Marketing Strategies

Strategy: Releasing an EP (extended play)
Example: Cults

Cults is a fairly new indie-pop band based in New York whose name started to rise in fame around mid 2010. After beginning to record their first album the band released an EP which consists of releasing one or two singles which would appear on the album. Cults released two singles, 'Go Outside' and 'Most Wanted.'
This type of strategy would give the audience a taste of what would be in the album. The singles give a glimpse of what the album would have to offer and encourage a larger group of the audience to buy the album when it is released.

Strategy: Early album release + 'Pay what you want'
Example: Radiohead

Radiohead's newest album 'King of Limbs' had an official release date of February 19th 2011. However, the album was released 24 hours earlier on the 18th of February, being released on Itunes and teasers being released on social networking sites. Apparently the early release of the album was purposely done with the reason being that everything was ready so there was no reason to wait.
But the outbreak of the early album release was big and was not limited to just social networking sites, tabloids and online publications were also making noise about the news. Of course the reason why they choose to do this was to incite this noise. It is unlikely that the buzz for the album would have been this high if the band had released the album on release date.

Radiohead are no strangers to marketing strategies, especially when the strategy for their last album was offering it to the audience for any price they deemed worthy. This type of strategy would definitely cause fans to swarm for the album as well as many other people who usually wouldn't buy the album, to buy it. It is a great innovation for artists/bands who get a royalty for every album they sell and make most of their money from concerts.

Lip Sync Exercise 1 - Editing Practice

An early practice to test out the cuts and merging different videos together

Evaluation
A practice task to show us the difference between a music video and a film/television show. It was to help us establish the difference in editing needed and the camera work/angles one can use.
We were given a number of video clips of people in animal costumes dancing as well as a number of audio clips. Our task was to select an audio clip and cut the video clips (more than one could be used) and try to match it with the audio.
Our task also prohibited the use of effects.

The audio clip i chose was 31 seconds in length and i cut clips from different videos, shortening them, in order to fit them with the audio. I used around 4-5 different video clips which were available to me.

Unfortunately i was not used to cutting video clips from a number of them and trying to match them up with an audio piece, so my main focus was to cut the video clips into smaller pieces, getting a sound for the audio and then matching up the video clips to the audio. Markers proved rather useful in these situations as you can mark the beats in the audio you want to match the video to as well as putting them where you want to cut the video clips.

Although i did experiment with wireframe and with a few effects i did not use any which is a weak point for this video. I spent most of my time on cutting and getting used to matching video with audio and did not give any time to experiment and use effects to improve my video. Although i do think that my time with cutting paid off and i produced a decent video (above) where the video matches the audio well.

Cults - Research Task

A new indie-pop band which began in the early months of 2010. They started by releasing a few songs online for amusement and friends although they did have some music experience.

From Manhattan, New York, they released their first track 'Go Outside' on their website which was an instant hit - something the two in the band did not expect. Brian Oblivion (vocals/guitar) and Madeline Follin (vocals) are a 21 year old couple who were praised by Pitchfork Media with their first track 'Go Outside' being named as 'Best New Music.'

Not much information was known about them at first since they didn't give anything away as well as not having a myspace page or any other page of any kind. They only gave those few rare interviews. They released a couple more tracks and after gaining more fame introduced themselves on social networking sites Facebook and twitter as well as Youtube and myspace in December of 2010.

They began recording for their new album in 2010 and went on until 2011 and on June 7th 2011 their first album, consisting of 11 tracks, was released in the US and Uk on iTunes and Amazon mp3. They released an EP in 2010 which featured 2 songs that would appear on the album - 'Go Outside' and 'Most Wanted.' Their album was produced by Lily Allen's Columbia Records imprint , In The Name of.



This is one of their songs. It is called 'Abducted' and was taken from their youtube account.