Happiness Marketing Founder, Thom Skarzynski

Happiness Marketing LLC.

Happiness. Marketing is a niche music marketing and commerce company specializing in physical album products sold directly to fans and via independent retail. Founded by sales and marketing industry veteran Thom Skarzynski, the company focuses on often overlooked revenue streams in the physical sales space. Happiness works as a partner to record labels and artist management teams from the strategy/ideation stage of an album release through manufacturing and fulfillment. Happiness. Marketing helps produce and provide loyal fans collectors’ items to enhance their artist experience, converting their enthusiasm into revenue and chart positions.

Thom Skarzynski started Happiness.Marketing because he saw a disconnect between artists with rabid, loyal fanbases who can sell out tours yet can’t transfer that excitement and recognition to meaningful numbers on the streaming side.

Thom has been in the industry for two decades, and spent his career both at major labels (Atlantic and Epic) and on the DSP side (Spotify). He ran the sales department at Epic for 5 years and spent 15+ in Marketing/Commerce roles.

Happiness. Marketing works as a partner to, not in place of, labels and artist teams to capitalize on often overlooked revenue streams, especially physical sales, including D2C offerings and independent retail.

While so many label and management teams are overworked and often servicing dozens of releases a week, Happiness. Marketing can hyper-focus on singular campaigns to maximize their effects.

The ethos of Happiness.Marketing is that fans want something to hold onto, literally and figuratively. Fans invest heavily in ‘collectors items’ – mementos they excitedly unbox and proudly display. By including a CD, vinyl, or any music configuration into a product it becomes chart eligible. Our specialty is creating distinct, creative configurations with that in mind.

Fans buy merchandise and tickets in droves, yet on streaming it takes ~1,500 streams to equate to 1 album. No typical fan will have the ability to stream enough to equal an album on release week! However, physical stands as a 1:1 purchase and leaves the fan with something to hold onto.

Happiness takes advantage of Indie retail, which is a real-life community of music fans who attend listening parties at stores and signing events. Additionally, indie retail sales are weighted more heavily, up to 7x per album sold depending on the store and market, driving higher chart positions.

Physical sales benefit both artists and fans: for artists, physical sales yield largely incomparable revenue over streams; for example, on Spotify it takes ~250 streams to equal $1.

Physical is a 1:1, with typically strong margins (D2C is 70%+) and weighted heavily in Luminate - especially in the case of independent record stores, who can be weighted up to 7x per album sold depending on the store + market.

Physical product can connect the fan to a deeper, more loyal relationship to the artist. Products can include full books containing never before seen artwork and handwritten lyrics, vinyl that opens to reveal “pop-up book” artwork, boxsets made out of interesting materials (velvet, leather, canvas) that then contain personal and collectible items inside (along with CD). The product is a physical representation of the album and artist, beyond solely the music.