I wrote about this a while back, but I wanted to bring it up again.
Our friend Veken from the band Granian has developed a counterintuitive but highly effective marketing campaign that capitalizes on how people really use music online these days. He created a site called Burn and Share, which is built and branded completely different from the band’s main site.
On the site, he gives explicit instructions to download the songs, burn them to CD, and share them with others.
Does this seem like madness? Not to me.
Like most musicians, Veken will make a fraction of his lifetime income from CD sales. By giving his audience specific instructions to spread their material, he’ll reach more listeners, who can then become real fans and support the band through ticket and merch purchases. Here’s Veken’s philosophy, as he outlined it to me in an e-mail:
I figured what have we got to lose. 99.99% of the US population isn’t buying our cds today anyway. As long as we find a way to introduce this music to people and then make it easier to buy than to steal, we will be ok.
You will be better than ok, because you took matters into your own hands instead of waiting for someone to come along and handle it for you. Good work!