Advertising cost for music marketing

Real TV marketing cost data from the UK

For 1999 I received some actual figures of TV-advertising budgets for some albums for the british market:

• Shania Twain - UK-L 850.000 or about US-$ 1.3 million
• Macy Gray - UK-L 460.000 or about US-$ 0.7 million
• The Corrs - UK-L 450.000
• Celine Dion - UK-L 400.000 or about US-$ 0.6 million

These TV-advertising costs are just a fraction of the total advertising costs for each album.

The total costs for advertising for music in the UK in 1999 spent directly by record companies was

which does not include the costs for retail co-op activities or promotion. The overall amount is still much lower then what some other companies spend (e.g. political parties for elections, telephone companies, food companies or detergent companies - but then these companies or parties make much more overall income from their products then record companies makes from CD-sales.

The different media sectors had the following shares of advertising spending:

• TV-advertising 55 %
• radio 16 %
• exterior posters etc.10%
• magazines and other print media 17 %

For Shania Twain the overall calculation was fine, since the album sold about 2.7 million copies in the UKand overall marketing costs were in the range of about 1 UK-L per album sold.
In Europe this is actually a very good and rare success, since the marketing costs for the European countries are normally much higher since the media charge more per potential viewer/reader then US-media. This is part of the explanation for the lower prices of CDs in the USA (others being overall economies of scale as well as much lower margins of retailers and distributors) in comparison with many other countries.

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