2018 music industry predictions from the Australian pros

There is momentum for good people in the music industry, and they will use their hearts and act with compassion. Caring for themselves, behaving in the workplace and giving to their community in some way.

3. We'll start to finally see the term "digital marketing" disappear

Stephen Green, SGC Media

I think the trend for 2018 will be the continued peeling back of bullshit in the industry, creating a happier, healthier albeit at times more uncomfortable industry. There's the continued calling out of the underbelly of sexual harassment and prejudice in its many forms that will continue to improve the working conditions for everyone and with a greater range of voices feeling welcome to be part of our industry, we'll only get stronger. This is going to take years, but if 2017 was the year we called it out, 2018 needs to be the year we change the game.

In music marketing, metrics and real data will continue their march across assumptions and the "way things have always worked". For radio, there's now real metrics to tell you when things are played and what impact those plays really have, cutting through the crap that a few spins at night are making a difference or that your independent dance track with no momentum actually has a chance if you have the right label or plugger. The press industry (including us publicists) are going to have to stop hiding between "readership" metrics that have no relationship to who is reading the ads they are selling or stories that are being written. Online outlets hiding behind rubbery "hit" numbers or visitor numbers that don't reflect who actually reads each article are going to start getting found out. We'll finally realise that the number of likes is not as important as post engagement on social media. We'll realise that a non-targeted low-CPM remainder banner ads are not actually cheap if nobody remembers having seen it. Conversely, people will realised that "youth focused" isn't a genre and if they want to sell ads with specialist CPMs they need to cultivate a specialist audience.

We'll start to finally see the term "digital marketing" disappear as everyone realises it's just "marketing" and those that focus on "online" or "offline" and expect someone else to handle the rest (or expect that artists or labels have the budget to hire others to bridge their knowledge gap) are doomed to irrelevancy. Good music marketing companies will be judged as much on their ability to create a direct targeting audience as they are on being able to get songs on the radio or articles in press. Streaming services being seen as marketing tools will also start to move back to reality as people realise that hearing a song at position #15 on a chill-out playlist might have gotten you a lot of streams, but didn't necessarily get people interested in you as an artist, so while important it isn't the magic bullet 2016/17 would have had you believe. Smart music marketers in 2018 will get back to realising that exposure and fascination are both important and if you aren't looking after both in tandem, you've failed.

I think we'll see 2018 as a better year for commercial Australian music than what 2017 was and a swing back towards slightly less rigid commercial radio genre formats and perhaps that allergy to guitars might subside slightly. Or maybe I'm just hoping. We'll see more "nationalizing" of commercial radio with the facade that there's real difference in playlists state by state disappearing. Music content in print newspapers will continue to decline. We'll continue to see the Coles/Woolies-style consolidation of Spotify and Apple Music as the smaller players all get taken out or merged in. Amazon Music will launch as a third force in Australia. Facebook will continue to make moves into the music space also. And SGC Media will have a multi-million dollar takeover bid launched at it which it will promptly accept, the proceeds of which will be promptly wasted on funding a 90s renaissance label.