Bands, Festivals, Today In Music, Twitter
Follow Us on Twitter!
Danielle Johnsen :: Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 2:04 pm
It didn’t take long for bands, and more importantly record labels, to harness the power of Twitter. As we saw with MySpace a few years back, it seems that if you aren’t on Twitter, you don’t matter -at least in a marketing capacity. Newbies to the rock world, like MGMT and celebrated folks, like Echo and the Bunnymen, are the latest in the long line of major bands sigining up to tune in and tweet on.
The best optimization of the Twitter technology might be Nine Inch Nails, who capitalized on the latest in-your-hands technology last Summer during their “final’ tour with Jane’s Addiction, offering free tickets, backstage views and even an handy dandy iPhone app to make sure their fans had complete access to them. Unfortunately, this eventually backfired and sent Trent Reznor packing his Twitter bags after the harassment of his then fiance, now wife escalated to a point of no return. More recently, the majority of bands playing this weekend’s Coachella have been offering chances to win tickets, CDs and for MGMT, a full paid trip to check out the band play the festival in the desert, as a way to entice their fan base to get on board and follow them. Its a promotional marketers dream. 140 characters and your job is essentially done. So its interesting to see a band like Echo and the Bunnymen, whose national tour starts with their set at Coachella this weekend, harness the latest in technology to reconnect with their fans, maybe catch the attention of younger folks and promote their tour, all with a simple tweet. The band will be giving away at least a pair of tickets for each upcoming date on the US tour through Twitter, but in advance of the day of the show to heighten the suspense and help the continuity in followers. To see new and old bands take advantage of the seamless aggregation possibilities of Twitter and its sister technology is interesting to someone in both the music and marketing industries and confirms that the music industry isn’t dead, its just in a period of evolving, again. For the full list of Echo and the Bunnymens upcoming dates, check out their site. So when is Mike Patton going to harness this technology? We are anxiously waiting!
