Kanye West's 5th studio album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is being released Monday. Before I rush out to the store to physically purchase my copy (sorry iTunes), I decided to take a look at just how well Kanye West and his G.O.O.D. team are at marketing albums--or, marketing his albums at least.
After spending some months out of the media (and creating his new album), Kanye came back ready to get engaged. So what does he do? He meets the media in their space. No fancy interview set-ups just Mr. West and crew talking to the media while they are at work. What's interesting is Kanye's particular interest in new media. Though it was a surprise visit to Rolling Stone some could call it expected since, Rolling Stone is, after all, one of the leading music media outlets. It was his surprise visits to Twitter and Facebook that got me thinking Kanye West single-handedly changed the term of SMT. All of a sudden the Satellite Media Tour turned into the Social Media Tour. And it worked very well. Outside of Will.I.Am speaking at a Twitter-sponsored conference earlier this year, it's safe to say that no celebrity has ever actually visited the sites that engage a significant amount of their fan base. Since Kanye's Visit, Facebook at least has seen visits from rappers Yelawolf and Raekwon. Soon after his visit to Silicon Valley, we then saw Kanye engage with fans over another popular tool, UStream, where he was able to answer questions live from his laptop and fans could see him and interact. He even gave his fans a sample of the song he planned to make his next single. And I'm sure Kanye will not stop his social media brigade here. In case anyone at G.O.O.D. is reading, I propose getting on Foursquare quickly. (And if you're curious as to what the specific strategy is, email me. I can't give the world these free ideas.)
Kanye West understands the importance of cross-marketing and he is always very clever with his choices. Cross-marketing in music is rather simple because all you need to do is simply feature another artist or be featured on another artists song. Hip-hop makes it even easier because hip-hop invented a little something known as the remix. So how does Kanye cross-market? He remixes a Justin Bieber song and gets Raekwon as a feature. Now, I have to be honest here. Prior to the "Runaway Love" remix, I've never heard a Justin Bieber song. I saw a music video of his playing once while shopping but I had never actually heard his song. All I knew about Justin Bieber is that he is the equivalent of Justin Timberlake circa 2000 but without the help of being in a boy band. That means he is every tweens dream. I also knew he sold quite a lot of records for a 16-year-old, broke a YouTube record and he is Usher's protégé. While I'm sure Bieber's fans had probably heard of Kanye West, I'm almost certain they had never heard of Raekwon. The only way to get the remix of course was to visit Kanye's website and enter in your e-mail address. So Justin gets some exposure to the hip-hop community and Kanye gets some help adding names to his database. This, people, is a mutually beneficial relationship.
And then there's Kanye's branding; something he's always been conscious of and great at keeping up with throughout his career. The lesson here: consistency is key. He uses the same font and (almost) the same color for every release of his G.O.O.D. Friday songs (with all of the features). He uses www.kanyewest.com as an online hub. There, you can also see his short film 'Runaway' and purchase his album through a link to iTunes. Speaking of 'Runaway', another great way to get people hype about your album is to create a movie around it. Michael Jackson was great at this, most of his music videos were considered "mini-movies". And Prince's 'Purple Rain' is another great example.
For the most part the above mentioned helped Kanye West push his album a great deal. But we also can't forget the nude pics and the recent performance on a Delta Airlines flight. Nor can we forget that a former U.S. President is currently name-dropping Kanye West to sell his own book. Of course none of this would be as successful without having a great product. And since Kanye West has yet to disappoint me since his 2004 debut, I'm going to go ahead and say everything was well worth it.
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