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I was interested to find the difference between how rock and DNB are marketed. Quickly it became clear that rock is marketed much more and DNB is more of an underground genre. The most prevalent marketing campaigns I could find were promoting the band Chase & Status.
In 2016 Chase & Status released an interactive video where viewers could manipulate their viewpoint around a central position. Since then, Chase & Status has begun to brand themselves as an underground, somewhat secretive, artist. In 2019, the band released a self-made documentary of their trip to Jamaica in order to attract attention to their upcoming RTRN II JNGL. To market the album launch party, they placed posters around London that had a phone number on. When phoned, a pre-recorded message would give details about the location and time of the launch party. This year, they held a private gig and banned phones at the venue. They used footage and images from this event for their marketing and even for the cover of their new album What Came Before.
These marketing decisions have been taken in order to give the band a nostalgic feel, harkening back to 90s DNB scene. I found this quite interesting as I had always regarded DNB as a new genre, having only been exposed to it when I started university in 2019. The genre saw a downturn around the time I was born, so I grew up being unaware of it, but has made a comeback over the last decade. Chase & Status themselves saw a 41% increase in Spotify streams and a 56% increase in Instagram followers in 2019. This prompted me to think about how I can use nostalgia to promote my project, not only nostalgia for the 90s DNB scene but also for the 70s rock scene. It also comforted me to discover that DNB is currently gaining popularity, despite the lack of marketed artists.
A unique marketing campaign I found was for Everything Everything’s new album Raw Data Feel. The concept for the album centred around AI, and promotional material and the album cover were created with the aid of AI generation. AI generated images have a recognisable, somewhat distrubing aesthetic to them. The campaign featured an Instagram filter that users could use to warp their own faces as if to look like an AI had constructed an image of them. Furthermore, Instagram users were encouraged to submit films of themselves with the filter singing song lyrics. These videos were used in the music video for Teletype.
I particularly liked this campaign because the album’s theme was so concisely expressed through the marketing that was released.
The last campaign I'm including in this post is the marketing of the Ubbi Dubbi electronic dance music(EDM) festival in Texas. This festival was launched in 2019, aimed at 18-34 year olds. The marketing campaign revolved around two 3D characters, Ubbi and Dubbi, who each represented certain genres of EDM.
Social media users were encouraged to the use the hashtags #teamubbi or #teamdubbi for a chance to win a free ticket and to signal which genres they were looking forward to seeing at the festival. After this, unique Spotify playlists were released for teams Ubbi and Dubbi, and plushies of the characters became available to purchase with festival tickets. Puzzles were also released online, the answers revealing the artist line-up of the festival. This campaign was a phenomenal success, with the first-time festival selling out! The campaign achieved 11 million impressions (views), 650,000 engagements and 27,000 followers across the festival’s social media accounts.
Evaluating these campaigns, I have identified the need for a strong aesthetic that can be clearly communicated to the audience. I have defined my musical aesthetic, but these campaigns all have distinct visual styles. Therefore, I have decided to create a visual mood-board to gain influence for my music’s “brand”.
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