When a band goes viral...

Source: www.kaiserchiefs.com

...it's a kind of revolution. The marketing concept for the new Kaiser Chiefs album is another approach of the music industry to bear up agaginst a world of filesharing but also against big players like iTunes which charge a huge ratio of the final sales for the opportunity to publish content on their popular platforms. 

So what are they doing? 


The only way to get the new album "The Future is Medieval" is over the bands website. On the website you have the opportunity to choose 10 out of 20 songs you want to have on your album. After choosing your 10 favorite songs you can create your own cover to make the album even more unique or personalized as marketing people would say. So far it is a very nice appraoch to create "customer involvement" but it is still not the big bang. What makes this marketing concept so promising is the option to create an own website where you can distribute "your" personalized album. For every album sold, the distributor gets £1. Thereby  everybody who downloads the album gets motivated to share informations about the album and the personal website via twitter, facebook or in real life conversations to drive his own sales and to share his own version of the album. So the result is that mostly fans of the band will be the sales force for the album. And who could be a better salesman than a fan who probably knows a lot of other fans. At the same time the created involvement could make the sellers also become brand advocates. Additionally to all this Marketing, it justs brings fun... 


Wrap up:

1. Availablility only on the Website => more traffic + strenghtening of the band as a brand + higher margins
2. Personalization => creates involvement
3. Own Website  => creates involvement + provides an incentive to start word-of-mouth

To sum up, I am wound up to a high pitch how this appraoch will progress but I definetly think that this way to start a word-of-mouth process is a promising approach. Not only for the music industry...

Here you can create your album!