These days, musicians are hyping new albums in more and more creative ways.
Last weekend, Radiohead's Internet presence started vanishing — the band's website gradually became too opaque to read and entire social media accounts disappeared. And then, after excitement had mounted over the course of a couple days, they released a video for the new song, "Burn the Witch."
Radiohead is not the only big-name band or artist to garner headlines for an unusual marketing campaign. Beyoncé posted cryptic images to her Instagram account, only to finally reveal her newest album, "Lemonade," via an hour-long special on HBO.
Catherine Moore, a clinical associate professor of music business at NYU, joined us to talk about the growing trend of unconventional album releases, how they might further shake up the music industry, and how artists need to create multimedia experiences to fully captivate audiences.
Interview Highlights:
This is both an upside and a downside to digital media, that there's so much material out there now. How do musicians rise out of that? What do artists need to gain a lot of exposure?
A fan base. Your fan base will be your advocates, your fan base will be excited to tell other people about what you do. Because the way that music gets spread is no longer in the control of the companies that support music. This has been a frustration for a lot of those companies who used to have a lot of control over how their music got to fans.
I want to ask about this phenomenon, which some people have referred to as "leaving digital bread crumbs" for their listeners, and how it developed. In the Nicki Minaj song "Feeling Myself," Beyoncé brags that she "changed the game with her digital drop," and that she "stopped the world." Is that true? How has this trend evolved?
Yeah, the digital bread crumbs, that wonderful image which I really think is very evocative of how artists can leave their fans with enticing, mysterious, incomplete snippets. And the snippets don't necessarily have to be music — they can be video, pictures, all kinds of things.
They can be half-truths, they can be half-words, they can be made-up words, symbols, colors, or even the absence of things. We saw that with Radiohead and their recent video, when they took away some of their social media presence.
And they did that just for one song! That seems a little extreme. [laughs]
Right, because now we're going dark before we can bring something into the light.
Why is the multimedia aspect important around a song release?
One of the ways that people discover songs is through radio, but another big way is through YouTube and through the ways in which people will say to each other, Did you see this great song? Did you see this great video? Anything that is only music, anything without a visual component, is in some ways less captivating. There's less to talk about if it's only the music.
You're describing a world in which artists are the entrepreneurs over their own career, but where do record labels fit in this equation? Is it still worth it for artists to sign with labels?
Record labels have the business connections that artists don't have when they're starting out. That still has value for an artist, but the artist needs to be smart about the type of deal they sign. They should get legal representation, because they're going to negotiate a contract. But I think that labels still have a function so long as they're a good fit for an artist because of those business connections.