Today we look at how social media has brought interactivity to the music industry....gone are the days where music videos and concerts are simply passive viewing experiences. With social media, individuals can get involved in creating the music videos they want to watch and share them with friends online; people can customize music videos to tell their own personal stories. Similarly, watching a concert can now become an interactive and social experience.
One case study with the band, The Arcade Fire, recently came to my attention at work. After looking it up on WARC (in an article titled, 'Google: The Wilderness Downtown'), I discovered that this campaign won the prestige Cannes Lion award 2012. Have a read here...
One case study with the band, The Arcade Fire, recently came to my attention at work. After looking it up on WARC (in an article titled, 'Google: The Wilderness Downtown'), I discovered that this campaign won the prestige Cannes Lion award 2012. Have a read here...
Arcade Fire, The Band
Arcade Fire is a 7-person, Indie rock band based in Quebec, Canada. The band has been popular amongst fans of alternative music since they released Funeral in 2004. They are now known for albums such as Neon Bible and The Suburbs, which won the 2011 Grammy awards for Album of the year, as well as the 2011 Polaris Music Prize.
The Wilderness Downtown Google Experiment
The Wilderness Downtown is the interactive, social media version of a music video for the Arcade Fire song, 'We use to wait.' It is a Google Chrome experiment; a multi-browser, HTML5 project which allows individuals to become part of the music video...To view the project, fans must put in the address of their childhood home. Following this, they can watch a music video built around them and their personal geography. Images of fans' childhood homes are interwoven into the clip, making it relevant and meaningful to viewers. In the clip, people are also given the opportunity to write postcards to their past selves. The clip is shown through several windows, which pop up and disappear as the story progresses...
You can make your own video here: http://thewildernessdowntown.com (Google Chrome must be used and it is browser heavy) or you can view an example below, though the full experience doesn't come across as well as trying it for yourself...But how is this all related to social media?
Well, fans can share the experience in a number of ways: they can share their video, with their childhood neighbourhood embedded in it, with others on social media pages like Google+ and Facebook. They can send a static url of the postcard they write to friends or out into the public. Chris Milk, director the video, created an invention called the Wilderness Machine, which has been programmed to swap postcards with random senders- sort of a message in a bottle concept. Each postcard can be "planted" (a graphic of a tree appears on the screen) and individuals who recieve a postcard can respond to them (they have a special code returning postcards to the sender). This can start conversations between fans of the band. Additionally, The Wilderness Machine scans and tweets the postcard messages to its Twitter account, one postcard message a day. 
Because the campaign was so 'cool', it also generated a lot of word of mouth advertising and buzz on social media when it was released...check out the tweets from celebrities:
Ashton Kutcher – 10M followers
"this is about the coolest thing I've seen in a long time http://bit.ly/cUptyg"
Jimmy Fallon – 5.3M followers
"New Arcade Fire video-directed by Chris Milk – type in your childhood address – it's really cool. http://bit.ly/bGqWer"
Ben Stiller – 2.6M followers
"http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ Taking it to another level."
Rainn Wilson – 3M followers
"If u go to one website in your life, make it this one: http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/"
Stephen Fry – 4M followers
"This is just too impossibly splendid for words… http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/Try it"
Not long after it was launched in 2011, it had already generated 4 million visits, with many visitors creating content and sharing it with friends. What was so successful about the whole project? Well, I believe it was quite creative. It was one of the first interactive music videos launched which allowed fans to take an active role in their viewing experience. It exhibited elements of co-creation - providing fans with a beautiful and nostalgic framework to develop their own stories and shape their own entertainment. It was also easy to share, which meant that fans only had to click to pass on their videos and spead word of mouth. Further to this, Arcade Fire co-branded with Google and experimented with new technology (HTML5). This also helped to drive SEO and online discussion, as Google would not only promote the music video, but people would be interested in it due to its use of advanced technology. Pretty creative way to market music!
YouTube Concert
Following the release of the album, The Suburbs (which featured the song 'We use to wait' and The Suburbs, below), Arcade Fire also teamed up with YouTube, Veveo and American Express to perform a live-streamed concert in New York City. According to Mashable and Google, the online stream-concert attracted 3.7 million viewers and offered a range of interactive features. For example, people could play with a 'Choose Your Cam' function, switching between the directors' stream and second camera. They could also view fan-generated images, showing various childhood suburbs.
The results? The album sold 765,000 copies in the US. Also:
The album debuted at No. 1 on the Irish Albums Chart, the UK Albums Chart, the U.S. Billboard 200 chart,[4] and the Canadian Albums Chart.[5]
While its difficult to attribute the exact sales made due to social media promotions and activities, the Cannes Judges awarded this campaign for its creativity, integration of different channels and its high level of reach.
In conclusion...
Songs are about stories and creativity, performance is about sharing and experience; Arcade Fire knew this and incorporated these ideas to promote their music. They tailored the story of their music video so that it was local and personal to viewers. They made the project one of co-creation, both with customers and other brands (Google). So the music video was made 'together' with fans and was sharable with the wider community. All this helped to generate online hype that propel the band's popularity and album sales.
http://mashable.com/2010/08/30/arcade-fires-chrome-video/
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/lifestyle/turning-page-views-into-album-sales/
http://socialmedia.hpc.unm.edu/?p=360
Key Points to take away:
- Be creative in social media marketing - choose different platforms or create your own, and develop unique content to get customers talking and sharing your brand online.
- Involve elements of story and play on nostalgia, particularly customers' personal stories. People love to share their own tales and are more likely to remember marketing campaigns that involve narrative.
- Experiment with something new, like new technology. Nothing gets people talking like new concepts!
- For established brands (e.g. Arcade Fire), it is worthwhile co-branding and cross-promoting with other popular and relevant brand names (Google) to generate excitement and online discussion.
- Make social media content and campaigns local, personal, sharable and collaborative. This will increase chances that the content, and the brand, will get discussed by customers online.
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