Hear Me Out: The Tricky Business Of Promotion

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 21^st 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 :)