AH Vault: Interview with Jon Vanhala

This is one of our longer videos, so you may need to watch it in segments, but it is incredibly informative and will give you a heightened understanding of how labels generally go about marketing their releases. In the video, Jon Vanhala, former VP of New Media and Strategic Marketing at Verve Music Group (he was still with Verve when this interview was recorded), discusses the role of “New Media” executives at record labels and explores what he considers to be one of the biggest changes that has come as a result of the digital revolution: the fact that all content from an artist has the potential to become a commercial use item and/or a marketing item. Additional topics include the ideal amount of time needed by Verve to set up a marketing campaign for a release (and why this amount of time is needed), how long marketing campaigns typically last, what affects a label’s decision regarding whether or not to push a release for a longer-than-average period of time, what types of releases tend to do particularly well in the online world, and how labels secure prime positioning for their releases in online stores.