It’s been almost four years since Lorde has released Pure Heroine, and I’ve been dying for new music. After months and months of silence, I had an idea: I was going to stop googling for information on Lorde’s new album, I was going to unfollow her on social media, and see how I discovered she had new music coming out (if that ever happened).
This is not about me giving up on Lorde – I am still a faithful fan – but I wanted to see which strategies would work best when marketing her new album. I’ve observed that a lot of artists rely heavily on social media to update fans on new albums (not a surprise). But some artists will simply send out a tweet, they don’t follow it on any other platform or stream. Some artists with massive followings can get away with this because the news will be everywhere in two seconds. Some artists are so successful (Beyoncé) they don’t even have to alert fans of new albums – they just release them.
But, it’s not enough to send out just one tweet and expect fans to know new music is coming – it takes a cross-promotional campaign. Or, at least, it should.
I’ve become interested in how artists alert fans of new music. Indeed, I originally only joined Twitter because some of my favorite artists would only update fans via the platform – I was always a step behind if I wasn’t constantly checking their tweets. But then I started thinking: artists should not make their fans work this hard. I mean, they want me to buy their album, why should I do extensive research to find out if they even have a new album?
So I’ve selected a handful of artists (Lorde is the first) that I know are probably working on new music. And I’m not doing my usual extensive research to find out any information. Instead, I’m sitting back and just observing and seeing how they reach out to me.
