You can now listen to Signaal/Ruis, a Belgian music show on Radio Scorpio, their show from last friday 27 April. The tracklist includes: Nest Egg, Howrah, Melkbelly, Ganser, Wooden Shjips and more.
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The Belgian hardcore band Walls has released a video for “Ball & Chain, Such A Weight“. It’s the 3th and last video from their “Cult Of The Weary” EP.
You’re in for a treat, Ballyhoo! You might have seen them perform on Warped Tour recently in 2016 or may already know about them and are hardcore fans; but for those of you who don’t know these guys, they are a rock band from Aberdeen, MD. They have released a new single called “I Don’t Wanna Go” and I have to tell you this song is very catchy! You will want to put this song on repeat.
If you like what you hear and want to learn more about this band, you can check them out on their website or follow them on Facebook.
zebrastrap, based in Kuwait, shares their latest single Bliss/ery. What stands out most about this single is how smooth the vocal melodies blend with each other, and if you like a good song with soothing vocals, then you’ll want to check these guys out!
Aussie metal band Skorched dropped a single, “The Masta Disaster” late last year. You can check the band out on Soundcloud and listen to the single below!
Warped Tour faves Our Last Night put out a single called “Ivory Tower” last year. It’s a 10/10 banger, if you’re into metalcore you’ll be a big fan of this track. I’d also be surprised if you aren’t familiar with OLN – if you weren’t, now you are!
Hailing from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, The Fatalist provide their single “Apocalypse Towers”. The prog-metal track features heavy and tight drums, fast beats, and synths over the obligatory guitars and bass. Check out the band on Facebook to see what they’re up to these days!
Check out “Magnolia” by Vault 51, a heavy alt-rock band from Atlanta, GA. Powerful, punchy drums with atmospheric piano combine to create a solid wall of sound. The skilled songwriting and arrangement help to further the song’s strong emotional content and showcase the band’s chops. Enjoy!
After not seeing the band since 2014, I got the chance to check out New Politics on the Lost in Translation tour with support from Dreamers and The Wrecks at their stop in San Diego at the House of Blues. Though the band has become much more musically refined in the last few years (I remember seeing a breakdancing, rapping, pop-punk act opening for Dirty Heads back in 2011), they still maintain their high energy roots. They have also become a much better live band, with solid production and a tight live show.
Indie-rock band The Wrecks opened the night, playing a 30 minute selection of their songs, including “James Dean”, “Favorite Liar”, and “I Don’t Like You”. The band has a variety of influences, but one that was clear from the start, especially on “I Don’t Like You” is Cage the Elephant. Seemingly out of coincidence, the first song after their energy-filled set was Cage the Elephant’s “Come a Little Closer”.
Dreamers is the direct support on the tour, one of the notable songs they played was a cover of The Cranberries’ song “Zombie”. The band released a recording of the cover online on February 9th, just three weeks after the death of Cranberries’ lead singer Dolores O’Riordan. Other songs the band touched upon included “Sweet Disaster”, “Wolves (You Got Me)”, and “Painkiller”.
As the main act of the night, New Politics started with an upbeat song off of their newest effort, Lost in Translation. “Istanbul” got the crowd going, and singer David Boyd was crowdwalking before the song was over. After a track off of Vikings, the band jumped things back to their 2010 self-titled release with “Love Is a Drug”. Even though many of the fans in the audience seemed to be newer converts, there was still an intense energy during the cut. During “Lifeboat” the band showed that they can still write a pounding, anthemic track to get the crowd going.
After dedicating “Color Green” to all their friends and family, the band played a few more songs from their first release; “Dignity” and “Die For You”. After the latter, the band was amazed that a mosh pit had formed. Throughout the rest of the set, the band blended songs from each of their albums and ended the main set with hit single “Harlem”. Several of the songs during the night also featured additional performances on keys and bass by stage techs, which was new to me but a nice touch. Some songs just seem to call for live bass, rather than the band’s standard backtracked synths.
Once the main set was over, the band came back for a three song encore, of “Lifted”, “Pretend We’re In a Movie”, and finally closing the night with their first hit, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”.
Check out their tour dates to see if they’re coming to a city near you!
Press photo by Brendan Walter.
While musical talent, great editing, and persistence are key to making a good album, you can’t deny the marketing component and promotional efforts play big roles when you want your album to make it big.
Intro
While doing some research for a blog post about music marketing, I stumbled upon a document titled Musically Made in 2015 containing some marketing cases, called The Year’s Best Music Marketing Campaigns.
To my surprise, this document contained cases from different genres, not only highlighting “mainstream” music. To spark your interest, I’ll be highlighting some cases from Bring Me The Horizon, Frank Carter and Iron Maiden. You should definitely still download the original document to read how Avicii used Instagram to promote his new “Stories” album, how One Direction used mobile activations to find their “loyal fans” or how Taylor Swift promoted her album Bad Blood by allowing users to upload a selfie and merging it with the single’s cover image. They may not be your thing musically, but there’s still good stuff there marketing-wise.
Bring Me The Horizon
With a team of 4 people and a campaign budget “Between £ 10,000 and £ 25,000”, RCA Records (Sony Music Entertainment) used Spotify to build awareness around the release of That’s the Spirit.
Eight days before the release of the new album, they released clips of new songs on Spotify, supported by a homepage takeover. This resulted in a few cool numbers:
- An increase of playlist following by 116%
- 140,000 Twitter engagements
- Homepage takeover was seen almost 2m times
- 2.6m streams in one day
Frank Carter
After having officially formed for six months, Frank Carter and a team of 6 members used over £ 25,000 to promote the release of Blossom.
Frank Carter already had some fame from playing in Gallows and Pure Love, so the main goal during this campaign was to create awareness for loyal fans by targeted social media posts, giveaways and their own mobile app.
In a second wave, they tried to make a personal connection between the fans and the bands by conducting a Twitter Q&A, focusing on intimate concerts and venues, doing in-store signings during the release week, and releasing limited-edition, multi-colored vinyl releases.
They didn’t mention a lot of numbers in their case study; they only mentioned that their mailing list increased by 3,000 submissions. Another notable number is the audience demographic: 25% female and 75% male!
Iron Maiden
The marketing team for Iron Maiden’s The Book Of Souls album consists of 2 members. They had £ 25,000 at their disposal and focused on video teasers, because they wanted to retain as much mystery as possible around the release.
T released 19 clips, which gathered 1m views during the first day. A few weeks later – when the album was released – they were #1 in over 24 countries. This campaign also had a notable skew towards the male demographic at 75%.
New Order
New Order, the English new wave band formed by the remaining members of post-punk group Joy Division, had a team of 13 people and over £ 25,000 to their disposal to promote the release of Music Complete.
The team, formed by members of Mute Records, Out Promotions, Pias Records and Band2Market, started to promote the album by launching a pre-order on Chris Evans’ radio show on BBC Radio 2. They focused on hardcore fans first, building out slowly to the casual fans and new audiences. They used social media, remarketing tactics and a strong press campaign.
The band gained over 1m new likes on their Facebook page, 16k new YouTube subscribers and 40k new Spotify followers. What about the demographics? 86% of their audience are males.
Whitesnake
Last, but certainly not least; Whitesnake’s The Purple Album campaign. The team, consisting of 8 The Orchard members and 2 Frontiers Music members, used a budget between £ 2,000 and £ 5,000. Their main goal: build a bigger Whitesnake fanbase and activate the Deep Purple fanbase.
They started the campaign with some rebranding, animated splash banners, and a hashtag wall. Secondly they posted some retargeting pixels on their homepage, which they used to push pre-orders and video premieres. They chose to not only use YouTube to release their videos, but they also posted them on Facebook. They did this mainly because of their large German fanbase where GEMA creates licensing issues (though this will no longer be an issue: https://www.thelocal.de/20161101/youtubers-rejoice-gema-lifts-block-on-youtube-videos).
They advertised on Facebook video, search, YouTube pre-rolls and banners which drove 1.5m impressions and 250k video views. This resulted in a successful re-marketing campaign to over 90,000 people.
During a last wave, the band setup a hashtag #PurpleAlbumWS where their fans could win some exclusive prizes.
The results?
- 8,000 digital album sales
- 1.5m album streams over 8 months
- 2m YouTube viewers
- 1.5m ad impressions
Other Album Marketing Campaigns?
As you’ve noticed, all the bands mentioned in this case study already had some fame. I’m certain most of these techniques wouldn’t work when you’re applying them on bands that haven’t collected even 1000 likes yet. Let us know via Twitter or Facebook in case you’ve got some cases for that target audience!