Music crazes unpredictably rise to and fall from prominence all the time, hence where the phrase “one hit wonder” comes from. Even within EDM, the genre known as Dubstep became wildly popular almost overnight with artists like Bassnectar, Datsik, and Skrillex receiving attention from mainstream outlets such as Billboard. Its popularity roughly lasted from mid 2011 to mid 2013 before falling out of relevance and becoming a niche market genre, almost like the Punk Rock or Ska of EDM. To attempt to maintain EDM’s lucrative status, I have come up with a couple of suggestions that may help keep EDM popular with consumers and profitable with marketers. 

       1) First off I would recommend all artists, festivals, brands, etc. to be actively engaged on social media accounts. Social media has changed nearly everything about the way we promote ourselves, its now more important than ever for public figures to maintain a positive online presence. It was also evidenced in the survey I conducted and administered that consumers enjoy following their favorite artists who post for and interact with their followers on social media. The positive relationship between the artist (brand) and fan (consumer) then becomes reinforced even further when a sense of engagement is created between the two. It may become time-consuming depending on the amount of followers attempting to engage, but the value of having fans that profess their fanatical love to you on social media and show their support is immeasurable. 

       2) Next, I would recommend to live event conglomerates who have invested interests in music sales such as Live Nation and SFX, as well as to the organizations who are responsible for hosting some of todays most popular festivals like Ultra Enterprises and Insomniac events, to focus more of their marketing efforts on further increasing event sales. Currently there are more and more music festivals happening each year that its impossible to believe people can keep track of them all, or even be able to attend a fraction of them based on the expensive cost of a weekend at a music festival. Festivals nowadays should make an effort to increase awareness about reasons why people should attend that festival over the multitude of festivals happening around that time. Whether it’s because of a popular line-up, a quality festival set-up and visual display, or a desirable price tag, most festivals make changes from year to year to try and compete with each other. As previously mentioned in an article from my literature review about data presented at a convention for music industry professionals by Tatiana Simonian, Neilsen’s VP of branded music, 11.2 billion EDM tracks have been streamed over the course of the past year. One way I propose to raise awareness about various music festivals going on throughout the year is for the festival to design a 30-second audio advertisement to be run during the commercial breaks on EDM Pandora and Spotify stations. This message has the potential to reach millions upon billions of people and directly targets individuals who listen to EDM and therefore would most likely be interested in attending EDM festivals Additionally, the findings stated that 32 million fans attend music festivals every year, spend on average about $138 on the cost of tickets, and concluded that people are more open to spending large amounts to travel to far away festivals with cheaper ticket prices than they are willing to throw down on the ticket cost for a festival closer to home. My suggestion to combat this is for festivals to look into partnering with any major airline to offer package deals that include flight + tickets + potentially hotel room and rental car. This will hopefully give more people the option to attend festivals being held far away locations without having to go entirely bankrupt in the process. 

       3) My last suggestion for how to better monetize EDM is to start charging fans for access to online live streams of music festivals. In the Eventbrite infographic I discussed back in my literature review, it mentioned in their findings how over half of the EDM fans surveyed revealed that they would pay for access to live streaming of a festival. Originally made popular by Miami’s Ultra Music Festival back in 2011 with a live YouTube stream of the event, major festivals from around the globe like EDC and Tomorrowland have started broadcasting their festivals live on various online video websites. Each year the Ultra live stream receives roughly 8 million views over the span of three days, add that to the roughly 300,000 people in attendance and that adds up to a lot of potential impressions to be made. However the live streams contain very minimal advertising because it is known by marketers that EDM fans do not want to be sold to, which begs the question, how can this become more profitable? Personally I get excited for the Ultra live feed, each year me and my friends all hang out, hook the feed up to a big TV with good speakers and watch the live feed with a few beers. It gives fans a chance to feel like they are a part of the experience in addition to hearing new and unreleased material being played by some of their favorite artists at one of the biggest festivals in EDM. However as a consumer and EDM live stream fan, I personally wouldn’t be too amenable to paying for access to the live stream unless it was something negligible like a dollar. Which still would amount to nearly $8 million dollars, but something tells me that if they started charging for access to live streams that it would be more expensive than just a dollar, as there are many people that would need to receive their compensation from this profit. My proposal to coerce fans like myself into paying for access to a live stream is to set the price somewhere between $5-10 per, but once the live stream is over you still have the option to go back to the page and listen to the sets over again. This way the consumer feels like they aren’t being taken advantage of for a couple bucks and that they are paying for exclusive access to live sets. In addition to the half of EDM fans that already said they would agree to pay for access to the broadcast, the ability to re-watch the festival set after it has ended should be enough to give the other half of EDM fans enough incentive to want to sign up as well.