Music Industry in the Philippines - Part 4: Promotion

Promotion is the other area in the music industry where the record company's money gets sucked up dry. Why?

• Promotion Tool #1 - Radio Stations
• Promotion Tool #2 - TV Guestings
• Promotion Tool #3 - Print
• Promotion Tool #4 - Ring Tones

Radio Promotion


Radio alone is expensive. Trash the law on music copyright with respect to radio stations. The sad truth is, the music industry pays radio stations for playing the songs, never the other way around.

Why? Radio stations are promotional tools! They're not music users. They're promoters. If it's not on radio, people don't buy the albums. To be on radio, you pay radio stations big time.

Radio stations are still very instrumental venues for promoting the songs. How the industry is supposed to work is that when radio stations play the songs, people hear that a song is "No. 1" and then they buy the albums in the music stores. Then, the record company makes money.

Not anymore, dude!

Technology came in and people started "ripping" the songs from the CDs and store them as MP3 files. MP3 files are easily shared electronically. You can't stop that. MP3s, streaming audios, peer-to-peer music file sharing (not to mention music piracy) ganged up on the traditional system of making money in music. It's back bone is crashed. I don't see how it can ever stand up as before. No way, Jose!

CD sales have plummeted, record companies are making much less money, and there simply is a general feeling of "drought" in the music industry these days (at least as of last year when I was still around).

Frankly I ask myself how songs can be marketed under the present system. The old system does not fit the terrain anymore. A new set-up has to be in place, and then all the rules have to be revised. This actually spells e-x-c-i-t-i-n-g.

TV Guestings

TV guesting is when the performer appears on TV to promote the song. Frankly, I have no clear idea how this is arranged and how it costs. All I know is that this works best when the performer is a popular personality in the Philippines.

Filipinos watch a lot of TV. When something is promoted on TV by a celebrity, then it must be cool! Having a copy of the album promoted on TV makes one cool! So on and so forth. I think this is how it works, or why would anyone buy the very first music album of G_____ C______? All but a handful of people who go to videoke bars can sing outrageously much better than him.

If one doesn't know nor like the persons bubbling on TV, one couldn't care less. Mute that box, Baby!

Print Promotion

I don't know much about print, except that it's expensive. Albums are promoted via print, but again, it works best when readers have at least a faint idea about who the performer is.

Ring Tones

Promoting a song via ring tones is a novel idea being implemented by the Information Gateway or IG for short. IG is actually a content provider for telephone operators. What they do is develop ring tones that can be downloaded by mobile phone users for a fee.


The downside of ring tones as a promotional tool is, it cannot cater to everyone who produces an album. It can cater to only one album at a time.