As Easy As One, Two, Bree

While surfing my morning headlines on CNN.com, one grabbed my attention titled “The Smartest Group In Pop Music?”. I rolled my eyes right away, but clicked through anyway and I was right. It was an article about some up and coming band out of Harvard named Chester French. There was an interview with the band and the story is about how Chester French is giving their new album away for free from their website and how now they are getting featured in a ton of magazines. Here’s a quote from the interview: “We’re doing something that’s never been done by a band before,” says lead singer D.A. Wallach.

First off D.A., it has been done before. Lots of times. In fact, here’s a recent one off the top of my head here: Radiohead gave their album away for free from their website, you could donate money for it if you wanted to, or just download it for free. Here’s another I just downloaded myself last week: Del tha Funkee Homosapien (amazing emcee and of Gorillaz fame) has his album in a nice tidy MP3 package available for you to download.

Second, it’s not the smartest move in the world. The Radiohead example above is actually a great example and I’ll show you why. Let’s remember a few principles:

1. People WILL pay for your music if you provide some value for it.

2. By offering it for free, you aren’t doing your fans a favor (unless you are an established band like Radiohead) you almost de-value yourself.

3. You provide value in a few ways:
a) Obviously it starts with the music, it has to be good!
b) Personal connection with fans. If fans feel a personal connection to you, your music or your band, suddenly people want to support you.
c) Add to the music, i.e. special packaging, limited editions, extra trinkets included. At Warner Bros. we did things like include a T-shirt with the package, include a CD of bonus content a la DVD special features, include special items like in the case of Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor there was a bound journal and photo book included.

So, let’s get back to Radiohead. They offered their music for free, but they let you put your own price on it, anywhere from $0 to $100.  Although a lot of people chose $0 and get the album for free, the people who DID pay for the music more often than not put a higher value than you would have paid for it at retail price. So, in the end it evened out to earn a similar amount of money as you would at retail.

If you look at this as a social and business test, you can almost put an actual price on what people’s perceived value of your brand and product is. It may surprise you how much higher it is than retail.

And how do you increase that perceived value? Through brand marketing, create a personal connection with your artist.

So, Chester French may be getting some hyper around their album right now, but starting with a perceived a value of $0 isn’t such a great idea. I doubt this will last…. unless their music is good, then it can speak for itself, but then if it IS good, why would you tell everyone it’s worthless?

Once again, I’m not impressed by Harvard trained boys.

Meet Nolan Gerard Funk. He’s been introduced to the teen scene as the star of the Nickelodeon TV movie “Spectacular!”.

Nolan Gerard Funk

This is a fun project for a marketer as you get to work with a blank canvas. He’s talked about in industry circles as the “next Zac Efron”. He could be as big as Zac, but in his own right. He’s got more marketable edge than Zac. He’s a little a older than Zac, so he can play the teen or get the “juicy” roles. And, oh yeah, the girls love him just as much.

Be on the lookout for Nolan. Like I said, he’s working with a blank canvas as Spectacular! kind of burst him on to the scene suddenly. He’s yet to put up a website, Myspace, Youtube, etc. but all of that is in the works, and he’s ready to strike while the iron is hot.

He would benefit a lot from launching his YouTube channel and seeding it by replying to all the videos already posted there from Spectacular fans. The girls love that stuff and would definitely respond and create a buzz that he is on the network. He already has some natural buzz happening on Facebook with a few fan created Fan Pages, one with over 1,500 people on it already.

It will be interesting to see what kind of plan rolls out with him and what movie role he takes up next. I’ll keep an eye on this roll out, watch plans early on like this one as you learn the most when you see the landscape from the very beginning.