On Sept. 18, Apple will launch their first new music product in years: iTunes Radio.
The free, ad-supported service will function similarly to the already-popular Pandora. Pandora allows users to create stations based on artists or specific songs and then tweak Apple's recommendations by approving or disapproving the songs chosen by the Cupertino firm's algorithms.
While Internet radio is new territory for Tim Cook and company, Apple's plan to use free content to sell music is distinctly old school.
Yet where terrestrial radio unified listeners' tastes, Internet radio seeks to serve hyper-personalized preferences, fracturing our collective listening habits even further.
The death of the so-called "monoculture" creates a seemingly-insurmountable problem: how can less immediately-accessible but successful acts hold our attention long enough to sell us an album?
If 2013 is any indication, flawlessly-executed stunt marketing is the panacea for our ever-increasing musical fragmentation.
The rise of "Get Lucky" this summer wasn't achieved by typical brute force radio ubiquity but instead was founded on months of zeitgeist-baiting, promotional trickery.
Daft Punk's siege of pop culture existed entirely independent of its actual music, building hype though an iTunes leak, SNL commercial, Coachella teaser, Creators Project YouTube Series and Vine track list announcement.
The robots were everywhere, and we hadn't even heard a single Nile Rodgers strum yet.
Acts without Columbia Records money behind them have crafted similar campaigns totally separate from the music, albeit on a smaller scale.
Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada drummed up excitement for their first album in seven years through what is known as an ARG, or Alternate Reality Game.
ARGs are gamified narratives told over various forms of media – a specialized agency creates a series of interconnected websites, videos and planted real-world objects for fans to uncover collectively.
While Nine Inch Nails famously centered the release of their 2007 album Year Zero around an ARG, the Boards of Canada game is set apart by the band's relative popularity, or lack thereof.
ARGs typically need a large number of participants in order to make their nebulous problems solvable.
The Boards of Canada ARG instead leveraged a niche but rabid fan base, focusing the game around two hidden vinyl records in New York and London.
What better way to incite record-collecting nerds to buy music than by giving the records themselves transcendent meaning?
More recently, indie rock darlings Arcade Fire used guerrilla marketing tactics to promote their upcoming album Reflektor.
A combination of street art, Instagram, a fake band website and an inexplicable ad-hoc performance at a Montreal salsa club led to the release of Arcade Fire's latest single last week.
For bands that fly under the radar of the mainstream press, subtle marketing tactics create the kind of fodder perfect for think pieces such as the one you are reading currently.
– By Jordan Francis
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