Lead: Have you ever been hounded around the internet by an ad for a gas boiler or cheap flights? Of course you have. It’s 2017, after all. That is, as you’ll know, symptomatic of bad retargeting. But don’t mock too soon as the music industry is far from innocent here. We speak to marketing executives […]
Chance The Rapper, Iron Maiden, Mumford & Sons, Pixies and more are getting louder and louder about what they see as the scourge of secondary ticketing. They feel fans are being fleeced and a stand has to be made.
Beyond the fan-centric altruism, there is a bigger story about the “dark economy” around secondary where billions of dollars a year are bleeding away from artists and into both the secondary platforms’ bottom lines as well as the hands of avaricious “power sellers”.
Just how much is at stake and what, if anything, can be done to cauterise this value gap that makes the record labels’ war on YouTube look like small beer?
Ticketmaster and Live Nation have tended to be in the firing line for criticism of the secondary ticketing market in recent times.
So it’s interesting to see the companies working with Iron Maiden on a paperless-ticketing initiative that the band say will tackle “ludicrously inflated” secondary prices.
Every venue on the band’s 2017 UK tour will offer paperless ticketing “in full or in part”, with fans required to show a credit or debit card plus photo ID when they enter the concert.
We have written a lot in the past about Iron Maiden and gaming – and that’s for two reasons: they are not arrivistes as they have been doing this for years; and because of that, they’re really good at it. You see, it pays to do something properly over a long time rather than trying to quickly bluff it because it’s the fashionable option.
Legacy Of The Beast, the band’s first mobile game (their others have been browser-based), is coming later in the summer but they are already laying the groundwork and also testing something new to help bankroll the game in advance. For eager fans, they have launched a series of seven “founder packs” that start at £7.44 and go all the way up to £354.18 (and, wonderfully, are limited to 666 fans).
Lead: The music industry runs on hype – but it takes great pains to disguise it and is distrustful of anything that is too explicit in what it is trying to achieve. Step forward Broken Witt Rebels, the band that media agency MEC is trying to break by “non-traditional” means. We speak to the team behind it all about what they did, why they did it and the impact it had. We also speak to a marketing expert to hear why they were not blown away by any of it.
Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast was announced a few months ago, but yesterday the freemium mobile game went live on Android and iOS. Based on the metal band’s famous mascot Eddie, the game sees fans “fight legions of unrelenting enemies as you piece together the shattered remnants of Eddie’s soul, and ultimately save the universe”.
Lead: with downloads in decline, we ask if the instant grat, that failsafe of music marketing in recent years, is now under threat. Has streaming pulled the rug from under its feet? Or can they be used to draw in an early audience as a promotional track and then find a second life when formally […]
An excellent way of building up excitement for the campaign ahead of release. A fun game alongside a YouTube activation captured an audience that perhaps interacts with the band in a different way than its older audience. This campaign managed to entice different demographics equally.
Lead: In the “old days” (i.e. five years ago), big albums would have been kept off streaming services in other to push download and CD sales. Today windowing is often about pushing streams as much as possible – except on YouTube. The video site has been criticised in the past over its payment rates and […]
We loved the recent video for Iron Maiden’s ‘Speed of Light’, which took the band’s Eddie mascot into a world of gaming. Now there’s an actual game to accompany it, […]
There was confusion just before Christmas over a report claiming Iron Maiden had tracked the countries where their music was most-pirated, then made money by gigging there.
– Beyond the Apps hype
– Campaign Focus: Web Sheriff
– How to: Sound Cloud
– Tools: Bandzoogle
