Very Good Sample Response A/B: Industry/Music

B4. Explore how your chosen texts use digital technology in their marketing.

My three texts for this section are Lady Gaga’s 2011 album ‘Born This Way’, Radiohead’s 2011 album ‘The King of Limbs' and Nirvana’s 1991 album ‘Nevermind’. Each of my artists took different approaches to marketing with and without the use of digital technology.

Gaga uses digital technology such as the internet to sell her albums as well as making a retail copy. Her 2011 album ‘Born This Way’ sold 440,000 copies within two days via download on the Amazon website for a price of only 99 cents. A consequence of this new digital system and method for obtaining music is that fans can illegally download/ leak the album before the intended release date. Oxford band ‘Radiohead’ found a way around this problem when self-releasing their 7th album ‘In Rainbows’ (2007).

Breaking free of major labels and embracing digital technology Radiohead set up a website where they released ‘In Rainbows’ allowing their fans/ everyone to pay what they wanted for a digital copy, which let the fans decide how much the music was worth to them. This proved highly profitable for the band themselves and set a new industry model whereby the artists gained more profit and more control.

Lady Gaga is also well known for using Twitter to communicate with her social networking, teenage fans on a regular basis, creating a parasocial relationship with them. Overall the singer/ songwriter has 41,482,584 followers on the social networking site as well as other followers on other sites such as Facebook and Google+. The connection she has with her fans via the use of social media allows her to cultivate and reinforce a personal relationship with her fans to preserve her popularity and mainstream pop status. Digital technology therefore allows wider access and increases potential sales in the modern digital market.

Gaga’s success and popularity increased as she became more globally known through the use of digital technology. She released 5 singles over an 8 month period all accompanied with a music video, which can be found on her own YouTube channel. Repeated views increase her market value and maintain a level of popularity. The high production values together with the glamorous and provocative appearance of Gaga herself also made her videos compulsive viewing for her fans (Little Monsters as she calls them) on YouTube. She gains millions of hits per video and this encourages countless fans to create viral copycat productions which have increased her online presence immensely.

A band who didn’t follow this modern, mainstream method of marketing was Radiohead, an indie/ alternative rock band from Oxford, UK. Their self-promotion and self-releases of albums ‘In Rainbows’ (2007) and ‘The King of Limbs’ (2011), via their website allowed the release(s) to occur globally and at the same time see an increase in sales due to their established fanbase, cultivated via their major label EMI. ‘The King of Limbs’ sold an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 copies through the website alone. The experiment they conducted with the release of album 7 ‘In Rainbows,’ limited the possibility of illegal recordings/ leaks being distributed allowing the band more control in their output. This unique form of marketing resulted in positive and negative press coverage as a result of bypassing and not conforming to the usual record industry models. For the band themselves it allows more freedom and more profit, they have stated that they earned more money from their self-released albums – something the industry have historically depended upon.

As the band already had an established fan base, they didn’t accompany their 2011 album ‘The King Of Limbs’ with a tour and only released a niche, low budget, DIY music video for one track ‘Lotus Flower’, solely targeting their pre-existing fan base. Both Gaga and Radiohead gained and have sustained their fan bases and promoted their work(s) through the use of digital technology.

A band that didn’t have access to digital marketing during their career were ‘grunge’/ rock three-piece Nirvana. For their 1991 album ‘Nevermind’ they were totally reliant upon marketing via their major record label Geffen. Coverage from music press such as ‘NME’ and ‘Rolling Stone’ magazines, helped promote the bands profile but ‘word of mouth’ was essential in spreading the message about the bands work pre-internet as well as TV appearances and live touring. Due to this it took the band 5 months to get to number 1 on the Billboard 200 charts, whereas both ‘The King of Limbs’ and ‘Born This Way’ went straight to the top of the charts in their first week proving the effective use of digital technology in the music industry in todays modern marketplace.

Digital technology was not available during these times but their popularity is now widely promoted via ITunes and other online sites such as Facebook as a form of nostalgia for both those that enjoyed their music at the time and new fans. The suicide of lead vocal Kurt Cobain and the rise in sales post-death poses the statement that ‘artists make more money/ get more recognition once they’re dead’. This can be proven due to release of albums such as ‘Nirvana’s Greatest Hits’ released via online stores for the 20th Anniversary of Cobain’s death, promoting their work further with the use of digital technology.

Digital technology is highly used in order to market and promote artists in the music industry today as it has an immediate impact on fans and allows fans to access and download their work(s) in high quality, reducing the costs of production and distribution for music labels. The use of digital technology also allows for new artists to become widely known through social networking sites.