I always love when artists give back to their fans. Music has an immense spiritual and higher calling and giving your fans the opportunity to become ingrained in your vision and your culture is something that they will not only cherish, but pass on and build the musician’s brand.
In this vein, I am excited to see all of the integrated marketing campaigns happening with remixes, stemmed out versions of songs, rock band tracks and other ways to get your fans excited about the music.
One cool campaign I came across this week was from Katherine McPhee from season 5 of American Idol. She is prepping the release of UnBroken, her 2nd major album on Verve Forecast Records. In their launch campaign they have really empowered her fans and this is sure to help with release day numbers as well as long term brand impact which will help her on tour, with sponsors and other deals which will generate income for Katherine and her label .
One example that I wanted to show was the Facebook promotion “Unbroken Chain.”
It’s a fairly simple pass along contest for the fans. Come to the page, listen to some music and pass it on to 3 friends to get a coupon code for a prize. The cool thing for the artist is that they get 3 new confirmed fans/friends who they can now promote to and in turn get them involved to ask 3 friends to join. Simple, yet very, very effective.
The only complaint I have is that they are using 30 second clips – kinda B/S in today’s market where I can download the album for free with enough searching and yet can’t listen to the whole songs for free in a controlled environment.
Kat and her label are doing some other exciting things to market her album including:
helping with a fan’s wedding playlist to calling fans during an album listening party, from giving fans opportunities to create videos and splash pages to having them design a fashion set.
When you are creating your next campaign, how can you get your fans or your customers to come alive? This is one of the most vital pieces in the new economy that we are in right now!
This post was written by Greg Rollett. He talks about music marketing and the new music economy over at Gen-Y Rock Stars.
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