike many newspapers, may actually have cause for celebration, Eric Pfanner reports. The F.T. appears to have adapted to the changing media landscape — last year the number of digital subscribers, 300,000, surpassed the number of people who subscribe to print; subscription revenues are expected to surpass ad sales this year; and mobile devices account for one-quarter of the paper’s digital traffic. Analysts said that the boom in digital subscriptions hides the fact that online advertising has yet to catch on in a big way, which helps explain why The F.T. continues publishing a print edition to appeal to luxury advertisers.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/the-breakfast-meeting-folk-and-rock-are-ascendant-at-the-grammys-and-a-belated-focus-on-drones/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Boston Radio Station Switches to Electronic Dance Format

December 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

“Dance music just doesn’t work on the air.”

For years, that has been an inflexible truism in the radio business. Any record executive with a little experience in the promotions department will have stories to tell of visiting a pop station with a killer dance record — solid gold, baby, I’m telling you — only to be waved away by the program director.

This may be changing, however, as electronic dance music, or E.D.M., continues its surge in mainstream popularity and more media companies look to it as a way to a fun-loving, free-spending young audience. The clearest sign of this changing market emerged in Boston on Thursday, as the radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications introduced what one of its executives called “the first real E.D.M. station in the country.”

Shortly before 6 p.m. on WHBA there, just as Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” faded out, a dance theme churned for a few minutes before the song “Don’t You Worry Child” by the E.D.M. stars Swedish House Mafia began to play, and thus was born Clear Channel’s new Evolution station, at 101.7 FM.

Evolution began just six weeks ago as an online-only station through the company’s iHeartRadio app,with the popular British D.J. Pete Tong as its leading voice.

Tom Poleman, Clear Channel’s president of national programming platforms, said the online station was intended partly as a test of the format, and that the reaction to it was so positive — it instantly became the most popular digital-only station on iHeartRadio — that the company decided to give it a go as a terrestrial station, where the investment and risk are, of course, much greater.

“It reaffirmed our gut that this is something that is ready for prime time,” Mr. Poleman said in an interview.

In what could be interpreted as a bit of symbolism about the tides of the music business, Evolution is taking over the former frequency of WFNX, for decades one of the country’s most influential alternative rock stations. Clear Channel bought the station in May for $14.5 million, changed its call letters to WHBA, and set it on an “adult hits” format, which is promoted with on-air tagline “We play anything.” (On Thursday afternoon, the songs included Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and Counting Crows’ cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”)

Electronic dance music’s latest flirtation with the mainstream took root several years ago, as Top 40 began to embrace dance-heavy pop acts like Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas, and artists like David Guetta came to be seen not just as their producers but stars in their own right. (On Thursday, Spotify announced that Mr. Guetta’s 2011 album “Nothing but the Beat” was the service’s most popular album over the last year.)

Yet dance has struggled to find a hold on the radio. Many broadcasters have dabbled in it; the most recent example is KDHT-FM in Denver, which was briefly a dance station before switching last month to the “Jack” pop format. Billboard monitors only five full-time terrestrial dance stations for its dance/mix show airplay chart.

Boston is the 10th-largest radio market in the country, with an audience of just over four million, as ranked by the ratings service Arbitron.

Discounting stations like WKTU-FM in New York, which play plenty of dance music but technically have a “hot adult contemporary” format — leaning toward pop hits — Boston would be the biggest market in the country with a full-time E.D.M. station like Evolution.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/boston-radio-station-switches-to-electronic-dance-format/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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