The Album Release Cycle And The Band That Proved The Power Of Digital 7 Years Ago

Steve Jobs left a part of the disruption of the music business unfinished.

The part Steve left undisrupted was the Album Release Cycle, which provides a continuous supply of fresh music product for distribution and the spending on promotion to pull it through. It is the label divisions of the Music Major along with the independent labels who perform this, signing bands to multi-album contracts and using a codified series of steps to produce and promote each album.

For a band to complete each Album Release Cycle takes about 18 months. Since bands are in competition with other bands for a release date they are often stuck in this stage for months after completing the album.

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This mass media approach is really expensive because it isn’t efficient and that’s what’s behind the single-day launch event strategy.

Word-of-mouth is too slow to play a leading role in driving demand, which leaves promotion spending to carry the load. And by not knowing who each fan is the only option i to spend on expensive broadcast media to cast a wide net... and hope.

The Really Early Adopter - a 2008 marketing story :

- Fans were now digitally connected to their friends causing word-of-mouth to happen exponentially fast

- What fans like most to share with their friends is really new music - The band didn’t know each individual fan, but they could reach them through the internet

- because in December 2008 they posted their Dreams EP for download... for free. In a few months fans downloaded 90,000 copies of Dreams. In the next 12 months it had sales of 950,000 equivalent songs. Releasing that EP for free was like th best thing we ever did.

Taking just the lessons learned from the free download, look at how it changes the thinking about the Album Release Cycle.

Digitally connected fans now have super powers for promoting bands. New songs have a new role... promotion to rapidly grow new fans

fans who are digitally connected to their networks of friends can accelerate the growth of new fans incredibly fast.

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see full article on Hypebot

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