Weird Dancing Moves

I was reading my friend Pierre Schifflers's blog the other day, I usually really enjoy reading his blogs generally (it's essentially a marketing blog affiliated with music, and I am a huge fan and I'm always dwelling on what makes an artist popular), but this blog post about Radiohead and album "in rainbows". In this post, he talked about the lack for marketing for this album and yet the extreme success they had with this album, hence " Is marketing always necessary in making a product successful?" 


Well, I can see where Pierre is coming from, however I disagree. Although there wasn't any of the hard-ball marketing tactics used for the album, the video "lotus flower" was their best marketing strategy




First, radiohead is not considered as a mainstream band at all. Although it's very popular, but it's very unique in its own way. It feeds off the vibe of being different, alternative and for a lack of a better word: Hipster-ish. The video itself is unarguably very different, I mean if the dancing was to put onto "so you think you can dance", it will most definitely be aired, but for the wrong reason." People who love this band love to identify themselves as being non-mainstream and free-spirited, and Radiohead to do such a stunt like this, it will definitely become viral. 


Second, with the increasing trend of the internet usage, there is less and less need to the traditional ways of marketing, aka Billboards & TV. All people need nowadays are just the exposure to the internet, and Radiohead had successfully captured this trend and used it for its own advantage


music always (i mean most of the time) has a very specific demographic. Age, background, psychological state of mind, and usually people who listen to similar music have similar way of thinking and behavior (I'm not trying to stereotype, and I do know that it's not true all the time). To successfully market an artist/album, the first thing anyone needs to do is just to figure out who their target audiences are and then figure out the best way to reach their targets with the right message, through the right medium and at the right time. In this case it was the weird lotus flower dancing moves.