EPISODE 226: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Jaime Marconette

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Jaime Marconette for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Jaime and here’s what we discussed about-

1. How data-driven decisions shape marketing, touring, and fan engagement.

2. Building background through major label digital strategy and independent artist services.

3. Identifying optimal social platforms for targeted promotional efforts.

4. Tailoring communications to diverse audiences across Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.

5. The impact of AI on music marketing, data analysis, and industry operations.

6. Addressing complex issues around AI-generated content revenue allocation.

7. How technology, AI, and digital tools will shape the next phase of music marketing.

About our host:

Randy Rayess is the co-founder of Outgrow.co, a platform designed to help marketers create highly interactive web and social experiences to drive referral traffic and lead generation. With a background in venture capital, private equity, and startups focusing on financial services, transaction processing, and machine learning, He is passionate about leveraging technology to transform marketing strategies. He believes in shifting from traditional advertising to creating valuable tools and experiences for customers. 

About our guest:

Jaime Marconette is the VP of Music Insights & Industry Relations at Luminate, the data company behind the Billboard charts. With a background in digital strategy and data-driven artist marketing, he previously led digital strategy at Sony Music Nashville. His expertise spans music insights, industry relations, and progressive marketing strategies.

TikTok, Touring & Trends: Jaime Marconette’s Guide to Music Marketing in the Data Age

The Intro!

Randy Rayess: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Randy Rayess, and I’m the co-founder at Outgrow. co. And for this month, we are going to interview Jaime Marconette, who is the VP of Music Insights & Industry Relations at Luminate.

Jaime Marconette: Great to be here. Thank you.

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Challenge yourself with this trivia about the exciting topics Jaime Marconette covered in the podcast.

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The Big Questions!

Randy Rayess: Welcome everyone to Marketer of the Month. Today we have a guest from Luminate. Jamie works in Luminate and focuses on media insights and industry relations, specifically the music industry. So to get started, we’re gonna learn a little bit about Luminate. So Jamie, welcome to the show. Can you give us a little bit of information about Luminate and what you guys do? 

Jaime Marconette: Yeah, for sure. Well thanks, Randy. Thanks for having me. Really, excited to be here today as we’re in Austin. So Luminate is the most comprehensive data set for the music industry here in the United States. A lot of people do know us as the data company that powers the billboard charts, but we have over 500 daily sources of data that come to us from all over the world. So we’re able to get eyes on music consumption. We have insights research out in international territories as well to put that consumer why to the consumption what. And that’s just on the music side. We also have a film and TV division as well, where we’re doing some really interesting things. And then we also have a data enrichment offering, which is really helping to try to solve some of the challenges and metadata issues as well.

Randy Rayess: Very interesting. And so I was curious about how you got into Luminate. I know you have a very interesting career trajectory having worked in the agencies and then ending up at Luminate. Can you just quickly give us an overview of how you ended up at Luminate and why you chose it?

Jaime Marconette: Yeah. So I’ll start where I am right now. Vice president of music insights and industry relations. And my role at Luminate is to try to help make sense of a lot of the big music industry trends, and then share those out to broad audiences. So we have a couple of flagship reports that I work on, like the year-end report, mid-year report, and other conference presentations. Really just taking a massive amount of data and helping the industry make sense of what’s going on. Now, I kind of started there because of my career, I spent about eight and a half years at a major label in digital marketing, and digital strategy. I also worked at an independent music row company, more in the artist services world. So I think that when looking back on my career and all the different steps, whether it was the artist services world or the major label digital strategy world, it’s all been about harnessing data to activate and market for an artist to really engage fans.  

Randy Rayess: Very interesting. So one of the things that I find interesting is how the digital strategy must have changed over the course of your career. And so how do you think through artists where they’re kind of getting all this data, and obviously a lot of it is from Luminate, and they’re basically trying to make a decision in terms of how do we kind of activate our audience? How do we grow our audience? How has that first changed over the course of your career? And where do you see people kind of focussing on now in terms of how to build that audience?

Jaime Marconette: Yeah, sure. And that’s a great question. So, you know, one of the things that’s been so cool, especially about the last 10 years, 15 years, is that there is so much more data, right? And I guess that’s kind of a blessing and a curse because there’s so much to sift through. So you’ve got to also kind of get rid of some of the noise that’s out there. But I would say that in today’s world, there is so much more data that’s available. So you really can use that as guideposts for your decisions, whether it’s, hey, where do I want to tour? What cities? Who’s playing my music? Who’s over-indexing that? Or maybe it’s, okay, well, I have an offering that I want to see how my vinyl is going to do, or what should I put in my merch store? Or, you know, even just how my track’s doing. Or one of the key reasons that a lot of people use our data is because they want to see how they’re doing compared to other people, right? So if your numbers and streaming numbers are up 6%, but the industry is up 8%, you know, it puts things into context. So, you know, long story short on that is that there’s so much more data that’s available, and it’s very helpful. So I think that artists today, labels today, their teams, their management teams, everybody has a much clearer sense about what’s actually happening on like a day-to-day basis where they never had that before. Maybe you would, you know, 20 years ago, you’d send off a survey and you’d get some answers back, you know, a few months later, but you don’t know what just happened yesterday. And so I think that that really puts people into an interesting position where they can see what’s happening and then use that as a guidepost for what they want to do.

Randy Rayess: Yeah, I think market research has obviously dramatically changed the game because you get that market research, you get to understand what happens, and then you can make better decisions because you have more recent data. So it’s really interesting. And then when you look at channels, like so there’s one part is obviously deciding where to be, like where to perform, where to tour. There’s also like where to promote the tours, and where to promote the events. So, you know, you have Facebook, you have LinkedIn, you have TikTok, you have Instagram. LinkedIn might not be as relevant since it’s music, but TikTok, definitely Instagram, maybe even Snapchat. So how do you guys think through, or how have you seen people, the industry change when it comes to like, which channels are we choosing to allocate budget when it comes to marketing these events? 

Jaime Marconette: Yeah, well, I think probably the most efficient and smartest strategies that I’ve seen are really understanding who’s the audience you want to go after and where are they, right? Because, let’s just, you know, a big social platform of choice, right? Maybe everybody’s on Instagram or everybody’s on TikTok or everybody’s on Snapchat or everybody’s on, you know, but does that mean it’s totally right for you and your fans? You know, I mean, I guess that really, you know, those are some questions that you need to answer. And of course, maybe all of those are correct and those are right. But, you know, I think where you start to get a little bit savvier about it is when you can actually start to identify where your fans are, or at least your targeted fans, you know, the ones you want to engage with the most, and then start tailoring that messaging to meet them there. I’ll tell you also, like, you know, through my past experience, the fans that are on all of these different platforms could be wildly different. Your Instagram fans may be completely different than your Facebook fans, completely different than your TikTok fans. So then also understanding how to communicate with them, because I’ve got some good stories about, you know, this same exact post, but placed in a few different places and reacting completely differently, you know?  So it’s very interesting how those, sort of those nuances come.

Randy Rayess: So that’s great. And do you feel like going on the marketing channel, like when it comes to one channel that a lot of music kind of has been, has kind of really, I would say, revolutionized music discovery is TikTok, right? People, a lot of people discover at least small snippets of songs that they like on TikTok. How have you guys seen it, I know you guys have a report that you recently released on TikTok. So can you talk a little bit about that? 

Jaime Marconette: Yeah, of course. So our insights team recently did a report and released it wide with TikTok on the power of the platform for TikTok and how it impacts the music industry. And one of the key things that they found when looking at our consumer research tied to TikTok data as well, is that, you know, there is an incredible amount of music discovery happening on TikTok. It’s just, it really is powering that. And if you start to look at, you know, a lot of your top songs as well, you know, the upper echelon of the songs, it really helps drive those as well. So it’s happening, it’s helping with music discovery. And then I think one of the really key aspects and, you know, around it is that you’re actually having fans physically engaged a lot of times with your music too, whether they’re doing a trend or whether they’re doing, you know. Something that they’re creating. At the very least, they’re creating something, right? A post of some sort with the music. And I feel like that also kind of just bonds people together with the music a little bit more too. So it’s really helping to do that. And then, you know, obviously, when people are able to see their friends doing something and want to participate, it’s just really kind of sharing music out further. So, you know, we have seen that TikTok as a channel has really helped a lot with music discovery. And, you know, we have a lot of data to back that up. You know, but I think that the act of participation on the fan side in some sort of piece of content, I think that goes far away as well in creating that bond with the artist and with the music.

Randy Rayess: Yeah, I agree. I think there’s a big difference between the sharing content. Like I like the song, I share it versus I’m actually innovating with the content. I might be using a video or using some dance, I’m actually kind of creating something novel with it. And that new content creation adds a new layer of like kind of marketing, right? Of that content. 

Jaime Marconette: 100%. And we actually, you know, getting out of the report that we just did a little bit too, we’ve kind of taken a look at, I think it was our mid-year report last year where we actually looked at different genre fans and how likely they are to post. And you definitely start to see some differences with some really highly engaged fan groups. I’m thinking about, you know, K-pop fans or country music fans or others who are really engaged and really posting out there a lot too. So it’s really lean in for them. Like they’re actively seeking it out and then they’re spreading that further. And those platforms are so good at being able to enable that. I mean, you know, you look at Reels, you look at YouTube Shorts, you look at all of them, they’re really able to help, you know, carry that message further.

Randy Rayess: Right. One of the things that has come up a lot at this conference at South by Southwest in Austin is how AI is changing marketing and other industries as well. And how have you seen AI play a role in the music industry? Could be marketing, could be other verticals. Like how is it impacting the way the music industry operates and how things are being done? 

Jaime Marconette: Well, I think that there’s, when you’re talking about AI, I think there’s two different tracks, right? There’s generative AI, which is, you know, there’s a lot of conversation. There’s a lot of conversation about that, I’ll say that. And, you know, so there’s generative AI. And, you know, I’m not gonna, I’m obviously, you know, there’s people way smarter than me when it comes to the copyright discussion and all that. So, there’s that kind of AI. And then there’s like the AI that’s, you know, more tool or function or, you know, not creating something, but actually analyzing it, helping you to do things faster, helping you to understand audiences better. And I think that, so there are two different AI tracks. And I really do think that the latter of sort of the tools and the functions and the ability to, you know, help go through music data at scale, you know, I mean, these sorts of things, like that’s really important stuff that could really speed people’s jobs up and bring them to answers faster. So I think that we’re kind of seeing it used as a tool, which is the latter that I was talking about. And then also, you know, sort of the generative AI. And those are two separate things, but I think, you know, obviously the both huge conversations in the industry right now. And I think that, you know, there’s a lot to be, you know, figured out about it still. That’s for sure too. I was just in a panel when they were talking about it and how much still needs to be figured out. But I’m also fascinated again about how to use it as a tool, scaling, getting you to the answers that you need faster. And it does seem to help with those sorts of questions as well.

Randy Rayess: Yeah, I think in the short term, right, the usage of AI as a tool to help understand that, customers help understand where to market, how to market your messaging, just that from all those areas, it makes a lot of sense. And then over time, we’re going to figure out how this generative works. Because I think, especially in the music industry, if it’s just obviously using music already created, and then if it’s using, you know, millions of songs, how do you allocate all future revenue that this AI song generates? It’s going to be a very difficult question that the music industry has to figure out, but also other industries need to figure it out. The publishing industry, all needs to figure out how they’re going to allocate credit because it’s not as direct as taking all this information from one musician and then recreating, I’m taking it from the average of all these musicians, and then I’m trying to create something new.

Jaime Marconette: You’re right, it’s really a question for all creatives in all arts, right? And yeah, its impact is wide-reaching.

Randy Rayess: Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see how that develops over time. So the next thing I wanted to talk to you about was, I know you’re doing a panel on superfans. So I wanted to kind of just touch on a little bit about what you’re going to cover there and how you feel superfans are kind of changing the way or impacting the way musicians kind of build a loyal following and why they’re so important.

Jaime Marconette: That’s a great question. So yeah, I’m very excited to do this panel tomorrow. We have a fantastic group of panelists as well. Jun Choi, president of Weverse is on the panel. We also have Mitra from Hype Geffen, president, and then Sarah, who leads industry relations as a title. So just a really informed panel. And one of the things I was thinking about in terms of my prep is, we’ve all seen those, we’ve all seen those videos from the ’60s when Elvis Presley or the Beatles played and everybody just went completely wild. Well, those are all superfans, right? And so the concept of superfans has been around forever. Kind of getting back to what we were talking about at the beginning of our conversations, like digital data understanding of superfans has just gotten so much better. But the overall concept of superfans, I mean, this has been forever, right? And so I think that what is happening today is that we’re just so much better at understanding them. We can engage with them digitally, we can meet them where they are. So not everybody had to be in the Ed Sullivan Theatre. It’s actually like you can meet superfans where they are. And I think that that really helps open that up. Now, in terms of the psyche of a superfan, at Luminate we see a few different characteristics. And I think that for your marketers out there, I think they’ll definitely relate to this is that they’re early adopters. And I remember in my marketing class, I was like, hey, identify your early adopters because they’re gonna be the ones that champion you. They’re gonna be the ones to share. And that’s what we’re seeing with superfans. And so I think one of the ways to think about superfans, especially for people who might not be as in the weeds on it as some others is that these are your early adopters and your people who are gonna champion. These are the people who for the iPhone release would have been waiting out there 48 hours earlier, right? Like these are superfans. And so connecting with them has a really big impact on the overall industry because they’re gonna champion you out. It becomes part of their own identity. And they also love being superfans. So they communicate with other superfans. But all this does is really foster this group of fans that are early adopters and be able to champion. Now, there are other things that superfans do. They spend more on live. They spend more on merch and physical music and things like that. So there’s also obviously the understanding of their lifetime value and how they bring a lot to the table in that game. So obviously there’s gonna be some interest just from that as well. But I think that sometimes when I’m thinking about superfans, it’s that the concept has been around forever. It’s just that we are so much better at identifying them and now engaging them where they are for them to build these relationships with their favorite artists. And then from the sort of the label business marketing side, share that with other people as well. 

Randy Rayess: Right, yeah. One of the interesting things we’ve seen is people basically build outgrow contests or just contests in general. And when you look at the percentage of your follower base that’s signing up for your contests or your giveaways, those are usually people who are, I would say, either superfans or one level below superfans. They’re more avid than just to follow. And so then you’re getting a subset of those who are on the giveaways and in the contests. And then your superfans are the ones who are trying to gamify those contests. They try to do multiple submissions. They’re trying to do things. And so you kind of see that even from contests, you’re able to say like, oh, this is an outgrow contest that we ran and we had one million submissions. But if you look at these one million submissions, we can basically say that this is much more, on the scale of from follower to superfan, these are on the right side of that scale, closer to superfan, the ones who signed up for the contest. So you’re basically getting a subset.

Jaime Marconette: And I love that you point that out because I oftentimes get asked, and I’ve got a little bit different answer, but I oftentimes get asked, well, how can I find my superfans? Where are they? And your answer is a really good one. They’re the ones who are signing up for these contests and things. I’ve also said, hey, anybody who buys a physical product through your merch store, put them in the superfan category. And so I think that there’s But that’s sort of how the beauty of data is being able to start looking at this and being able to say, okay, well, how can I identify them? Or where do I know they are, where they are? But how can I find them? Because all of that value that we just discussed is also once you’ve been able to locate them, right? So your example was a fantastic one in terms of like, okay, well, how do I know which group of my fans are the superfans that I should engage with on the front end?

Randy Rayess: Yeah, and I think the interesting part is like, if you were to analyze the superfan base in the old way we do, like the old way you would do a superfan analysis is you would basically put people maybe into two or three categories of like low engagement, medium engagement, high engagement, and superfan behind engagement. Today with AI, I think that changed the game because now you can even say, there are different types of superfans. There’s a superfan who might be an older person who can’t go to watch me live, but they love my music and they buy all my merch. Then there’s a superfan who might be young who travels around the country to see me tour in different locations. And then those are different types of superfans. You might wanna message them differently, give them different offers and different messages that pre-AI you couldn’t do. It was not possible to go through a million possible superfans and then segment them.

Jaime Marconette: It’s a lot easier, right? Yeah, it’s a lot easier to do that at scale. You’re right. Yeah, I would have thought about like some of those, some of those big data programs I’m thinking about like the SPSS and in the world of like trying to do my cluster, cluster analysis and like figuring all that out. But you’re right. Those are the sorts of things where like, it opens that up to other people too, right? Maybe you’re working on a small management team and you don’t have the resources to be able to go out and do all of those programs. Maybe there’s a way to start to look at your data a little bit differently using AI and helping you get there to be able to bring those insights to more people. 

Randy Rayess: Yeah, because now the offers, you don’t have to, you’re not predefining the offer you’re giving. You’re telling the AI to basically figure out, okay, like this guy or girl has gone to these many shows of mine and bought this type of merch. What makes sense for me to give them as an offer or for me to engage with them? And you can kind of make categories. I think I know on x.com, they have the subscriptions and you can give different benefits to subscribers. And so you have followers who are not paying anything and then you have subscribers who are paying money and then you can give them benefits for subscribers and you can say, oh, this guy’s paying 200 bucks.This guy’s paying 50 bucks. I’m gonna give them different benefits.

Jaime Marconette: Definitely. And you are starting to see that, right? Catch on with the Patreon model. And those sorts of things. Like there are other platforms that are doing that too. And that is one thing that I’ve kind of got my eye on too is how that continues to build here in the US as well. I know that the idea of tipping artists is probably a little bit bigger, has been a little bit bigger in some other countries, but sort of the Patreon model and the one you just described, I am interested in how that will kind of progress in the US as well.

Randy Rayess: Yeah, yeah. And that would be cool actually to think about even how it plays out in publishing. If someone writes an amazing blog post and you wanna tip them, what’s a good mechanism to tip them? Yeah, so it’s gonna be interesting to see how that plays out. But yeah, we’re in like this time of uncertainty, but also excitement and energy and to see which model is gonna win. And there might be many models that work in the future that do that kind of work. So it’s exciting times. So those were kind of the main things that I wanted to cover. Is there anything that you wanted to kind of. In closing, I like to ask questions around advice that you’d give to people in the music industry or people who wanna get into music. What kind of general advice would you give them? And yeah, what would you kind of like that?

Jaime Marconette: Yeah, well, kind of talking about super fans in a little bit of a way is that I think that music and film and others, other creative pursuits, I think are really interesting in terms of the stakeholder dynamics. And what I mean is that in the music industry, the artists are obviously passionate about the music, right? Like they wouldn’t be artists if they weren’t passionate. Your fans are, a lot of them are very passionate about it as well. So your consumers are passionate. And then what I have found is that in the music industry, your staff and your employees and your teams are passionate as well. Now, I can’t think of a tonne of industries that we’re all sort of, your whole 360 of stakeholders are all passionate. Film, I could see gaming, it’s sort of these arts pursuits I think are probably where that lands. But what I would get back to the advice question and I’ve thought about this as well is that I think it does take like a certain amount of passion for it. But what I’ve found is if you have the passion for it and you are kind of self-sustained by that passion because the music industry is not an easy place. But if you have that passion, I think that that’s probably the number one thing you can have is the passion. And I don’t know if it’s, for me it was digital stuff and marketing. Maybe it’s production or sound engineering or live. But if you have that passion, get involved and kind of follow that passion. And I think that there’s probably a spot for whatever you’re interested in inside the music industry but just really dial it in on what you’re most passionate about because I feel like that will help sustain you even through trying to get your career going.

Randy Rayess: I agree actually. I think it’s hard to, when you say a broad industry, it’s hard to kind of say, okay, what’s my role in that industry? Whereas when you actually work in a specific role, you can say, I like it, I wanna stay doing it. Or, oh, I met this other guy, he’s doing something else in the company. But I actually think that’s better for me and I moved there. So you kind of find your niche and find your role. 

Jaime Marconette: Yeah, sometimes I’ve told people too, especially if they’re just out of school, sometimes it’s better just to get your foot in the door and then you can try to figure out what it is that you really wanna do because it is competitive out there and there aren’t a tonne of jobs out there and there’s always gonna be a lot of people going for every single one. So sometimes it is also better just to get your foot in the door. Discover your passion and kind of follow it. 

Randy Rayess: Right, yeah, through that experience, you’re gonna learn and see things, even if it might not be exactly what you wanted to do at the beginning. So yeah, that was kind of all I wanted to cover and I wanted to thank you for coming on the show. This was a great podcast and I really enjoyed it.

Let’s Conclude!

Randy Rayess: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Jaime Marconette, who is the VP of Music Insights & Industry Relations at Luminate.

Jaime Marconette: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Randy Rayess: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.