留学生作业写作需求：Marketing Plan for Jazzwise mag
Brief for a 3-year Subscription Marketing Plan for Jazzwise magazine
Prepared by Jazzwise Publications Ltd for the post-graduate Marketing Diploma course at Teeside Business School, November 2009
Contents
1. The brief – a summary
2. Jazzwise magazine – an overview
3. The general market conditions for magazines
4. The market for jazz in the UK
5. The brief in detail
1.
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The brief is to construct a marketing plan to build subscriptions to Jazzwise magazine from the present level of 1,900 to 5,000 over a three year period.
2. Jazzwise magazine – an overview www.jazzwisemagazine.com
Jazzwise magazine was launched in 1997 and is now Europe’s leading English-language jazz magazine. Published monthly in print and digital editions, Jazzwise provides an in-depth mix of news, a gig guide, well-written features and probing interviews with leading artists. It also offers the UK’s most authoritative jazz reviews section, covering CDs, DVDs, books, live gigs and musical instruments.
Publisher
Jazzwise is published by by Jazzwise Publications Ltd. www.jazzwise.com
The business was founded by its present Managing Director, Charles Alexander, in 1984 to run jazz courses and to market tuitional books and music to aspiring jazz musicians. Today it has three divisions:
• Jazzwise Magazine
• Jazzwise Direct (tuitional books and music)
• Jazzwise Education (the Jazzwise Summer School)
Achievements
Jazzwise has changed the way jazz magazines look and think with stunning graphics, a bold, fresh dynamism and a wide editorial remit. Its achievements over the past decade include being the first to ‘discover’ Jamie Cullum, Clare Teal, Soweto Kinch, Empirical, Led Bib and Portico Quartet. The magazine was the recipient of a Parliamentary Jazz Award in 2007 and Ronnie Scott’s Club Award for “Jazz Publication of the Year” in 2007.#p#分页标题#e#
Frequency
Jazzwise is published 11 times a year. The December /January issues are combined.
Covermount CDs
Three or four times a year, Jazzwise features a covermount CD, in partnership with another company, generally a record label, which meets most of the costs. Jazzwise promotes covermount issues with an advertisement in The Guardian, positioned alongside the Guardian’s reviews of new jazz CDs.
Production and print
It is edited and published by Jon Newey, who has 32 years experience in music magazine publishing, and produced at the company’s headquarters at Streatham, south-west London and printed by St Ives Roche at St Austell, Cornwall.
Jazzwise magazine is now produced in two editions:
(a) Print edition www.jazzwisemagazine.com
(b) Digital edition (launched August 2008) www.exacteditions.com/library/jazzwise
Competition
(a) Jazzwise has only one national competitor as a monthly jazz magazine with a cover price: Jazz Journal. Relaunched in May 2009 after the death of its previous editor, it also incorporates another former competitor, Jazz Review, which ceased publication in 2008.
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Net Sales of Jazzwise
The total net sale of Jazzwise is 4,155, as follows:
• Retail: 2,190
• Subscriptions – print ( July 2009) 1,915 (UK: 1,676; Europe: 170; ROW: 69)
• Subscriptions – digital 50
4,155
Retail sales are through newsstands, including many branches of WH Smith, (distributor: Comag Specialist Division) and through entertainment multiples such as HMV (distributor: WorldWide Magazine Distribution).
Media sponsorship of jazz festivals
Jazzwise partners each year with two of the UK’s leading jazz festivals as their Media Sponsor:
Cheltenham Jazz Festival (April/May)
London Jazz Festival (November)
Other activities
(a) The Write Stuff
Now in its seventh year, the Write Stuff is run by the London Jazz Festival and Jazzwise magazine and gives new jazz writers the opportunity to work with professional journalists to improve their writing skills, develop an understanding of jazz criticism, learn about the history and development of the UK music press and receive insights into career paths as well as getting to go to lots of concerts! The 2009 initiative included sessions on feature writing, reviewing and editing by writer and broadcaster Kevin Le Gendre, jazz and music press overview with Jazzwise editor/publisher Jon Newey, writing for the web with Jazzwise and Time Out’s Mike Flynn and input from other writers and jazz industry figures. This year’s participants will have their work posted on both the Jazzwise and LJF’s websites and one review will be chosen to be published in the February 2010 edition of Jazzwise.
(b) Readers’ competitions
Jazzwise runs competitions for readers with prizes such as hi-fi systems, contributed by manufacturers.
(c) Specialist music tours
During 2009 Jazzwise will offer a music tour of Cuba in February 2010 to its print edition subscribers at a discounted price.
(d) Jazzwise has helped inaugurate the European Jazz Media group, that includes the editors of most European jazz magazines, and Jazzwise editor Jon Newey has chaired the first two bi-annual meetings.3. The general market conditions for magazines
(a) Jazzwise is a specialist magazine serving a minority taste in music. It is subject to the following market conditions:
• The Magazine market as a whole – the trends that influence the sales patterns of the big-selling consumer magazines;
• The Music Industry – Illegal downloading/file-sharing; the contraction of record companies resulting in fewer jazz artists on major labels;
• Jazz music – attendances at live jazz events; new artists; radio coverage of jazz(b) Consumer magazine trends
Over the past decade, consumer magazines have faced stiff competition from the Internet, with the rise of blogs, news sites, and a wide range of entertainment and information services ranging from YouTube to the iPod. Circulation loss is sharpest in the younger age groups who have grown up in the Internet age and for many of whom magazines may have no relevance.Since 2004 the monthly
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(c) Music magazines
Music magazines have suffered from the general malaise of the music industry as it struggles to deal with the impact of the digital age, manifested in illegal downloads and file-sharing on the one hand, the closure of major music retailers such as Tower, Virgin (later Zavvi), MVC and Woolworth, competition from other types of entertainment such as games, and emerging generations for whom music holds a less important place in their lives than it did for their parents or grandparents. As record companies invest in fewer acts, so there is less news to attract readers.
On 13 August 2009, the ABC magazine circulation figures were announced, showing a 9.4% slump in sales for the magazine industry’s music sector.
Figures for the popular music market leaders:
TITLE Aug-09 Variation Aug-08
NME 40,000 -27.00% 50,800
Kerrang! 43,253 -28.00% 55,364
Uncut 76,526 -12.00% 85,709
Q 100,000 -11.50% 111,500
Mojo 97,722 -8.10% 105,637
Metal Hammer 46,004 -5.20% 48,396
Classic Rock 70,301 5.50% 66,434
TOTAL 473,806 -9.55% 523,841
These figures do not include other leading music magazines such Classic FM, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine.#p#分页标题#e#
4. The Market for Jazz in the UK
4.1 Assessing the potential market
In December 2006, Jazz Services Ltd published “The Value of Jazz in Britain” a report by Mykaell Riley and Dave Laing. This was the first serious attempt to collate and present the metrics of jazz in Britain. While it is a helpful guide and provides a useful overview, few of the figures are based on solid facts (these being largely unavailable) and many (such as the circulation figures for the specialist jazz periodicals on page 20) are significantly inaccurate. This caveat aside, this report will provide a researcher with a valuable insight into the state of jazz music in the UK.
The Executive Summary (page 6) states:
“Chapter 5 provides examples of recent audience research undertaken on behalf of Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Wales and others. This show a growing audience for jazz which is predominantly male, middle-aged and of socio-economic groups ABC1. While over 3 million UK adults have attended a jazz performance in the past year, the core audience for jazz is estimated to be about 500,000.”
This figure of 500,000 is generally regarded as plausible in the jazz industry and is the figure that Jazzwise uses to assess its core market. If only 1% of these subscribe to Jazzwise magazine, this is 5,000 potential readers – an indication of the present low market pentration of Jazzwise and of the potential to grow the subscriber base from its current 1,900 level.
The audience for jazz is predominately male. Unless guided by parents, teachers of friends, listeners may not discover jazz until they are in their 20s or 30s, when they have already explored other forms of music.
4.2 The market in the education
Although music today has a lower priority in the school curriculum than it did 20 years ago, jazz is now an accepted part of that curriculum. Many young people now have the opportunity to discover jazz and to play it at school or, outside of school, to join a Youth Jazz Orchestra or jazz workshop.
There are now eight music conservatories in the UK offering full-time jazz degree courses (all fully subscribed) and many other courses at colleges around the country offering diplomas in jazz.
4.3 Age of readers
Jazz listeners are generally in their mid-30s or older before they begin to subscribe to a jazz magazine. See the Jazzwise Readers Survey 2007 (page2) for the age profile of Jazwise readers.
It is an often-quoted perception that the number of young people attending jazz events is in decline or that the average age of jazz event attendees is getting older.
However, the sceptics will suggest that younger people frequent different venues than the older generation and that these are not included in this assessment.
An age profile of readers
4.4 Media coverage of jazz
Jazz coverage on radio or television is relatively limited.
BBC RADIO
(a) BBC Radio 2 presents a weekly programme Big Band Special on Monday evenings largely features big band jazz from previous eras. Occasional documentaries generally focus on historical jazz figures. There is no coverage of today’s jazz output.#p#分页标题#e#
(b) BBC Radio 3 offers the best coverage of jazz on BBC radio: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/jazz/
There are four weekly programmes:
Jazz Library (presenter: Alyn Shipton)
Jazz Line-Up (presenter: Claire Martin)
Jazz on 3 (presenter: Jez Nelson)
Jazz Record Requests (presenter: Geoffrey Smith)
In addition BBC Radio 3 also broadcasts several jazz concerts each year which it has recorded at festivals such as the London Jazz Festival and Cheltenham Jazz Festival
COMMERCIAL RADIO
(a) Jazz FM radio station, which vanished when the Guardian Media Group rebranded it as Smooth Radio, was relaunched as Jazz FM Digital on DAB by its pre-GMG management in October 2008. Its quarterly RAJAR listening figures for the period ending September 2009 were 416,000 (with average weekly listening hours of 4.4). This makes it one of the fastest growing commercial stations in the UK.
Jazz FM Digital currently operates on DAB in London, the North West, the West Midlands, Glasgow, the Severn Estuary and South Wales and is streamed globally at www.jazzfm.com. It can also be heard through Sky Digital and Freesat. Its eventual aim is national coverage.
(b) The first jazz DAB station was theJazz. This started to broadcast in December 2006 but was closed in March 2008, a victim of cuts by its owner GCap Media while it was unsucessfully fending off a hostile bid by Global Radio. By October 2007, theJazz had attracted 388,000 listeners, including 53,000 young people under the age of 15.
TELEVISION
Jazz coverage on TV is limited to occasional high-quality programmes on BBC 4. There may be several consecutive programmes on a particular theme (such as the acclaimed Jazz Britannia series, tracing the history of jazz in Britain since the 1950s) or featuring a particular artist (e.g. Oscar Peterson, Humphrey Lyttelton).
5. The brief in detail
5.1 The target
The brief is to construct a marketing plan to build print subscriptions to Jazzwise magazine from the present level of 1,700 to 5,000 over a three year period.
5.2 The two types of subscription
Jazzwise offers two types of subscription:
• Print subscriptions (1,915 - UK: 1,676; Europe: 170; Rest of World: 69)
• Digital subscriptions (50)
For subscription pricing see:
Appendix: #2 “Subscription pricing 2010”
5.3 The primary focus of the brief
The primary focus of the brief is to build print subscriptions (note 1). This is for the following reasons:
• Print subscriptions are more profitable than digital subscriptions
• A separate initiative is in place to promote digital subscriptions to libraries
• Advertisers place greater value on the print edition than the digital edition
• To replace retail sales lost due to the closure of music retail multiples (note 2).
Notes:
(1) While the print edition is the priority, this does not preclude marketing initiatives which also include digital subscriptions.#p#分页标题#e#
(2) Over the past three years the following music retail multiples Fopp, MVC, Zavvi (formerly Virgin), all of which stocked Jazzwise magazine.
5.4 Subscription sales - historical trends
• For a subscription sales history from 2003, see:
Appendix: #2 “Jazzwise Magazine - Print edition: subscriptions sales history”
• After steady growth from 1,369 subscriptions in January 2003 to a peak of 1,974 in early 2008, subscription sales have begun to slip for the first time.
5.5 Marketing of Jazzwise subscriptions in the past
Marketing initiatives have generally been confined to the following:
(a) Free CD and discounted subscription offer in every edition of Jazzwise since January 2000.
For many years it was possible to obtain CDs free-of-charge from labels and to invite subscribers to choose one of three free CDs. Because of the contraction in the record industry, however, this is now almost impossible. It may be possible to purchase CDs from labels at trade prices, but this increases marketing costs. Had we had to buy the CDs like most other music magazines, it would have cost over £25,000 over the past decade.
With the increasing popularity of downloads, CDs are possibly a less attractive incentive for subscribers these days, although discerning listeners may prefer to own a physical CD for its superior sound quality.
(b) Jazzwise Direct mailings
Catalogues are mailed two or three times a year and will include either a subscription leaflet or a subscription advertisement in the catalogue. Mailings are to customers on the Jazzwise Direct database. The numbers mailed vary according to selection criteria but recent mailings have averaged around 12,000.
Jazzwise Direct customers are almost all musicians who have bought (or may buy) products such as instructional music books, music scores and music software. They may or may not be interested in Jazzwise magazine. It should not be assumed that a person who aspires to play jazz will necessarily wish to read a jazz magazine. In the Jazzwise Readers Survey 2007, 53% of readers use “musical equipment” (instruments, music computers, etc) and 16% buy “instructional music books/repertoire”.
(c) Cross-platform promotions
Under the “media sponsor” agreements with the London Jazz Festival and Cheltenham Jazz Festival, Jazzwise magazine logo and information is included in festival publicity and programmes.
Under a reciprocal agreement, Jazzwise and the world music magazine Songlines included each other’s subscription leaflets in their November 2009 issues.
Jazzwise 4 page subscription flyers have been included in the large Serious concert and festival mailouts prior to London Jazz Festival for the past six years. Mailout totals are from10,000 to 15,000 nationwide, but mailshots may contain up to a dozen items. (Serious is the UK’s leading jazz concert producer and is the organiser of the London Jazz Festival.)#p#分页标题#e#
(d) Press advertisements
Jazzwise has advertised in The Guardian 3 to 4 times a year for the past decade to promote those issues of Jazzwise with a cover-mounted CD.
(e) Flyers at jazz venues
Jazzwise subscription flyers have been on the counter or entrance foyer of The 606 Club, The Vortex, Ronnie Scott’s Club and Pizza Express Jazz Club.
Jazzwise magazine ran a radio promotion campaign pushing subscriptions for 5 months on The Jazz DAB radio in 2007
5.6 Future marketing ideas, resources and opportunities
(a) Referrals
Jazzwise management has considered introducing a programme of referrals.
A flyer is mailed to each UK subscriber offering:
• For the existing subscriber: 20% off the cost of their next subscription for each new subscriber introduced (up to 3 new subscribers);
• For each new subscriber: 20% off the cost of their subscription for the first year.
(b) Promotions with jazz societies
There are over 50 well-established jazz societies in the UK, run by volunteers and promoting weekly or monthly events featuring contemporary jazz music (i.e. aligned to the content and readership of Jazzwise). A package could be offered as follows:
A leaflet is prepared offering members or regular attenders of [name of jazz society] the opportunity to subscribe to Jazzwise at a discount of 25% for the first year. This will be a time-limited promotion (e.g for two months). An agreed number of leaflets will be supplied to the jazz society for inclusion in their mailings or as handouts at their events. It may be possible to incentivise the jazz societies to use their email lists to inform their mmbers of the offer with a tim-limited code enabling access to the special offer via the Jazzwise Magazine website.
(c) Promotions with leading jazz clubs
This will take a similar form to the promotions with jazz societies, but targetted at London venues such as Ronnie Scott’s Club, the 606 Club, the Pizza Express Jazz Club, The Vortex and regional jazz venues such as Matt and Phred’s (Manchester) and the Jazz Bar (Edinburgh). Flyers could be left for customers on tables and mailed to their audience circulation lists.
(d) Promotions with leading jazz concert venues
Similar to the above promotions but targetted specifically to concert venues such as the Barbican Centre in London and regional arts centres, which regularly present jazz music concerts as part of a wider music programme. These promotions would mainly be in the form of inserts in their mailings to the jazz-interest segment of their audience circulatio lists.
(e) Promotions with Jazz FM Digital radio station
• There may be scope for reciprocal deals here, for example, free advertisements for Jazz FM in Jazzwise in exchange for free radio advertisements for Jazzwise.
• Jazzwise subscriptions as prizes for small-scale on-air competitions – “the first person to call or email with the name of the saxophone player on that track will receive a free one-year subscription to Jazzwise”#p#分页标题#e#
(f) Enhanced benefits for subscribers
• Promoting the idea of a Jazzwise subscription as entrée to a club of like-minded people who have exclusive access to special benefits, such as:
• Print edition subscribers wll receive a 30% discount off a digital subscription
• Discounted concert tickets (these have to be agreed with concert promoters)
• Exclusive events for Jazzwise subscribers
• Discount offers on Jazzwise specialist music tours
• 5%
The challenges are
• To maintain a continuous flow of attractive benefits
• To ensure cost-effectiveness by minimising the cost of the benefits on offer and the staff time required to administer the offers.
(g) Identifying subscriber prospects from consumer databases by demographic profiling
If it is possible to identify such a nice interest as jazz music, this may be a productive source of prospects for mailings.
5.7 Test and Measure
All promotions would be subject to the discipline of Test and Measure - testing each promotion type on sample prospects and measuring the result, befor committing to a full-scale promotion.
5.8 Marketing budget
£15,000 over three years
APPENDIX
1. Jazzwise Magazine - Print edition: subscriptions sales history
JAZZWISE PUBLICATIONS LTD
MONTH END SUBSCRIPTIONS - FROM DECEMBER 2002/JANUARY 2003 ISSUE
ISSUE D/J FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV INCR.
2003 1369 1427 1458 1463 1466 1460 1449 1456 1478 1492 1502 9.72%
2004 1482 1505 1527 1564 1571 1564 1559 1571 1573 1582 1624 8.12%
2005 1679 1736 1739 1717 1732 1744 1758 1762 1763 1764 1742 7.27%
2006 1786 1808 1844 1840 1826 1826 1830 1845 1850 1851 1849 6.14%
2007 1908 1871 1889 1902 1906 1912 1926 1952 1959 1959 1962 6.11%
2008 1971 1974 1954 1945 1963 1965 1955 1939 1940 1941 1936 -1.33%
2009 1914 1901 1889 1924 1927 1926 1915 1901 1876 0 0
2. Subscription pricing 2010
PRINT EDITION
ISSN: 1368-0021 UK Europe Rest of the World
Institutional subscription rate
(Libraries, colleges, etc) GBP 56.00 GBP 75.00 GBP 86.00
Personal subscription rate GBP 42.50 GBP 56.50 GBP 63.50
DIGITAL EDITION Worldwide
Institutional subscription rate GBP 225.00
Personal subscription rate GBP 25.00
PRINT EDITION +
DIGITAL EDITION together UK Europe Rest of the World
Institutional subscription rate GBP 267.00 GBP 281.00 GBP 289.00
Personal subscription rate
3. Website statistics
Website statistics for 2 months from 1st July to 1st September 2009 are included as a separate document.
4. Jazzwise reader survey 2007
The Jazzwise Media Pack gives key readership statistics extrpolated from the most recent Readers Survey (April 2007).
5. “The Value of Jazz in Britain”
This report by Mykaell Riley and Dave Laing, commissioned and published by Jazz Services Ltd, can be downloaded from: www.jazzservices.org.uk/Portals/0/ValueofJazzReportDec2006.pdf#p#分页标题#e#
6. What is Jazz? An introduction
Jazz music originated among African American musicians in New Orleans in the early yearshttp://www.ukthesis.org of the 20th century and quickly spread to other cities in the United States. It drew on the blues, gospel music, ragtime and other popular music of the time and had a strong rhythmic foundation and its African roots were never far from the surface. But the key aspect of jazz music that distinguishes it from most other types of music is the opportunity that it offers to musicians to improvise. Typically a band would play the melody of a song over a rhythmic accompaniment and then certain band members would improvise over the form and the harmonies of the song, creating new melodies. In this way jazz offered an opportunity for creative expression that was previously almost non-existent. The first internationally recognised jazz virtuoso was trumpeter Louis Armstrong.
By the early1940s jazz music was to be heard in many forms and was played in ensembles ranging in size from trios to big bands with up to 20 musicians. It was closely related to the popular “swing music” of the time and reached wide audiences. In the mid-1940s Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and others devloped a more complex form of jazz music, often played at fast tempos and requiring a high level of technical skill. At the same time jazz was absorbing other musical influences such as the sophisticated rhythms of Cuban music and the harmonies of European classical music.
From the 1950s onwards, the word “jazz” began to encompass a wide variety of musical forms, with one common thread – improvisation. Alongside the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 70s, “free jazz” emerged where musicians played and improvised outide of the usual restrictions of song structures. By the late 1960s Miles Davis and others were rejecting swing rhythms in favour of the even metres of rock music. The “fusion” leaders included Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock and two European musicians, John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu Orchestra) and Joe Zawinul (Weather Report). By now the rhythms and harmonies were often complex and had moved some distance from the generally simpler structures of popular music. It therefore demanded a greater depth of attention and musical awareness from the listener.
Jazz had been popular in most European http://www.ukthesis.orgcountries Europe since the 1930s. Indeed the first European group to make an impact in the United States was the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, whose first recordings were made in 1934 and which featured violinist Stephane Grappelli and the Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. In the past forty years jazz has become a truly international movement. There are few countries in Europe or Asia where you will not find jazz music being played in one guise or another. In the first two decades after WW11 European musicians, busy catching up with the innovations of the great American players, would often sound like pale imitations of Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. By the mid-1960s this was beginning to change and today European musicians, such as the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, draw upon their own cultural roots to create their own distinctive styles of jazz music. Jazz has become an international language with a diversity of dialects and local idioms.#p#分页标题#e#
