Just read a great article about how Imogen Heap is shaping the new way of doing the music business. For the past two years she’s been working on her latest album, Ellipse, which releases on August 25. I won’t go into all the details, you can read the article for yourself on Deep Dive Marketing. Here’s a summary:
- Twitter – She started when Twitter was still pretty new and was the first to establish how Twitter could be used by an artist
- vLog – She posted weekly video blogs on YouTube showing off bits of her album, talking about her life, asking for help writing her press bio, and just having some fun
- Flickr – She used Flickr’s social networking powers to get fan-designed album artwork and packaging
- She built her tribe over time
- Crowdsourcing – After being notified that someone had posted an advanced copy of her new album on eBay, she asked her fans to drive up the cost (to the $10,000,000), which they did, causing eBay to remove the auction, thereby preventing her album from leaking early
- Heap Tweetup – She hosted a Tweetup, or a meeting announced on Twitter, where she played some songs and met fans. When the venue kicked them out, she stuck around in the alley and signed autographs and chatted with each and every fan.
- Cafe Heap – these are live videos chats with Heap hosted on Vokle.
Is she perfect, hardly. Is she blowing the minds of people in the industry, you betcha. Even Lefsetz thought this was overkill and that if everyone had to do it this way, the industry will collapse. The way I see it, accessibility is now the norm and if you’re not, then you might not have an audience.
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