Rock ‘n’ Roll tourism
September 26, 2007
Music goes sight seeing
What?: A number of tourism and music partnerships have sprung up. Is music taking a year off to go traveling?
* Sony BMG Entertainment is teaming up with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide to develop music and entertainment-based programming for the hotel chain.
* MTV parent Viacom Brand Solutions International is teaming up with Dutch online travel operator Shoestring. The new campaign, MTV SoundTrip, will focus on music festivals.
* Alabama’s tourism agency will use the line ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, from the 1974 Lynyrd Skynyrd song, as part of its new tourism campaign. As well as a $25,000 licensing fee, it will pay Universal Music a 6% royalty on logo merchandise.
* Radio station Magic 105.4 has entered into a sponsorship deal with Tourism Toronto, Ontario Tourism and Travelpack to promote Canada as a shopping destination.
* Virgin America airlines is teaming up with Viacom’s VH1 to offer an on-demand music video library to passengers on its flights. The service will offer 3,000 MP3 tracks and up to 50 music videos.
So what?: It’s World Tourism Day on 27th September (no, I didn’t know either) and music will be celebrating the possibility of beautiful partnerships.
As the music industry sees the digital sector still failing to offset the loss in physical sales, new revenue streams need to be looked at. The tourist trade is looking lucrative too. Tourism is the world’s largest industry, with annual revenue of almost$500B.
How to capitalise? Visit Britain attempted to map famous musical landmarks across the UK, but the site is clunky and the music connections are tenuous at best for some. Hed Kandi offered branded flights to Ibiza, and now Sony BMG is targeting hotel chains direct. MTV has the right idea, teaming up with a tour operator on music content across the globe.
As Alabama stumps up a large bill for the Lynyrd Skynyrd track, should bands be targeting other US States and countries? Just how good a deal was the Magic FM and Canada tie in? With 252M tourists traveling in the first four months of 2007, up 15M on 2006, this is a market that music should be guiding.
Globetrotters are waiting with Visas and VISA cards at the ready.
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