All the things a band should do to guarantee an album’s success–plan a big U.S. tour, give loads of interviews, film an MTV video and have a hot hit single in the can–Radiohead chose to ignore with the release of its latest disc, “Kid A.”
To the old-school record company mogul, such defiance would’ve spelled curtains for sales. And yet “Kid A,” a dense, album-length song cycle, shot straight to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 during its first week of release. While the CD was highly anticipated by listeners and an industry awaiting the English band’s follow-up to its successful 1997 release “OK Computer,” a top of the charts debut is usually reserved for a Garth Brooks, Limp Bizkit, Brittany Spears or hip-hop artists following the release of a single that receives massive airplay.
Billboard hailed “Kid A” as “the first truly groundbreaking album of the 21st century”–a tag that could be applied not only to its sound, but how it was marketed via the Internet. Even as “Kid A” fell to the No. 10 slot in its second week of release and now rests at 14, industry observers marveled over how the Web propelled the record to the top of the charts.
“People are asking when an Internet star is going to be born,” said Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com. “We haven’t seen a band totally born on the Internet. But with Radiohead, you are seeing a band where all of the fans are coming together online. If you go onto the Internet, you’ll see chat groups for Radiohead everywhere. It’s a phenomenon that couldn’t have happened five years ago.”
Grass roots fan buzz on the Web is nothing new (it played a huge role in helping Korn’s “Life Is Peachy” to debut at No. 3 in 1997). But with “Kid A,” Capitol Records employed an elaborate strategy, and a few new wrinkles, to build that cyber-buzz to a fever pitch. With the album’s out-of-the-gate success, expect other artists and labels to follow suit in the months ahead.
“We’re just now seeing the major labels starting to understand the power of online viral marketing–friends telling friends,” Robertson said. “Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had Paul Simon and Offspring. These big bands are now using the Internet and embracing this, while the fans have been doing it for quite awhile.” The Offspring and its record label, Columbia, came to a showdown last month when the band announced plans to post its upcoming CD, “Conspiracy of One,” on its Web site for free downloading. Columbia’s parent Sony threatened to sue, and the band backtracked, offering only one song for MP3 downloads.
While the Offspring symbolizes the artist and label in conflict in the age of Napster, the Radiohead campaign has been different. As the band decided to create an experimental album and restrict live performances to a few select stage and TV appearances, its record company created its own plan.
Robin Bechtel, Capitol’s head of new media marketing, and who claims to have launched the first Internet band chat room for Megadeath in 1994, used a miniature Web site created by iMedium to build excitement among Radiohead’s Internet fan base.
Like tentacles spreading out from the main body, the mini-Web site is like a site-within-a-site, with Capitol controlling the content and fans permitted to e-mail the mini-site across the Web. Starting out on 1,000 “host” sites–including MTV.com and amazon.com–it spread instantly. “It became a viral promotion,” Bechtel said.
For Radiohead devotees, the mini-site’s content was precious. It consisted of roughly 70 short video spots, or “iBlips,” produced by the band–and the “Kid A” album itself, which could be audio-streamed in its entirety for three weeks prior to the official release. “It was like a traditional listening booth,” Bechtel said.
In the past, record companies have been reticent to post any large chunk of an album on the Internet, fearing it would hurt sales. But Capitol bet that once fans heard “Kid A” in the lower-fidelity streaming version, they would rush to order it on CD.
That’s what happened at amazon.com, where 10,000 copies were sold in the first week, and as of late last week the CD was its third-best seller. “This wasn’t a normal record,” said Rob Gordon, Capitol’s vice president of marketing. “It’s huge, huge. There’s no way we could’ve sold as many records as we did without the Internet campaign. More and more, we’re going to lean towards the Internet.”
While Capitol won’t say which artists it might promote in a similar fashion, MP3.com’s Robertson said that this marks only the beginning of innovative schemes for artists to please fans, top the charts–and fill their wallets–via the Web.
“What you’re seeing now is that it’s driving CD sales, but as it gets more organized, it will drive concert sales where bands could sell tickets on-line and avoid Ticketmaster,” Robertson said. “You’ll see wonderful, tighter connections between bands and fans going forward.”
