Music Videos as Viral Marketing: Lessons Learned

About 5 weeks ago, I worked with Greg Hester to release a music video that would hopefully help promote his band and grab some new listeners. The idea was simple: take a song he was already working on in the studio and develop a video that incorporated a current event that was of interest to a large audience, while at the same time, staying true to the content of the music. These are just a few things we learned from this promotional tactic:

1) It worked! In the 5 weeks since releasing the video, Greg has been offered gigs in Columbia, SC, Augusta, GA, Athens, GA, Charlotte, NC and Atlanta to name a few. His MySpace page views jumped over 15% from 9140 to 10635 in less than 40 days. He also added almost 100 new MySpace friends from across the country (a 15% increase as well), and his total music plays increased by over 10 percent to 9,461. And at the time of this post, his video has been watched on YouTube 950 times. Additionally, he now has a few more labels following him on MySpace.

2) Finding someone influential on Twitter to make a post about your video will certainly bring in traffic. For us, it was Dave Winer. We received over 200 views directly from his tweet alone - Thanks Dave!

3) This was an inexpensive tactic, only $200 to produce. Not bad considering the amount of increased exposure, and most musicians and bands will be able to DIY.

4) It provided us with an entertaining way to easily showcase Greg's band to a couple of major label artists considering working with us on an upcoming James Brown tribute CD (more on this project in the coming months).

5) It was a great way for us to pre-release the song before making it available for downloading later this year.

All in all, the video was certainly worth the expense, but there are a few things we would have done differently. For example, asked our friends with YouTube accounts to add the video to their channel, uploaded a high quality version to Vimeo, as YouTube is not a great medium for releasing high quality video/audio, reached out to our friends with music blogs, contacted more influencers interested in the content of the video, sent copies to the media, and spent much more time promoting it in social networks, to name a few tactics. Due to time constraints, we did very little, almost none, but I have a feeling we are going to be creating more of these kinds of music videos in the future, so hopefully the next video will have a greater impact.

Comments

[Greg Rollett]

Glad to see your campaign worked. Did you pick the current event based on Google Trends, top videos or just a gut feeling? Love the approach as it plays off SEO, internet marketing and music promo.

[Indie Music]

Hi Greg: Thanks for your feedback!

Essentially, we happened to be working on a song called "Prezident" right around the same time as "Super Tuesday," so developing a video that played off the election momentum surrounding Barack Obama was a natural fit for us.

Keep in touch!