In the 1990’ties the music industry was one of the biggest marketing spenders in Denmark.

And it was transparent as a newly polished window with weekly sales charts (in genres with shares!), airplay charts, lists of new releases, monthly Marketing spent etc.

A huge playground for dedicated marketeers.

Coming straight from Tuborg Brewery via Nestle in Bruxelles – two of the biggest marketing organisations in the world – I was overwhelmed by all market research available. And what a huge surprise: Except for following the weekly chart positions nobody used the research.

By introducing the most common marketing tools from my work with FMCG in my previous jobs I soon created a few basic portfolio models based on chart score which I used for an equally basic SWOT analyses.

From here developing a few strategic bullets was easy. Especially one bullet was very clear.

A merge between EMI/Medley an the newcomer CMC Records was the perfect match. EMI had the catalogue and CMC new how to exploit it. 

The same year EMI/Medley bought CMC a merge that turned into a very fruitful business where CMC focused on developing Highly commercial music compilations based on EMI/Medley’s catalog while EMI/Medley focused on signing and developing new talent.

Thomas took his work a few steps further when he – together with CARAT – developed a tool to improve the ‘hit rate’ on TV campaigns based on historic sales on 40% of all TV advertised Music Project anno 1998.