The impact that digital technologies have on the music industries has changed dramatically over the last 20 years with more and more artists relying on digital technology to promote there albums/singles to bring in as much profit as possible. Lady Gaga, Radiohead and Nirvana are some examples of how digital technology has changed over time and how they use different methods to market their product.
Nirvana's album Nevermind was released in 1991 which they only expected 250,000 copies of this album to be sold but in actual fact 30 million copies have been sold to date. This was because they're marketing strategies were very good with the limited amount of digital technology there was back then. Nirvana appeared on satelight TV channels such as MTV the only 24 hour music channel in the 1990's but to keep sales and profits increasing they re-released their album when new digital technology was available to them such as itunes and amazon, which can enable their album to go global while keeping the costs to a minimum which in turn maximises their profit margin. Also by re-releasing and repackaging the album Nevermind on to CD this also kept the album alive even though the band is no more, the main singer shot himself in the head with a shot gun, which even this still promotes the band as the main singer died in the name of the band which some people may respect. So Nirvana goes to show that you don't necessarily need the amount of digital technology big record labels insist on having to make a band or artist successful, you just need a reliable group of fans, lots of tours, BBC showings on Top Of The Pops, word of mouth.
Radiohead is the opposite of this where they go to show that you can also make an album successful by only promoting and marketing an album by digital technology only. In 2011 they created their album The Kings Of Limbs where they only advertised the release date of this album 5 days before you could buy it but only by download through their own website. The cost of this album was £6. They actually released this album after 4 days instead of 5 days. No other promotions or marketing were used so this shows that a band can still make money and be successful with out the backing of a big record label which still insists on multiple ways of advertising to get as much profit as possible. even though this album did not sell as much as some of radiaheads other albums it was the most profitable as they didn't have to pay for all the physical copies and shipping fees all over the world. One other method of digital marketing they did was to release the video Lotus Flower which was cheaply made with lots of use of light, shadows and weird dancing done only by the main singer from Radiohead. This video caught their fans eyes and made them want to see what their new album the kings of limbs was like compared to the video that was released.
Lady Gaga and her record label uses so many different ways of digital technology to their advantage to gain more fans to buy her albums. She released her album Fame in 2008 where previous to this she released singles during the run up to the album to make more money, first from the singles and then the main album. She keeps in contact with her fans through digital technology such as twitter where she now has the second most followers as she was recently took over by Justin Beiber. With the use of twitter she can write tweets telling her fans to buy her latest albums and promoting herself also she profited a good 30 million pounds from twitter alone in one year from interacting with her fans. She also offers her fans physical copies of her albums in CD form and also through digital downloads to cut down the cost of globalising her music this way she can gain fans from all over the world which again results in more profit and more money to be made. Her music videos are very digital with many special effects and very costly unlike Radiohead Lotus Flower.
I think the best way to promote and market a band or artist is to use a variety of ways including terrestrial TV (BBC) by appearing on interviews and shows such as Top Of The Pops or Xfactor, Salelight TV (MTV) by when a single hits number one it gets more play time on MTV meaning that the song is played every hour to constantly promote it and get more fans, touring around the country again this increases the fan base which in the long run will be more profitable, having social media accounts such as twitter, Facebook and spottify so you can offer interaction with people and fans also gaining money from these social media networks, offering a range of ways to have the single/album in vinyls, CD, downloads to target a wider range of fans that are into collectables (vinyls) or more modern (itunes downloads) so buy using a range of digital technologies and no digital technologies is the way to make an artist very famous and earn as much money as they possibly can.
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