Combining Talent with Creativity: Lessons Learned from the Music Biz

In the music industry, having talent is often not enough to succeed. You need to find a way to stand out and be unique. That’s true when it comes to marketing and ecommerce in the music industry as well. 

Eamon Mulligan is the VP of Product & eCommerce at EMPIRE, and it’s his job to help lead a team toward ecommerce success. The way he does that is through creativity and partnerships that have proven to drive traffic in big ways. What kind of unique ideas have they tried, how do they manage to achieve a high ROI on SMS marketing, and what do memes have to do with all of this? Find out on this episode of Up Next in Commerce. 

Main Takeaways:

• Think Outside the Box: In a sector as saturated as the music industry, you need to do everything you can to stand out and get your messaging and products in front of fans. Everyone is still using the traditional channels, but if you think outside the box and test ad content on different platforms — like meme websites — your impact might be larger than you expect.

• Employ Creative Partnerships and Campaigns: When you partner with artists and get them to buy-in to a creative marketing idea, they can put it out to their fans and followers who will be more likely to see credibility in the product because it’s coming from an artist they already trust.
• Stay Unintrusive: When utilizing something like SMS marketing, it’s important to be as unobtrusive as possible. It’s also critical to make transacting through text easy by providing direct links and easy access to the store or the cart they left behind.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Welcome, everyone, to Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, your host, and today on the show, we have Eamon Mulligan, the VP of Product and eCommerce at EMPIRE. Eamon, welcome.

Eamon:

Thank you for having me.

Stephanie:

How's it going?

Eamon:

Good. Just hanging out at my home office and plugging away.

Stephanie:

Yeah?

Eamon:

Yeah.

Stephanie:

That is good. I've never had anyone on the show in this industry before, in the music industry, so I'm really excited to hear all about it. But first I want to start with you and your background. I saw you have a long history in the music industry, so I wanted to hear how you got involved in that.

Eamon:

Sure. I guess not to go back too far, but as a kid I always loved music and wanted to be in it somehow. I grew up originally in Napa, California, which is not necessarily a hotbed of the music industry. [crosstalk 00:01:04].

Stephanie:

Unless you get too much wine. I guess.

Eamon:

Yeah. I spent a lot of time traveling down to the Bay Area and watching local groups perform and eventually really attached and followed a local group called Living Legends and befriended them at the time webmaster, this is probably 1999, 2000 ish. And I didn't really know anything, what I was doing at the time, I was talking to the webmaster and asking, I read all these magazines and I see that mentioned in there, but there's never been a full on article, how does that happen? And then he went on to say, "That requires a publicist and BIOS and press kits." So then I started interviewing the guys and putting together BIOS and press kits, which I wish I still had today because I'm sure I would laugh at them.

Eamon:

And eventually, the Living Legends in 2005 asked me to go on tour with them to assist the tour manager. Previously I had been helping them with online stuff. I had started their MySpace page, their YouTube channel, was helping with an email newsletter. So that was where I cut my teeth a lot in the digital space. And then they had me go on tour. I was the assistant to the tour manager who was also doing merchandise. So I was helping set up the Merch booth, and she was teaching me how to sell stuff and keep tracking everything and all that stuff.

Eamon:

And then, with two shows left, she had left the tour ... the tour was ending right before Thanksgiving. And she left early, and they were like, "Okay, you're the tour manager now." And then I was like, "What?"

Stephanie:

Push you right into it.

Eamon:

Yeah, and they were like, "It's not that hard, it's not rocket science." And they just forced me into it

Eamon:

I had never gone to college, and so I eventually went back to school. And then so when I finally graduated from school, I initially was thinking, the music industry was fine, maybe I should try my hand at something else. And so I started taking interviews with a couple of ad agencies, advertising was interesting to me. I had taken a couple of the classes while I was in school.

Eamon:

Nothing really panned out. But at the same time, there was all these music opportunities that kept presenting themselves to me. I looked at that as like, "Okay, I think the universe is trying to tell me something here." And so we had put a release out with EMPIRE in 2011. And Ghazi, the CEO and founder, and I just built rapport, he's a Bay Area guy, grew up, born and raised in the Bay. So we just always kept in touch. And when I got out I shot him an email and said, "Hey, I'm looking for something to supplement my income, I'm still managing, but do you have anything going on?" So we went back and forth for a little bit and then he eventually brought me on to help with the physical distribution side of things and merchandise, which has been a long tale in building [crosstalk 00:07:09].

Stephanie:

Tell me a little bit about what EMPIRE is at a high level and what your role looks like there.

Eamon:

Yeah. So, EMPIRE is really like an all encompassing company. So it originally started as a digital distribution company. Ghazi the founder just completely bootstrapped, was never taken a dime of investments, refuses to sell anything, retain 100%, that kind of autonomy. And eventually the company grew into adding label services with a lot of the distribution that we did. And one of the things that set EMPIRE apart originally was for the distribution deals. He was doing non-exclusive distribution deals. And that was unheard of at the time. People would often catch when he was giving out non-exclusive distribution deals and be like pretty crazy, what are you doing?

Stephanie:

Yeah. Jump at that.

Eamon:

Yeah. His thought process was, I'm not in the business of holding people hostage. If anything, hold us accountable, because then we have to earn the business, and it keeps us honest. And so that's been one of the guiding principles of the company to this day. And so, eventually, we started adding more services and more departments. And it's grown into a full fledged record label at this point. And then we also have a publishing arm. So right now we have a distribution, record label, publishing and merchandise.

Stephanie:

That's awesome. Any artists that I would know?

Eamon:

Yeah, we work with Snoop Dogg. We just released Adam Lambert album earlier this year. We were instrumental in XXXTentacion career, unfortunately who's passed, Anderson Paak, we were a part of early. We've helped grow a lot of early artists and we're still doing that and also working with a lot of legendary artists as well.

Stephanie:

Very cool. Yeah, I do know a lot of those names. So that's very impressive. So tell me a little bit about your role at the company as the VP of product and eCommerce when it comes to thinking of record labels. I don't always think eCommerce and of course, when I started looking at you and I was like, oh, yeah, obviously they are. But tell me what your day to day looks like there?

Eamon:

Sure, I manage our physical distribution and our merchandise team. So on the physical side that looks like setting up and gathering assets for a physical release and setting it up with our physical distribution partners, and getting stuff the product made, so CD, vinyl, cassette, and then making sure that it is getting into all the right stores. We'll also do a lot of exclusive things with Urban Outfitters and Vinyl Me, Please and other retailers, Turntable Lab, et cetera.

Eamon:

And then on the merchant side that looks like managing ... we have a team of people that's, our account management and web admin and marketing and production. So we're talking with the artists that are signed to our label that we have merchandise rights with and building out merchandise items and coming up with creative ideas. Sometimes it comes all from us, sometimes it's collaborative effort, sometimes the artist has things ready to go. And then we're just helping manufacture a market. But that's ... it ranges from building out the creative, building out web stores, building out marketing assets, as well as back end automation marketing as well. And then ultimately reporting and paying out the artists.

Stephanie:

All right, cool. So when it comes to thinking about being a label, because I would think some artists might be like, "Oh I'll start up my own eCommerce platform and sell my own merchandise." What makes them want to work with you gu