Has any band sold a record well with barely any marketing to speak of?

I think if an actually still popular band did it it wouldn't sell as well as if there was advance notice, but once it came out people would write and talk about it maybe even more. Is marketing acceptable once the release date passes? (And of course it would be nearly impossible to do this with a band people actually wanted to know about a new release from--at the very least record store employees would tell people about it once they got the product on the weekend).

My hunch would be that it would be very hard to keep it secret these days. And in the case of Limp Bizkit, did anyone really care about them by the time that album came out?

xpost

re: I was wondering, if a very big and popular band were to release an album next week with absolutely no promotion and no forewarning to the press no nothing - just like a surprise where the album just appears on the shelves, how well would it sell?

In the internet age this could never happen ! online retailers list forthcoming releases ! there is no way a media embargo of a forthcoming release by a popular artist could happen.

The only way it could happen if the album was released under a pseudoynm, pretending to be a new artist. But why would an artist/ record label want to do this ?

Reminder of some basic economics/ and marketing concepts:

Suppy and demand: There would have to be appropriate supply side:, e.g number of Cds pressed/ manufactured, a distributor to supply the albums, buyers/ managers at retail level to buy in/ order the album. At all points of the supply chain, decisions would be made of quantities to manufacture/ distribute/ stock.

An appropriate level of demand, would be matched by supply side.

Marketing consumer behaviour model: Attention [are you aware of the product], Interest [do you have an interest in the product], Desire [Do you want this product], Action [Where? When? do you buy the product]

word of mouth / increase in media exposure / or if the album has a buzz would alter supply / demand balance. All parties concerned labels/ distributors and retail will constantly monitor for changes in demand.

A case in point is Nirvana's Nevermind album in September 1991, initially only about 70, 000 albums were manufactured by Geffen for the US market, by Christmas it was a mega seller.

Likewise in the UK, Nirvana were just a cult Sounds/ Melody Maker band, Smells Like Teen spirit was a chart hit and suddently the album became a massive seller. From a moderate start to an explosion of sales within two or three months.

They didn't sell all that well, either, by the standards of the time or by today's. But they kept selling. I'll bet they have all recouped.

They've been running ubiquitous TV ads (which appears to be an increasingly popular way to hawk records, by the way).

So... Not really. The only way that would happen (and it's stretching the "barely any" point) is for a label rep who'd pushed an album to get fired and have his stable get no budget, only to have a hit come out of there (which happens very, very rarely). There's a reason why artists complain that their albums aren't being aggressively promoted.

Some examples I can think of that are close but not exactly on point— Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, though the press storm was mighty, and Clouds Taste Metallic (I think that was the one with She Don't Use Jelly on it), which had a radio hit several years after it was released.

dealing with the press isn't quite the same thing as marketing. and their advertising has been minimal at most - not even t shirts and stickers, let alone anything resembling an ad campaign.

wasn't it 'in on the kill taker' that debuted somewhere in the billboard top 200, with virtually no 'marketing' to speak of?

This reminds me that this is all a question of perspective. For instance, your prototypical ILMer is hyper-aware of whether or not a release is getting promoted, since they themselves are in some way connected to the apparatus of the promotion industry. But I remember being at camp one year during high school and having heard some tiny reference to Dave Grohl having a new band that was going to put out an album, and I called the local radio station multiple times a week to find out if it had actually come out yet, or if they had any music from it. So it may have been (and probably was) furiously marketed, but from my perspective, I was desperate for any info about it because the well was dry.

Of course you can always argue that that one scrap of info I did have was the result of all the marketing being done that I wasn't aware of, and that without that push I would have had nothing and so wouldn't have even known that the Foo Fighters were Dave Grohl's band. Trickle-down etc.

I dunno, they're not marketed like the White Stripes or whatever, but keep in mind there are a LOT of kids reading PP and MRR that are totally rabid over Dischord. Compared to bands with a publicity campaign, yeah, sure, there's no comparison, but Dischord is an american brand that the punk rock kids of America can count on to put out quality product, if you know what I mean.

cf all the stories in alt weeklies etc about Fugazi

Also, didn't No Code get a fair bit of press about being intentionally anti-commercial etc?

So you could argue that Fugazi's 10/5 policy is a publicity stunt, but it's definitely not marketnig.

FWIW THESE ARE NOT DISJOINT

Marketing is driven by the record company/band.

Publicity is driven by the media.

I mean, it adds up to the same thing in the end, for most cases - words on pages. But it just depends on which side is doing the pushing.

UH

Not quite. There was an advance single ("Who You Are") and radio promotion to go along with it.

Here's a hint: Anytime you hear "Band x sold blah thousand copies almost entirely by word of mouth" you're most likely reading rehashed copy from a press release (written by a highly-paid PR agent) describing a successful viral marketing campaign also unleashed by said PR agent

But yeah, I am a little tired of reading the same lead in every story about them.

O.A.R. and dispatch. boring dudes with acoustic guitars frat rock, the both of them, but damn if they didn't catch on entirely through people sharing mp3s and going to shows. they're a lot more well known now, sure, but they were selling out medium-sized venues with basically no marketing. at all. O.A.R. sold out madison square garden earlier this year for fuck's sake.

i think this is a way more common phenomenon in the jam band community than pretty much anywhere else.

Regardless of whether they were a better or worse band, I think PiL's take on selling "political rock" was a lot more interesting, or at least more amusing.

The four Ps are:

* Product: The Product management and Product marketing aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual good or service, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants.
* Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts.
* Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
* Placement or distribution refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to “where” a product or service is sold, e.g. in which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people, women, men, etc.).

How about "Macarena" as selling without marketing?

Fugazi does so little in the way of promotion that Christgau (if memory serves) concedes he stopped reviewing them in the '90s because he couldn't bother to go out and buy the CDs in stores.

Hmm. I'm sure there are a few contract-concluding type records that dropped with virtually nil promotion.

Wikipedia is right: Publicity is an element of marketing. Labels have a weird structure where central staff is supposed to co-ordinate among various departments, with publicity and marketing being separate (as is radio promotion, which is also an element of marketing). Realistically, if there's a reasonably large, professional staff, different people are going to be doing different functions -- publicity staff basically maintains relationships with the press, promotions with radio MDs, marketing with ad agencies and advertising media and also, crucially, retail.

Words mean whatever I say they mean.

Publicity is part of marketting.

So, was "In Rainbows" the answer to this question?

no, there were like 8 billion newspaper articles about the distribution method, lack of marketing, etc

though i guess you're drawing a distinction between active marketing and publicity

Sorta. The Raconteurs' last album was I think a little closer to what this thread started asking about, though, since they released the retail CD with nothing but a quick advance announcement the week before (since stores/websites were receiving the album then and the news would've leaked around that time anyway). Did pretty well, too, top 10 Billboard debut.

Thing is anything like this or what Radiohead did is still inherently novel enough that just the act of doing it is looked as a marketing hook/gimmick.

But were the "OMG WTF?!?!?" news articles actually part of a marketing strategy, or something that was a reaction to such a wacky stunt? (Yes, I'm thinking of active marketing strategies rather than publicity.)

i don't know if you can draw a distinction there honestly

Well, I'd say "active marketing strategy" = something you pay for, or something that you have paid a marketing consultant or strategist to dream up.

oh i meant between "actually part of a marketing strategy, or something that was a reaction to such a wacky stunt?"

pretty sure wacky stunt = active marketing strategy.

There's almost no distinction between "active marketing" and publicity. If you see a bunch of articles about a band, then behind the scenes they've got a PR person or team promoting them.