The dictionary definition of promotion is ‘the publicizing of a product, organization, or venture so as to increase sales or public awareness.’ I will be focusing on promotion for this essay because my final project is to produce and release an album. For this album to be successful, I will need to promote not only the album itself, but my band as a whole to get as many people listening to it as possible. Music promotion strategies have massively changed throughout the years. Whereas the most common method of promoting a band 50 years ago was physical (radio, posters, newspaper) the most common way now is digitally. This is due to the changing landscape of music and the music industry with technology and digital media becoming the standard. In order to fully understand promotion and marketing for bands, I will be looking at an analysis of different band’s promotion campaigns, advice from a record label and advice from successful artists on how to promote a band. By analyzing these sources, hopefully I will have greater knowledge and understanding on how to promote my band to become successful.
My first source is an article called ‘the year’s best music campaigns’ by sandbox.In this article there is a breakdown of 2017s most successful music campaigns, most of these are for mew music that artists are releasing. I have chosen three to analyze as these three are the closest in genre to my band’s music, and they are all UK based. The first band’s campaign I am going to analyze is nothing but thieves for their single ‘Amsterdam’. The bands budget was £2,000-£5,000 which is massively above ours but I am looking more for inspiration and methods instead of comparison. The way nothing but thieves promoted their single was to send 500 of their fans around the world signed postcards which had a link to the Spotify pre save page for their single. Pre save is a way for fans on Spotify to have their artists music already saved so that when it is released, it is automatically saved to their library. This page then had information about their single as well as encrypted messages for their fans to decode in order to find out more about the upcoming single. This page was updated every week with new information and encrypted messages which encouraged their fanbase to keep returning and urge others to do the same. Because of this campaign, the single ‘Amsterdam’ became their number two single, their social media engagement went up 350% with more than 300,000 fans engaged across their social media platforms. This is enough evidence that this was a memorable and successful social media campaign. This method of marketing is very effective as it is engaging for the fans as they not only get information on the music, but also get to have fun finding out the information as they have to decode messages. Because of this, the fans will feel as though they have invested something in the band and therefore are more likely to give the band money and stay loyal fans.
The second band’s marketing campaign I have chosen to analyze is rise against. This band was aiming to promote their upcoming album ‘Wolves’ and did so by creating a citywide scavenger hunt around London. They managed this by creating a scavenger hunt app called ‘We are the wolves’. The premise of this was that the app instructed fans to go around London to certain destinations and enter the geo fence which unlocked a multiple-choice question about the band and their history. Each location had one of these and the fan to complete them all in the fastest time was given two free tickets to Rise Against’ sold out show in London. Similar to Nothing but Thieves’ campaign, this was a very innovative way to market, it was very involving and engaging for their fans, which was a good way to get their fans back on track as they hadn’t released any new music in three years. This campaign allowed fans to have fun whilst being made aware about their favorite band’s new album. The proof of this campaigns success was that the band had 23,000 unique users and new signups to their email database, as well as 10,000 visitors to the app.
The last band’s marketing campaign that I chose to analyse was Royal Blood. To market their second album, how did we get so dark? Royal Blood focused their marketing campaign mainly on digital promotion. First, they released a time lapsed video of two artists painting a mural of the new album art, accompanied by a loop of the albums single, where are you now? At the end of the video they announced the title of the album and the release date. This simple and short video made it easy to capture their audience’s attention, especially since they had been waiting three years for a new album. As well as this video, they also partnered with Samsung to create the first live streamed 360 show to launch Samsung’s new 360 camera. These videos gained the band over four million views on YouTube and Facebook. This campaign goes to show that engaging well with your audience will give you successful results.
The second source I chose to analyse is a document containing a list of tips and advice for people in the music industry. It is from ‘First Music Contact’ which is an advice service for musicians and people in the music industry. The parts that I am focusing on are about promotion and tips on promoting your band. The first section is about ‘Hype or Hit & Hope’ written by Emma Warren. The two most important factors of band promotion, as stated by Warren (p. 46)
‘Hype or Hit & Hope. The former necessitates you being able to build up a buzz, and a word-of-mouth reputation that will get magazines running after you eventually, the latter suggests the more prosaic route of attempting to get coverage through reviews and magazine coverage.’
This quote is stating that hyping up something to be released will do exactly as intended, hype it. Whereas hit & hope is riskier and leaves it up to chance. Because of this, the hype route is more engaging, and tends to be more successful. This article states ‘What you need is an unassailable sense of belief in your band and your music, unstoppable energy, and often, a big gob.’ (Warren p. 46)
This is essentially saying that you need to fully commit to your project and really commit. Something that is much easier to achieve than the information from my last source, which heavily relies on already set reputations and a large budget. For my project, the hype route seems a lot more viable as it is more hands on and will help with building a fanbase. The article goes on to state that you will need friends to help boost the start of your fanbase, and people with connections to help get your music to the right people such as journalists and DJs.
Some more advice from this document is the importance of DIY press. This method is a lot cheaper than hiring a PR which is perfect for my project as I am running on a very low budget that will only cover the necessities and spending hundreds of pounds on a PR that might work is not a necessity. To be successful at DIY press, this document states that I need to be tenacious and very clever about what I do. This involves tactics such as reading magazines that review similar music to my bands and contact the editors and journalists to see if they would be interested in reviewing our music. Or sending our music to radio stations and certain DJs that are known to give small bands a chance. The bottom line here is for us to do our research.
With my findings, it is important for me to look over what I have researched and apply it to my own situation and how I can use it. My project for my band is to record an album and release it to the public. We are running on a very low budget which means we are going to be spending the most of our money on the actual recording of the music. Once this process is done, we won’t have much money to spend on promotion, which is why I can’t really compare my situation to other, much bigger bands like the ones from my first source. However, what I can take is inspiration from their campaigns and learn lessons from them. The biggest lesson being that for a successful campaign, you need to be engaging with your audience. With all three of the bands, no matter what type of music they make, what they were releasing, or how big their budget was, their primary objective was to engage their audience. Such as Rise Against creating a scavenger hunt and then performing an impromptu acoustic set in a park with their fans who participated, or Royal Blood releasing a 360˚ concert video to make their fans feel as if they were really there with them, having a direct connection to their fanbase is something that makes these bands so successful. This, thankfully, can be achieved with no budget at all, as engaging with your fans can be as simple as messaging them, giving them a t shirt, or in Nothing but Thieves’’ case, sending them a handwritten postcard. What I’ve learned from my first source can then be merged with my findings from my second source such as the fact that hype is the best way to go for my current situation, like Royal Blood releasing a video which only shows a snippet of their singe, the album art, title, and release date. This is something that they did themselves and didn’t wait for a magazine to do for them. This will have to be the attitude that I take into my project, to take matters into my own hands to create interesting, engaging, and fun content for our fans which will in turn gain us more fans.
References
Firstmusiccontact.com. (2019). [online] Available at: http://www.firstmusiccontact.com/bandtips/fmc_band_tips.pdf [Accessed 29 Mar. 2019].
Musically.com. (2019). [online] Available at: https://musically.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Sandbox194-eoy-47284626.pdf [Accessed 29 Mar. 2019].