With more instantaneous music and entertainment available to consumers than ever before, even well known artists must find compelling ways to rise above the noise. But as both Forbes and Village Voice have recently pointed out, label marketing machines walk a fine line between “hip” and “gimmicky” with these high profile promotions for new music…
Examples abound… Kanye West’s video projection project promoting “New Slaves.” Daft Punk’s Saturday Night Live 15-second ad to promote Random Access Memories. Ghost Beach’s Times Square billboard campaign on music piracy (that conveniently drew attention to their new single with AEO).
Depending on what you think of these marketing ploys, J. Cole’s Twitter invitation for fans in select cities to attend full album listening sessions for Born Sinner is either very cool or eye-roll worthy. Why? Because of these instructions:
Please bring 1. iphone fully charged, 2. with LSNR app downloaded and enabled, and 3. favorite pair of headphones.
— J. Cole (@JColeNC) June 6, 2013
Turns out these are no ordinary listening sessions. If you’ve been in the industry long enough, you know what I’m talking about – “you name the label” HQ, 5% fans who’re completely excited and overdoing it on the free booze, 95% industry folks who’re there less to hear the new music and more to catch other industry folks doing the same thing.
For those in Atlanta, Boston, NYC, Chicago, Toronto, Houston, LA and Fayetteville interested in hearing Cole’s latest project before it drops, Roc Nation has created a whole new kind of event that means understanding latitude/longitude lines (New Yorkers head to Times Square, thank you google) and being on-time (again, a-typical).
Check out the particulars below and check out Cole’s Facebook page in case more details unfold. Very curious to see how this plays out (no pun intended). Personally, I think the more innovative and unique the experience, the more incentive fans have to discover, share, purchase, stream… whatever… an artist’s music.
Gimmick-shmimmick. That is no small thing.