Unreleased Advertising: New marketing strategies in EDM.
How do you advertise new music? For decades, the main strategy has been to announce a new album or song you are releasing, set up some billboards, in more recent times you post about it on instagram, and release it on the day you advertised. This has been the case for all major genres of music from Jazz to Rock. However, a new strategy is seeming to emerge in EDM, don't release it.
Unreleased music has been a staple of many genres like EDM and Rap ever since music streaming services like SoundCloud gave people the ability to easily post leaked music on the internet. I was first exposed to leaks as the hype was building for Playboi Carti’s album WHOLE LOTTA RED. People were dying for the album to come out, and waiting to see what Carti had been up to since dropping Die Lit in 2018. This caused an explosion of leaks on SoundCloud, showcasing a new sound that was a massive departure from the music people had come to expect from him. The leaks undoubtedly caused more hype for WLR in the lead up to its release. However, instead of capitalizing on this new found anticipation for the album, the situation was handled by targeting leakers and aiding in their arrests.
Diverging from Carti’s handling of the situation, a different approach seems to be taking hold in EDM. This first came to my attention when seeing John Summit’s set at the Experts Only event in Lake Tahoe, California recently. He opened his set by playing a track no one had heard from him before, and it was a major hit with the crowd. He then released the track, titled ‘light years’ featuring Inéz, a couple weeks later, racking up almost 2 million streams within the first week. Showcasing the track a large and well publicized event certainly had an effect on the hype for the track in the lead up to this release, with people speculating what it was, when it would drop, and prompting people to upload bootleg versions of the track to Soundcloud. A similar situation is happening with Zulan’s remix of 4Ever by Clairo. Zulan has played the track at almost all of the sets she has played recently, stirring up immense anticipation for its release.
This got me thinking of the marketing potential of these unreleased songs. Naturally people want what they don't have, and this reigns true in the case of music. Showcasing unreleased songs and posting them on social media to build hype and anticipation for the songs release can yield great returns when the song releases. I think this is a trend we will continue to see and grow over the coming years, with potential to spill into the concerts of artists in a wider range of genres. Do you agree? Leave a comment below or send a message in the contact section and let me know your thoughts.
