A dream come true? As it turned out, not for Lucks Music.

The business performed so well that Lucks, with only 20 staff, was unable to handle the enormous volume of work, from moulding new singers to running showbiz events. Consequently, it stumbled through its second year, 2006, performing inefficiently.

"Last year, we had to postpone a number of jobs until this year. As a result, our revenue fell by half compared to the first year of operation," says Chatchawan Pukhut, co-founder and managing director of Lucks, a former music producer for GMM Grammy.

The main reason for putting off work was to enable Lucks to review its management and set up new working procedures to make the firm more systematic. Finally, it came up with a formula it calls the 5Ts - technology, terminal, trends, taste and talent.

Chatchawan says the formula arises from changes he has witnessed in the behaviour of media consumers.

Traditional music album promotion plans don't guarantee success any more, so the first thing to understand is the function and usage of each technology, to correctly exploit each of them for promoting music albums.

Then, Lucks has to carefully survey its target groups, investigate their lifestyles, determine which media channels they use and what kind of music they like in order to identify the correct "terminal" to connect to them.

Partners are also included in the "terminal" concept, because the media channels needed to reach various target groups have to be precisely identified before the correct business alliances can be made to run those media channels.

Then, it comes to the final 3 Ts: taste, trend and talent.

Chatchawan says quality of talent always comes first when choosing singers because it saves marketing costs. A small music business like Lucks cannot afford huge marketing budgets like the big players. It has to study the market to observe trends and movements in popularity, so it can maximise the appeal of each music album.

Another important thing is taste, and Chatchawan says taste is playing a greater role in consumers' choice of music.

"If certain albums or concerts match the tastes of targeted groups, then price becomes the last factor in a purchasing decision," he explains.

Take the example of the "Story of Love" concert by DHC, featuring singer Thitima (Ann) Prathumthip, who has released a new album called "Bloom". The concert was not big, but tickets sold for more than Bt1,000.

Lucks Music 999 currently gains revenue from three main businesses - selling CDs, digital content downloading, and events or concerts.

The proportions of revenue from the different sources has changed since the first year, when CDs contributed as much as 50 per cent, while digital downloading and events or concerts generated 25 per cent each.

In the second year, there was a downturn in CD revenue because of pirate selling. This particularly affected Sena Hoi's "Dum Jung" (So Black) music album, which suffered more than 70,000 illegal downloads. Another reason was delays in releasing new music albums.

"We don't focus on generating too much revenue," Chatchawan says. "We want to be a small music camp that always creates unique products. We believe that music marketing is still very strong. Hence, having clear target groups who have high loyalty is great compensation for our disadvantage of not serving the mass market. It's also easy for us to attract business alliances."

He gave as an example Phiyada Hachaiyabhum's music album, which has been sponsored by Phyathai Hospital for two consecutive years.

Chatchawan is also planning to enter a new marketing channel: sports events. He also expects to launch new music albums every one-and-a-half months, which will result in Lucks Music 999 launching about eight or nine new albums this year.

The company's revenue target this year is Bt50 million to Bt55 million.