A quick lesson in promoting a band
Marketing guru Seth Godin points out the importance of having a unique concept for promoting music. He stopped by a garage sale recently and found out that the guy was selling thousands of brand new CDs, most still in the wrappers, for just $3 each. What a great deal! Well, he soon discovered that he didn’t really know who most of the bands were, they were all small and unknown to him and they all started to look the same. There were no recommendations or hints about what was similar, no frame of reference for him to judge the bands by. He spent so much time and effort trying to figure out if he might like any particular album that he felt his time was worth more than the $3 it cost to buy one. Essentially, the CDs weren’t even worth it if they were all free, because of the effort he had to spend.
What does this all mean? It means that new and emerging bands are facing huge challenges right now. But more importantly, it means that if a band wants to overcome these challenges, they have to do something different. If you do exactly what everybody else does, doing it more and harder isn’t going to help you more than anyone else.
Any band trying to break out of the crowd needs a catchy little marketing tactic to spread the word (but this is easier said than done). For example, think of how Wizo released the first ever “album” on a USB stick-drive in 2004. I was so incredibly excited about this when it happened, even though I really don’t like the band, because I instantly recognized the genius of the idea. Afterall, the news spread to tons of websites all over the internet and got the name Wizo in front of people everywhere. And not only did it get the name out there, but people had a much higher chance of remembering it because of the unique music format concept that was attached to it.
A similar thing happened with Eisbrecher’s debut album when it was announced that the limited edition would feature 2 blank CD-Rs (with the same label as the real CD) to copy the album onto. Once again, this news spread rapidly online and even made it onto Slashdot which receives over 5 million visits per month.
So what other things can bands do to create some news? If we move beyond just German bands for a moment, we can talk about how Paul McCartney released his latest album on Starbucks’ new record label Hear Music and how it was sold in Starbucks coffee houses. Or how Prince distributed nearly 3 million copies of his new album for free in the Mail On Sunday in England last week. He recognized that his real revenues were coming from touring and saw that CDs were just advertisements for him. Both of these musicians’ moves were seen as highly controversial and the traditional labels didn’t seem to like them, but both have proven to be hugely successful.
Then of course we can talk about Nine Inch Nails’ marketing scheme for Year Zero and their purposely “leaked” MP3s, and I could go on and on. The point is that all small bands, German or not, need to take a moment to look at what they are doing as far as promotion goes. Is it exactly what everybody else is doing? If it is, maybe it’s time to try something else.
