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Last week we focused on answering the questions “Who Are Your Customers, And What Are Their Needs?” We identified a few basic core needs, and what they mean to your customer, and in this week’s article we have matched up these core needs with different categories of product an artist can offer to fulfill these needs. By fulfilling the needs, an artist can develop and grow a relationship with the customer, and monetize this relationship. In today’s changing media and music industry landscape it’s important to shift our focus from monetizing content, to monetizing the audience. The model around monetizing content (recorded music sales, charging for a physical news paper, etc.) is broken, but the good news is that our ability to monetize the audience that consumes the content is growing leaps and bounds. Fred Wilson wrote an interesting article about this, which can be found here. This doesn’t mean we can’t charge for music anymore, or continue to monetize content. It just means we have to open our eyes to the changes before us, and make good use of this knowledge by expanding our relationship with our customers. A healthy mix of transaction-based and relationship based activities will position an artist best for success.

But back to the topic at hand, matching our customer’s needs, with products we can offer to satisfy the needs. Erik applied his powerpoint skills and created this graphic representation of our brainstorm. Did we miss anything?

In our next article we will shift our focus from Individual Customers to Corporate Customers, a distinction we made in Part Two of this series.

(This is the third part in an on-going series of articles written together with McKinsey & Co’sErik Rutten*. Through regular brainstorms we will examining the music industry starting from an outsider’s perspective as business men and music lovers, and working our way through the different aspects during the next six weeks. *Erik is on sabbatical and the views expressed are his own, not his employer’s.)