While record labels bemoan their sad plight, artists like Nine Inch Nails are coming up with creative ways to inject mystery and playfulness into the music promotion game.
The elaborate campaign for NIN’s new “Year Zero” album — 42 Entertainment is the agency behind it — is a great example of blurring the line between marketing and entertainment.
Trail of clues
It all started with a concert t-shirt:
The bolded letters on the shirt spelled out a domain name that describes Parepin, “a revolutionary drug.” This kickstarted “a long, elaborate, cookie trail of clues and cryptically hidden website URLs hidden in the most unlikely of places.”
Another version of the truth is also one of the campaign’s sites. It features an idyllic photo and message, but clicking and dragging on the photo reveals hidden, darker imagery.
That dystopian vision is reflected in the album’s songs too. Fans discovered USB Flash drives left in bathrooms at the band’s shows. On them were unprotected versions of the new tracks. These leaked songs soon showed up online as another part of the puzzle.
The power of mystery
Rolling Stone said the “Year Zero” project is “the most innovative promotion scheme since the leaked sex tape.”
NIN have treated their fans to a sort of Where’s Waldo game that includes tour merchandising, a dizzying network of websites and, umm, bathrooms in European concert halls.
Adrants praised the campaign and said, “Mythology adds fuel to fan fire.”
This is the way a viral campaign should be run – with a brand using multiple forms of media to play with its users and leave them things to find and chase after.
The Google perspective
Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, points out why the campaign is a winner from an SEO perspective.
- Check out the text from iamtryingtobelieve.com/purpose.htm. It’s so jittery that it’s hard to read, but if you view the source, you’ll notice that it’s mostly text content, which lets search engines index it.
- The buzz built pretty organically. USB drives were left in bathrooms at conferences and messages were hidden in conference T-shirts. It’s much better to let people find you than to push too hard to get noticed. The links from the “people-find-you” approach are more organic than if someone spammed to get links to viral sites.
- I appreciate that the campaign picked a lot of terms (e.g. “parepin”) that were unique nonsense words. That keeps the marketing campaign from crufting up search results for actual topics or real peoples’ names, which is a pretty rude thing to do.
CD design
The CD design comes with a twist too.
Before you play it the disk is black. When you take it out of the CD player it’s white, and then slowly fades to grey. As it turns out the people that have done the marketing are the same ones that marketed the ill fated microsoft zune, which has been one of the biggest failures in history. This goes to show it wasn’t the marketing, it was an inferior product.
Trent Reznor on DRM and technology
In “Stars compose new ways to use music,” NIN’s Trent Reznor discusses why he dislikes DRM.
The USB drive was simply a mechanism of leaking the music and data we wanted out there. The medium of the CD is outdated and irrelevant. It’s really painfully obvious what people want – DRM-free music they can do what they want with. If the greedy record industry would embrace that concept I truly think people would pay for music and consume more of it.
Reznor is also making individual tracks from the album available in files that anyone can edit and remix in programs like GarageBand. Reznor talks about the democratizing influence of technology:
Any time a new technology becomes available to the masses it’s a good thing. Recording studios used to be the domain of only the privileged or professional – now many have access to these tools allowing anyone to try their hand at it. As to what I’m looking to gain from doing this, I’m not really sure…it just seemed like something I’d want as a fan.
When marketing becomes art
While the major labels continue to try and hold onto the past, Reznor’s attitude and approach is a glimpse of the future. Instead of looking at his album as the finish line, he’s using it as part of a bigger, all-encompassing experience for fans.
What you are now starting to experience IS ‘year zero’. It’s not some kind of gimmick to get you to buy a record – it IS the art form…and we’re just getting started.
Tom
on 01 May 07Bonus feature: the album’s really good too.
Long Time Listener - Repeat Caller
on 01 May 07^ That’s all a matter of perspective.
Matt
on 01 May 07Does anybody know who designs NIN’s websites and album art. They have a fairly consistent look even as far back as The Downward Spiral album cover. I can’t get enough of it.
Dave Rau
on 01 May 07@Tom: I share that perspective too, the album is great.
Trent embodies the concept of art and artist; he’s incredible. I got the album from iTunes, I was just bummed I couldn’t get it DRM-free.
Chris Harrison
on 01 May 07I can’t stop listening to the CD… I can’t get the music out of my head… This whole campaign was bad ass.
bofe
on 01 May 07The last great NIN album was The Fragile. Since then the music itself has gone downhill, but the marketing is pretty cool. What about Trent Reznor’s pioneering in music videos?
FredS
on 01 May 07Too bad the album is teh suck.
Mike M
on 01 May 07This type of marketing campaign is showing up more and more these days…. using the interweb and people’s curiosity to break the ‘viral’ marketing code. The TV show ‘Lost’ is another example of this type of marketing with all their ‘leaked’ info, websites, clues, etc.
Steve
on 01 May 07@Matt
They have an in-house guy, Rob Sheridan, that does all of their design/video/photography. He’s been on board since after The Fragile I believe… before that, it was various studios who did design, and I think Trent’s vision that drove the uniformity. I’m personally getting a little tired of the digital noise style that Sheridan is milking. He’s a much better photographer/videographer(sic) than a graphic designer, IMO. I miss the rich artwork of Downward Spiral and what David Carson did with The Fragile.
Denis
on 01 May 07I’ve appreciated TR as an innovator though his music hasn’t necessarily been my speed. But such visions and decisions have me strongly reconsidering the desire to listen to NIN’s stuff.
It’s pretty cool thinking. In addition, he has also released a number of tracks as Garageband mixes for users and fans to toy and tinker with. That, in and of itself, is absolutely awesome.
This is a great post, thanks for putting it together.
Dan Lee
on 01 May 07Muse do a similar thing, build up the mystery and then put on a good show. Sometimes they will release songs early online see what the fans think of them but to listen to them you have to break a code. For them its all about the experience, much of the money that they make goes into their gigs and innovating their music and they are getting a name for them selves because of it.
Ross
on 01 May 07awesome, Trents approach is an effective way to move towards rewriting the copyright laws that serve the Corporations rather than artists. I hope to see more of this.
Tara Hunt
on 01 May 07Okay…so I agree 100% that this was a super cool thing to do, but the problem with the assessment as stated in your title is that this is ‘the new viral campaign’.
Sounds like Reznor thought it would be a cool experiment, that he wanted to give his fans something better. What a cool impetus to do this.
The unfortunate part of this is that the marketing companies will take this ‘model’ and try to recreate it everywhere…not because they want to give fans something better or be experimental, but because they want to sell sell sell. There will be ROI and eyeballs and various other awful buzzwords and the intent behind Reznor’s most excellent ‘campaign’ will be lost.
Now, if we stop looking at this as something ‘viral’ and something that is innovative and really cool and experimental (whether it increases bottom line or not), then we start to get somewhere.
feedMashr.com
on 01 May 07We’ve been in this phase for a while now, where commercials = content, or commercials >>> content. Is this “good”, well, who cares, as long the infotainment is worthwhile.
JG
on 01 May 07Apparently when the CD is played it reals binary code that spells out another viral website, www.exterminal.net
Michael Heilemann
on 01 May 07...and a damn good album to boot (people comparing it to The Fragile or Downward Spiral have no concept, and should just praise themselves lucky that Reznor managed to produce not one, but two double album epic masterpieces in his career). Year Zero is a pretty damn tight package, which is listenable from start to finish, which is more than can be said about 99% of the music out there today, which are two-three hits and then a whole lot of padding.
MarketingGeek
on 01 May 07A great campaign indeed, but hardly viral. It was a great, different campaign used to reactivate an existing fanbase, but I’d be willing to put down money that it did little to bring in any new fans.
The reality is, the record debuted at #2 and sold almost 100k LESS than the previous NIN album did two years ago. How can you justify launching such an enormous (and no doubt expensive and time consuming) campaign for results like that?
I’m not saying ARGs are bad, but I definitely don’t see them as being highly effective marketing tools. They’re great gifts to existing fans, but not much more than that.
matthew tavares
on 01 May 07Not bad, but you seem to discredit the band who started the viral album marketing: radiohead.
Ben Darlow
on 01 May 07It reminds me of Bungie/Microsoft’s “I Love Bees” promotional alternate-reality game they used to help build up hype prior to the release of Halo 2, back in 2004. That all started with a URL (ilovebees.com) flashing up only very briefly in place of the normal xbox.com domain name, at the very end of a cinema-only trailer for Halo 2. It was a fascinating bit of alternative marketing, and got a lot of attention from Bungie’s typically energetic fanbase. The page on Wikipedia gives a lot of background. I wouldn’t be surprised if this NIN thing turns out to have been made by the same company.
Scott Meade
on 01 May 07This is certainly a cool campaign and I love to see the creativity that went into it and the great response from the fan base. This type of creativity and desire to see things change in the music biz should be recognized, rewarded, and encouraged.
But it seems disengenous to say this approach is part of a democratizing movement. While it may be true that “studio time” and the ability to mix and edit like the pros is now accessible to the everyman, I bet that not many small bands around the country can afford to hire 42 Entertainment to pull off stuff like this – viral or not.
Julia
on 01 May 07The campaign would have been great if Universal would have known that it existed. A German blogger got a cease-and-desist order/warning after posting a streaming version of one of the “found” mp3s.. Although the story had a happy ending (Universal excused for the legal actions, blogger got his money back) the campaign is rather an example for labels not in touch with the web and viral web 2.0 bullsh** gone wrong.. More here and here (German only).
chu
on 02 May 07All seems a bit cheesy and way contrived to me. A middle-aged vision of what kids will think is cool. Reminds me a bit of all those nightclub scenes in mid-80’s movies which looked like they were filmed by people who hadn’t ever been in a club. I guess NIN are really more D&D than S&M.
Ian
on 02 May 07The album sold 31% less in its opening week compared to NIN’s last release. They failed to mobilize their core fan base. And they forgot to write a hit single.
Andy Wibbels
on 02 May 07No way. I was finishing up a post on this exact same topic!
Chris Harrison
on 02 May 07If the album sold less than With Teeth, the previous NIN major release… it’s probably due to the fact that a lot of people got the high quality mp3 rips that appeared on the net shortly before the album’s release. I still bought a copy of the CD (which sounds a hell of a lot better than the copies floating around on the net).
Shelly
on 02 May 07I petted his dog Daisy
dick
on 04 May 07send me info.
Greg
on 04 May 07Ben Darlow: Funny you should compare Year Zero to I Love Bees. The same company is behind both of them. I think they did the A.I. ARG, as well.
DaniCast
on 06 May 07YZ campaign is the best I ever saw. Really awesome.
I never heard about Radiohead viral campaing? Can someone send me info about? I am now curious. I like Radiohead (of course, like NIN much better)
This discussion is closed.