1) Can you introduce yourself? Explain what you do for a living and how you started? 

 

My name is Quentin, I'm in the digital marketing department at Polydor. It's a universal label. My goal is both digital communication via social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok and Youtube. And there is also a marketing aspect, which will be advertising on the internet, whether it's banner formats or video advertising formats, also on social networks or whatever is going to be on the websites. 

I did a bachelor's degree in cultural mediation and then 2 years of MASTER specialized in music industry management. I did three internships, one at Skyrock, one at M6 music label then at polydor for almost a year and a half. 

 

2) Did social networks play a role in your professional growth? 

 

Yes and no, in music there are lots of public people. You work with artists who have their own social networks and you can be linked to artists via the networks through posts. It's a bit like the Linkedin of our job. Instagram is almost as important as Linkedin. Employers will automatically stolck what we do, see who we've worked with, what our tastes are, what our world is like. So, yes, social networks helped me. 

 

3) Have you noticed a particular influence of the media in your profession?

 

Yes, the medias are omnipresent, when you have a project you have a marketing part so you get paid more. That's what I do for example in digital marketing but it's also what project managers do in mixed marketing. There's all the advertising part, but on the other side there are also all the people who work for promotion, press promotion, TV promotion, radio promotion and web media promotion. The point is that when an artist targets specific people you can combine this forces to reach the most people and put them forward in the end. The medias are omnipresent, especially for music, whether it is radio or TV. There is also a lot of web media that is developing.

 

4) Can you give me an example of a star pushed by the media?

 

Yes, Angèle! It's perfect for this kind of campaign. It's the type of artist that can touch everyone. You can go through older media such as the press, see TV or radio but also through the web media. She has such a large audience that she will be able to go through all communication channels. Angèle is an artist who has been pushed a lot by the media and it has been very successful for her because it's one of the biggest selling artists today.

 

5) On the contrary, have social networks already participated in the failure of a career ?

 

Yes, I have two examples in mind, Sadek and Koba la D. Sadek is going to fight with an influences in Lyon and the problem is that at the time the media had filters and it was necessary to correspond to a line editorial, we could not say everything, it was filtered by journalists.

While today an artist to his community on social media and networks is like public space so he says a little bit about what he wants and can even be live with his fans.

So the problem is this, he had no filter, he wanted to do something, he filmed it and then posted it.The same thing with Koba la D when he says homophobic remarks, in the end nobody filtered, he said it on Snapchat and directly all his communities could see that. 

 

6) What do you think is the most influential platform for promoting an artist?

 

It depends on the artist typology, there are several platforms for specific artists depending on the audience of the platforms, it means that Facebook despite the fact that it is a fairly young digital network because it is linked to a Internet. It’s one of the most aging social networks, today the average is over 30 years. So that means that for some artists it is better to use the Facebook channel to find its audience. Then there is Instagram which is going to be a little more access to the image and very used for rap. It’s an urban platform like Snapchat.

And at the moment what's interesting is that there are new platforms like Tik Tok and Thriller that are coming out. 

 

7) Since the advent of streaming and online music have you found it harder to sell hardware CDs? 

 

FROM the 2000s onwards, the market for physical CDs has fallen. Since then, it has become more and more complicated to sell physical CDs.  It's to be put into perspective because it depends on the project. There are projects like Johnny Halliday that will sell a lot of CDs and very little streaming. On the other hand, there are rappers like Jul who will mostly stream and sell few albums. On the global market we are moving more towards streaming consumption, but physical sales are still going on, especially for some projects.

 We're largely heading towards digital consumption.

 

 

8) How does producers adapt to this digital format?

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In time it was the outlets, Fnac, Carrefour, specialized stores. It was the only point of contact with the consumer. So you had a stock issue, you had to put your artist as far forward as possible. So today the problem of record companies and labels is getting closer to the new point of sale which ultimately the streaming platform, in France it is especially Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, Amazon Music also which is skyrocketing . And their objective is to get as close as possible to this platform to be the best playlist possible and therefore to assemble digital teams who will try to understand how to optimize their title whether on networks or on streaming networks .