Idolator

Stylus has a solid, thorough piece on work of pre-release online marketing, and the amount of energy that goes into "priming the pump"—making sure that a band's name reaches the upper echelons of elbo.ws and Technorati before its album's release date. Take, for example, the case of former blog-buzz band Midlake, and how one song's presence on a label sampler led to a flurry of pre-release chatter:

Greg Bresnitz, the head of new media for World's Fair Label Group, Inc., couldn't be more excited about the buzz surrounding Midlake's The Trials of Van Occupanther. I chatted with him in July, the week before the record dropped, and he was amazed at the amount of pre-release interest it had gathered. Back in January, the situation was far different. Bresnitz discovered that Midlake's European label, Bella Union, had pressed the album's first single, "Roscoe," onto a sampler, which was mailed to a variety of online outlets. These included two of the most widely-read mp3 blogs, Gorilla vs. Bear and Stereogum, both of whom posted the mp3.

As a composite marketing force, multiple mp3 blogs posting the same song can form a powerful marketing tool, so Bresnitz decided to put them to work for World's Fair and Midlake. He put the "Roscoe" mp3 onto his own server, and papered other music blogs with promotional materials and requests (and, importantly, tacit "permission") to post the file. More crucially, Bresnitz also contacted entertainment sites AOL Music and Yahoo! Music (the traffic from which dwarfs even the largest music blog), and influential review sites Pitchfork, Stylus, and Pop Matters for reviews of the song and possible interviews with the band. Midlake played a few European dates with the Flaming Lips, and Bresnitz dutifully emailed pictures of the bands together.

After the seven-month promotional campaign, Bresnitz claimed more than 150,000 downloads of "Roscoe." What that number exactly means is hard to quantify, a testament to the unique and often confusing realm of Internet promotion. An individual song download doesn't equate to paying 13 bucks for a CD, and the download itself could well have been spurred by faith in the site rather than the quality of the song itself. But the fact remains: without radio and the expensive benefit of touring, Midlake had made something of a national impression.

Whether or not that "national impression" resulted in dollars is still up for debate—sure, that 150,000-download figure sounds impressive, but measuring its actual meaning (how many people who downloaded "Roscoe" listened to it more than once? or saw the band on tour?) is, of course, still an inexact science. (How many "blogger buzz bands" do your offline pals know about? You do have offline friends, right?) The techniques that marketers use try to keep up with the ever-shifting patterns of online chatter about music are only going to get more elaborate over the coming months—and watching how those efforts translate into dollars, especially from fans who may want to consume music, but not necessarily pay for it, will be even more instructive about those techniques' ultimate effects.

Priming The Pump [Stylus]