Mark Plotkin is an American songwriter and award-winning artist, a Grammy shortlisted producer, Bloomberg Businessweek Top 25 Entrepreneur, and a professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. He’s existed both in the music industry as both an artist and a musician. He’s also been in the tech startup world. He’s excited to bring all those experiences together in music education and online music education.
One really important concept to digest before studying a lot of music marketing is the idea of orthogonal thinking. Orthogonal is a word that comes from the math world. It basically refers to where a right angle meets two lines. It’s a really helpful visual because one of the problems in music marketing is that we all sort of become lemmings and just kind of copy each other.
Orthogonal thinking says, “Let’s look at something that is directionally the same as what we’re doing but is actually in a completely different lane. A great example is if you’re in a band, and you think about who you’re musically inspired by. It’s not crazy to think that you might want to do the marketing things that that band did. However, the reality is that you’re probably existing in a completely different era from them. You’re not the same people as them. There’s a million variables that are different.”
An example of a model that is more similar to what you’re doing might be, let’s say, a technology company. Maybe you think that your band and Snapchat have nothing in common. However, if you started your band the same time as Snapchat, and your fans exist sort of more in that ecosystem than on MTV like the band you’re modeling yourself out of, it makes a lot more sense to study what Snapchat does from a marketing perspective than who you sound like. Plotkin has many examples outside of music. That’s where the orthogonal thinking challenge is going to keep coming up.
