The Near Naked Guide to Revolutionary Music Promotion

A sleepless night spent sweeping imaginary spiders from beneath my 2 year olds bed on Friday led to an early night on Saturday where, as the wife snored, I was shocked to find myself transfixed by ITV’s The Kylie Show. Part PopPorn Lite, part sketchy sketch show, one song had me reaching for my You Tube the following morning.

So I thought I’d use this unreleased track as an exercise in how to capitalise on the new methods of musical promotion out there and look at a few of the areas where technology and sequins combine:

1. Kylie is a Widget - no it’s not a typo. The You Tube video is a widget, a piece of embeddable code, but for greater viral effect we should use a widget platform such as Clearspring to create a viral wrapper for the video, enabling you to embed it in your social media of choice, ie blog, Facebook, MySpace etc, or rusty ole email.

2. Freemium - Kylie has a 20 year fan base, she also recognises the financial benefits of touring, having adopted the Madonna annual spectacle model, they whole Cirque De Kylie Ltd etc etc. So she adds the ability to download the single from the widget (see Daft Punk) for free. There is more money to be made in converting single buyers into concert goers than charging $0.99 for a download.

3. PopPorn - lest we forget Kylie has a notable and well publicized rear - sex sells, the hint of sex sells even better. Wearing very little and riding a mechanical horse also works wonders, so add an extra video to the widget. No need to record expensive new content, just add the Agent Provocateur video, re-negotiate new usage and distribution deal with Agent Provocateur, convince them of benefits and Kylie might even earn some money by giving away her single for free.

4. Seedy - Upload video to You Tube, seed it on a number of Kylie fansites, official and unofficial. It’s vital to maintain communications with unofficial sites. Speak to a number of top flight tech and music industry bloggers about using technology to set the content free, attract kudos from tech and music marketing industry. News filters down to offline publications. Seed on p2p networks making file available to all bittorrent users to ensure greater global reach, particularly in lucrative Asian market.

5. Watch it Ride - Use Google Trends and widget analytics to monitor how the widget travels across the web, which regions are picking it up? Use this data to plan future ad campaigns based on regions to promote up coming tours. (see this piece for more info)

Make it portable, make it free, gather key data for future targeting and ticket sales. Release it in time for Christmas and Kylie’s operatic yodeling will be Number One, whatever that really means anymore.

Here endeth the near naked guide to revolutionary music promotion.

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