My name is Jan Clausen and I'm running a company
called Factory 92, and we are doing communication and PR in the music industry, which means
mainly for radio PR, for festivals, for conferences. We are based in Germany, Hamburg. The main thing during the pandemic with the
PR was that there was no live shows and that changed everything. It was hard for bands promoting
themselves, playing live, etc. We had much more music coming out because
the musicians were at home and there is much more music.
So we had just more stuff to promote. But on the other hand, we had less media. A lot of city mags, print magazines went bankrupt
because there hadn't enough customers. That was kind of situation during the pandemic. And what's happening now and what we are expecting
with the future of the PR, the future of the events is that we are having in the spring
of 2022 much more concerts. We need much more PR, much more bands
coming on tour, new albums coming out, so there will be just an overload of o
utput. But on the other hand, we have less media,
which means we have to find ways how to promote bands and how to work with the bands.
On one hand we can use the classic media, and that will be still
important to have radio. On the other hand, we are having still some
print magazines and some online magazines, but they're getting less and less important. What we have to do now is of course focus
on the social media and also to create content. But this is kind of dangerous because the
bands have
to make music and playing live and not only creating content. For us as a PR agency, we're becoming more
like content creators and journalists, which I don't like that much because we're not
journalists, so we need journalists to do that. We have to hire journalists, we are becoming
our own media, and the bands are becoming their own media to promote themselves, which
can be dangerous because you are always just running in your own bubble and not getting
out of the bubble. It's not that easy a
nymore to discover new
music, because you're only circling in your bubble, because you don't have
that media anymore. So that would be like one of the biggest problems
or challenges in the next year. We noticed at one point that people during
the pandemic were listening to old music and they were not up for new music. And also the problem was that we had no live
shows and we missed like two generations, of new music, new bands and also the audience
missed two generations of being the first time
on the concert, being
the first time on the festival. If you were 16 and that's maybe the age
when you are just having your first concert, now you are 18 and you didn't see
any concert. That's the big problem. And this is, of course, the challenge that
we have to get all the people back, that they have to buy music, listen to music,
see bands, coming to the shows. And that will be one of the challenges next
year, especially for new bands, to get the attention, to have the chance to
create fa
ns, to being at venues because the venues will be totally booked,
to have a chance to have their own shows. You have to do it much more long term and
you have to be more creative. You have to be using your own creativity to
create your own challenge, to make your own videos, to make you on
social media, to be visible. So don't count only on the media. On the other hand, really think about how
you can reach your audience? It's not everything is Tik Tok, because everybody
saying Tik Tok is the n
ew thing. Maybe your audience is a little bit older. Maybe you are still on Facebook or YouTube. And maybe you're just playing much smaller
concerts in smaller cities, not in the big cities. So being creative, doing maybe something else
and then you have a chance. It's still possible to do good stuff. If you're
good enough the people will discover you. Radio is still the media the people listen
to it and you have a filter. Nowadays, of course, you have an algorithm
on your Spotify or Apple Musi
c account, but you can discover new stuff and you listen
to it and always you have special shows, special things and even announcements for shows and
everything, which you don't have on the Spotify playlist. And you still reach out to a lot of people. A 100.000 people in the city listen to the
music in the morning, in the afternoon, or maybe on the special shows, and normally they
also mirror all the stuff which is going on in the social media. So you have both, you have the audio music,
but als
o you're having a strong player who's pushing you on the social media.
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