With so
many bands (and their many labels) vying for whatever pittance you
may call your music budget, the art of promotion has become a tricky
thing in recent years. Leaks aren't going away, so advance streaming
has become commonplace. They serve their purpose admirably; the hope
is that giving the world a legal means to listen will curb illegal
downloading. It works to an extent, though only with regards to
guilt-prone would-be pirates and/or casual listeners who couldn't be
bothered with a torrent. Regardless, by their very nature, these
streams are now a viable and widely used means of album promotion.
Of
course, some old traditions still hold true. Labels still pay for
their artists' music videos, a longstanding promotional double whammy
that gives eager fans a song and a neat commercial for an upcoming
release. It's a practise that dates back over three decades and is
arguably still one of the most effective means of promoting yourself
as an artist.
Then,
there are the more eccentric promotional techniques. Increasingly,
artists are partaking in head games, using cryptic messages and
Easter eggs to draw not just anticipation from their fans, but
participation as well. An excellent example of this is Nine Inch
Nails' 2007 release Year Zero, an album for which the
promotional cycle was unique, somewhat bizarre, and completely
interesting.
With
that said, I'd like to examine a few recent examples of promotion (or
lack thereof). Through these examples, perhaps we'll gain a better
understanding of what works, what doesn't, and what impact it has on
us as music consumers. Or maybe it'll just be me babbling on about a
bunch of crap no one cares about. Only one way to find out.
When it
comes to generating hype and exposure for a new release, few can
argue that Green Day went balls to wall for their trilogy of 2012
albums (through stunts both intentional and unintentional). The
promotional wave of three albums released within a span of three
months was only matched by the torrential release of singles. It all
started inconspicuously enough with the lyric video for Oh Love
being posted on July 16. Then, the floodgates opened; between
promotional videos and singles sent to radio, they had promoted seven
different songs by the time Tre was released on December 11.
To put that into perspective, most bands release a new single about
every three months when they're promoting a new album. Which means it
would take most bands just shy of two years to do what Green Day did
in less than five months.
Naturally,
cries of market over-saturation rang out (and not just from Yours
Truly); it certainly didn't help when they released the video for The
Forgotten on October 23. See, the video was interspersed with
footage from the last Twilight movie, and the song was indeed
on the soundtrack for said film; it was released on November 13, the
same day Green Day released Dos. Only, The Forgotten is
on Tre, which came out a month later. Obviously, confusion and
burnout had set in. Couple these damning factors with Billie Joe
Armstrong being in rehab and what you got was a commercial failure.
Current US sales figures aren't easy to find online, but it's
estimated that the trilogy combined has sold in the neighbourhood of
500,000. Yes, for the three albums combined. Compare that to 2009's
21st Century Breakdown, which sold in
excess of one million copies. Clearly, overexposure is not good for
sales.
Which
is why Queens Of The Stone Age may be skating on thin ice. With the
release of ...Like Clockwork a week away, we've endured quite
a bit of promotion for the album already. It started with cryptic
messages, the first of which appeared in Mojo magazine way back in
December. More followed, until eventually the album was announced in
March. Lead single My God Is The Sun hit radio in April,
followed by a series of five short animated videos earlier this
month. If that weren't enough, nine of the album's ten songs were
played last week during a concert webcast. Today, we get the official
stream.
This
isn't Green Day levels of exposure by any stretch; still, some folks
are saying it's a bit much. Personally, I feel like my anticipation
has deflated quite a bit in the last week. Having heard most of the
album already, the rush of discovery is pretty much gone. It's
shaping up to be an incredible album, surely, but putting so much of
it out there well ahead of release makes June 4 less of an event and
more of a formality for a guy like me who avoids the leaks. Then
again, as I mentioned, it sounds incredible. The best four songs from
the Green Day trilogy combined into one album still isn't something
I'd classify as incredible. So maybe (hopefully) QOTSA makes out okay
despite a bit too much promotion on the strength of a well executed,
Record of the Year candidate album.
What,
then, of Alice In Chains? Their approach for The Devil Put
Dinosaurs Here is pretty much the polar opposite of what Queens
have done. Granted, they started promoting in December, when a lyric
video for Hollow hit the web. It became an unexpected rock
radio hit, championed by programmers desperate for a new song in the
late December/early January dead zone. Since then, all we've gotten
is a second single (Stone) and accompanying video. They
haven't been playing many new songs on their recent tour dates, and
they didn't put up a stream prior to release. If you don't go hunting
for leaks, two of the album's twelve songs is all you get.
Really,
it's quite novel; almost a throwback to the 90's, when you got one or
two tastes before release and the rest was experienced for the first
time when you listened to the album at home or in the car. And I have
to say, in a weird way, the strategy QOTSA employed makes me
anticipate this Alice In Chains album more. That's because this time
last week I was chomping at the bit for QOTSA while giving Alice no
more than an afterthought. Now, with most of ...Like Clockwork
already experienced, I'm more excited for the new Alice In Chains
than I had any right to be before watching the QOTSA webcast.
With
that said, doing promotion the way Alice In Chains is doing it may
not necessarily be all that wise. In an age where everybody is
screaming and streaming for your attention, here's a band doing it
with a level of promotion that is, by today's standards, far below
the norm. It'll be a nice dose of nostalgia for me hearing most of
the album for the first time the way I always used to, but without
the hype I don't expect the album to sell copious amounts. And who
knows? Maybe that's the idea; maybe they're comfortable enough with
the fan base they have, and maybe they're realists who understand
that much of the world sees them as a relic or, worse, a band
undeserving of their name without Layne Staley in the ranks (which is
ridiculous; anyone who's not closed minded about it knows that Jerry
Cantrell wrote all the band's best songs, and therefore has every
right to claim the name as his).
At the
end of the day, no amount of promotion will determine whether or not
you click play. Whether it's through your own discovery, on my
suggestion or that of a shiny commercial on TV, what it boils down to
is that either you will or you won't.
It's
kind of sad that it took about 1300 words for me to get to this
place, but here we are. Now that we're here, what do you think? How
much promotion is too much (or too little)? More importantly, what
kind of promotion makes you want to listen? Feel free to post your
comments here or at the Facebook page; post nothing if you agree with
everything I say :)
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