Music Ally

If you’re a modern band with a strong connection to your fans, why not get them to do some free work for you? Like remix your new single, or create a video for it, or provide footage for your website or DVD by filming themselves covering your songs. The user-generated content (UGC) fan contest is increasingly a core part of music marketing campaigns. Here’s some of the ways to do it.

Remixable stems
Forget paying a superstar DJ a fat fee to mess with your masterpieces. Increasingly, artists are making their songs available for fans to remix. Radiohead’s release of individual instrument ‘stems’ for Nude through iTunes is one of the most famous examples, but Franz Ferdinand did it for Ulysses via Beatport, and Erykah Badu and Linkin Park have both done it. A couple of artists – K-OS and Third Eye Blind – have made their tracks available for remixing before the actual albums were out, with K-OS promising to include the best ones on the album itself.

Cover versions
Fans covering their favourite bands’ songs on YouTube used to be a spur for takedown notices. In many cases, it still is. But other artists are actively encouraging fan covers. Oasis gave away sheet music of new songs with music mag the NME and asked fans to upload their performances recently, while Colombian superstar Juanes asked fans to send in video covers, and found 30% doing it via their mobile phones. Of course, there’s also the option of miming: the new series of Flight of the Conchords was promoted via a contest for fans to lip-synch to Hophopopotamus vs Rhymenoceros, while Guns’n’Roses got people to perform their widdliest air guitar solos to the title track to Chinese Democracy.

Video production
Some artists have looked beyond fans playing or miming, and asked them to get more creative and come up with ideas for videos. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails launched contests in the same week last March, with the former asking for animations based on In Rainbows tracks, and the latter asking for videos for all 36 tracks on his Ghosts I-IV album. Marillion offered a £5,000 prize for the best fan-created video to their last single, while Datarock got people to create videos for three tracks using stock footage from EA’s The Sims games – machinima, if you want the proper word for it.

Dance-offs
How did pop stars ever recruit tour dancers before YouTube? Several have turned to video-sharing sites in recent times to find people to cut some rug on-stage. Janet Jackson recruited dancers for her last tour via MC Hammer’s DanceJam site, while The Flaming Lips invited fans to upload videos to YouTube in a bid to join the band on-stage at their New Year’s Eve bash last December. One of those contests encouraged furry animal costumes, and one didn’t. Meanwhile, Beyonce is getting fans to send in videos of them doing the routine from her Single Ladies video, although via old-skool snail mail rather than a video website.

Fan fiction
Most artists run a mile from fan fiction, especially when it’s of the X-rated ‘slashfic’ kind. However, Britney Spears is positively encouraging it with her Britney Global Fan Fiction Contest, where fans have to choose a song from her last album Circus and write a 250-word story based on its lyrics. The winner will get their story turned into an animated video.

This article was originally published in the Music Ally Report, our fortnightly premium publication. For a free trial, click here

Tags: beyonce, britney spears, datarock, erykah badu, flaming lips, flight of the conchords, franz ferdinand, guns'n'roses, janet jackson, juanes, K-OS, linkin park, marillion, nine inch nails, oasis, Radiohead, third eye blind

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Digital Music Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.