15 Critical Upgrades for De La Soul’s Free Music Giveaway
De La Soul is good at rapping, bad at internet. For decades, the native tongues trio has been touted as hip-hop dignitaries; responsible for driving jazz rap, skits and playful verses as the genre approached its global crescendo in the early 90s.
25 years and seven albums later, they’re giving it all away for free—sort of. A few weeks shy of the anniversary of De La’s debut, 3 Feet High And Rising, the group released free downloads of their discography as a 25-hour Valentine’s Day giveaway. De La Soul has struggled to get their music on the web due to red tape and their heavy use of samples. This “Spreading Love” campaign was their next best (pirated?) alternative and was met with considerable press, impressive social media buzz and new fans.
Quick Stats: There were 59,897 tweets mentioning “De La Soul” and 13,928 @WeAreDeLaSoul mentions throughout the duration of the campaign (Feb 13-20) according to Topsy.
This just in! De La Soul: good at rapping, bad at internet! pic.twitter.com/21WYg6JqKs
— Andy Mangold (@andymangold)
February 14, 2014
There was a lot that went right with the campaign—free music, what?! But as the Twittersphere quickly noted, De La Soul’s strategy was riddled with tech fails and missed opportunities. Here’s some tough love on how De La Soul and team could’ve gotten even better results (in no particular order):
1. There’s more to internet than Facebook and Twitter.
De La Soul has a presence on several platforms and social media networks but you’d never know it from their “Spreading Love” campaign. There were little to no mentions of instagram, tumblr, soundcloud and YouTube. Audiences differ across each site so cross-platform promotion and consistent branding is essential especially for a band “emerging out of obscurity.”
2. Shutdown impersonators.
De La Soul’s official handle is @WeAreDeLaSoul. @DeLaSoul is taken seemingly by an impersonator who also owns, shopdelasoul.com. Filing an impersonation ticket with Twitter can nab De La their trademarked handle. As for the website, the contact is listed in WHOIS, barter if you wish. All De La Soul members but Dave have a Twitter handle. For the sake of the campaign and upcoming projects, this should’ve been remedied to thwart fraudulent accounts.
De La Soul’s social media strategy is largely broadcast, infrequent and doesn’t involve engaging with fans. Prior to the launch, De La Soul sparingly posted content on Facebook and Twitter with low engagement rates. Facebook throttles your future posts if your previous content has low engagement. If you want to increase the likelihood that your content has awareness and reach on both networks, consistently creating entertaining content and engaging with followers is key.
And don’t forget influencers! De La Soul engages reactively with influencers like @Questlove. Proactive engagement of influencers is optimal and can amplify your reach considerably.
What?? Yes!!! De La Soul To Release Entire Catalog For Free http://t.co/NS5kL2nexa #DeLaLove
— Lady Iva (@divaldy)
February 14, 2014
4. De La Soul speaks internet with an accent.
De La Soul struggled to produce content native to each respective social network. They spoke internet with an accent and it was clear they didn’t have native fluency in social media. For instance, there were “unclickable” links on Facebook, no branded hashtags and the copy auto-populated by the tweet button on the landing page read: “de la soul is spreading love! http://www.wearedelasoul.com via @wearedelasoul”. Strategic use of hashtags could’ve had De La trending faster and longer as well as solve for disambiguation in a sea of fan made creations—#DeLaLove and #SpreadingLove or at the least, #DeLaSoul would suffice.
5. Analytics is everything.
Since the wearedelasoul.com link is everywhere from blogs to tweets and Facebook, getting a handle on referral traffic would enable De La Soul to make smarter, more targeted campaigns in the future. Analytics could also mean having data that compels record labels to remedy De La Soul’s sample drama sooner. This means using UTM tracking tags to supercharge their Google Analytics and investing in a branded URL shortener. All the cool kids are doing it.
6. You got a site? That’s good, fantastic.
On wearedelasoul.com, lied the keys to the unlocking De La Soul’s discography. The landing page consisted of a newsletter sign-up form and two social media calls-to-actions with clunky, buggy integration. The auto-populated Facebook “like” post read, “You liked 2014”—yikes.
7. Hello? Is it me you’re searching for?
A quick peek at the page source shows that team De La didn’t adhere to much of Google’s webmaster tools best practices—think metadata. Fortunately, all the press linking to the site seemed to help it’s page rank. Wearedelasoul.com appears second to an outdated wikipedia page in search. Sadly, their wiki page doesn’t link to wearedelasoul.com and instead to shopdelasoul.com, the domain affiliated with the supposed @DeLaSoul impersonator.
You know what would be awesome? If De La Soul was collecting our emails from this free download to tell us they're going on tour.
— Magda Pecsenye (@AskMoxie)
February 14, 2014
8. Did you know De La Soul is on tour?
Probs not. Their landing page wasn’t localized to display tour dates and the newsletter sign-up form only asked for email and a name so there was no opportunity for targeted email follow-up.
9. De La Soul didn’t pull the event trigger.
Completing the newsletter sign-up form is anti-climatic and form submission doesn’t trigger anything. A visitor isn’t redirected anywhere and it’s quickly made clear that the site is nothing more than a landing page. This was a missed opportunity for integrating the De La Soul tumblr blog, YouTube channel, etc.
10. Something seems phishy about those emails.
Not so fast, before you get the music, you gotta confirm your subscription. Expect two emails: one a confirmation request, the other, download links. Both emails had inconsistent senders listed and phishy subject lines. If open rate wasn’t 100%, include spam filters as one of the potential culprits.
De La Soul is giving away its entire discography. As such, nobody is allowed to complain about Valentine's Day. http://t.co/mYeZw9btQx
— Jason Abbruzzese (@JasonAbbruzzese)
February 14, 2014
11. Maximizing fan appetite.
De La Soul’s discography was offered a la carte. If someone signed up for only three albums, use marketing automation to follow-up with a strong call-to-action on why they should check out the others. Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt to request they share feedback on their favorite album, track, or lyric on social media.
hahaha the De La Soul Is Dead link is...well...#tooeasy #theyfixit
— Questlove Jenkins (@questlove)
February 14, 2014
12. De La Soul (link) is Dead.
Surprisingly, De La Soul used a consumer account on Dropbox to distribute their music. The De La Soul consumer account used up so much bandwidth that Dropbox experienced an outage and the “Spreading Love” momentum slowed. Save yourself the “De La Soul (link) is dead” jokes and coordinate with a more appropriate distributor for an enterprise account.
13. Grind Date is missing, what gives?!
Missing from the discography download was Grind Date. A good fix here would’ve been redirecting the thousands of downloaders to Spotify where they could stream it and earn De La a few pennies on the dollar.
14. But wait, why are we getting this music for free?
The branding of this campaign wasn’t it’s strongest suit. Aside from lacking a hashtag and a consistent name, the narrative behind the push was unclear. The campaign was meant to both commemorate the 25th year anniversary of 3 Feet High And Rising and their new album, You’re Welcome, slated for a spring release. The latter was unclear. In the past 30 days, under 1000 mentions on Twitter have referenced “De La Soul” + “new” while, “De La Soul” + “free” has close to 33k.
15. More content, more, more, more!
Lastly, the internet has a short attention span. Sadly, on Feb 15, “de la soul” tweet volume had dropped by nearly 550% despite the campaign still being live. This was followed by considerable drops each subsequent day, bringing De La Soul closer to it’s pre-campaign engagement level. This campaign was a great opportunity to push additional content like behind-the-scenes at recording sessions, Dropbox outage memes, playlists, or even a G+ Hangout so you can thank your fans live on camera and have the recording automatically posted on YouTube. This kind of content can live on beyond the 25 hour download spree and keep word-of-mouth flowing.
De La Soul up-leveled their brand awareness and acquired more fans, but was it worth it?
Again, there was a lot that went right with this campaign. For rap veterans, this kind of buzz is invaluable and the new fans they acquired will hopefully fill the seats of their upcoming concert dates. But tweets and “likes” in a vacuum don’t always equal dollars. If you’re going to release your entire discography for free, see to it that you get a return on your investment—that new album and tour dates aren't going to sell themselves. Be rigorous in setting your key performance indicators and execute accordingly. 25 years of solid production and lyricism shouldn’t be taken lightly; when it comes to strategy and optimization, you know them stakes is high.
—@KD
Photo: NPR
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I've been a fan of these guys since The PB&J Solution. TiRon & Ayomari just dropped The Wonderful Prelude Pt 1 and The Wonderful Prelude Pt. 2, check out their entire catalog at The Cafeteria Line.
In other news: I am fervently hunting for new artists and catching up on old favs, stay tuned via my soundcloud.
This answer got me named on a "Quora users to watch" list, woot!
My Answer: Watch the Throne did not leak primarily because of the release and recording strategy. An album can leak due to a myriad of reasons but primarily the culprit is, the tracks pass through too many hands.
Jay-Z insisted on recording the album in-person and reserved blocks of rooms at hotels exclusively for the album's recording and production, i.e. "no mailing it in." It caused delays but in addition to increased authenticity, it decreases leak risks. In the past, albums have been prone to leak during the mastering process by engineers. An easy fix to this is to use a trusted, veteran producer. In the case of Watch the Throne, Mike Dean was their guy. If an album has made it through recording and production leak free, high risk lies in the hands of the press and the CD manufacturing plant.
The audiences at the Watch the Throne listening parties were carefully curated to ensure only trusted professionals were in attendance; But when blogger DDot Omen snuck into a recent listening session and attempted to leak snippets of each track on his blog, he wasn't celebrated by the music community, but instead berated. The culture surrounding "Watch the Throne" made it clear that if one were to leak the album, they would be nobody's hero and antagonized immediately.
To avoid a leak via the plant, Jay and West used a graduated release strategy. They chose to first exclusively release a digital deluxe version to iTunes on Aug. 7. The physical copies of the LP will exclusively be available at Best Buy on Aug. 12 for the first two weeks of the release. Fewer web and brick and motar retailers means fewer hands. But even more, targeting the source of a leak should one occur becomes easier. As the result of excellent strategy, Watch the Throne became one of the first albums in a long time to release leak-free.
Originally posted as a response on Quora: Why didn't Watch the Throne leak?
Beyond Oblivion recently got an additional $77mil in financing for their music licensing venture. Interestingly enough, their stakeholders include MySpace owners, News Corp. This sounds like a win.
A great artist doesn’t have fans, but brand evangelists. In “Direct Message From @JayElectronica: A Fan Engagement Case Study,” I explored digital brand engagement from the perspective of the fans. The above figure is a social media value chain model as executed by the artist. [Hi-Res]
Research in the economic impact of social media and direct-to-fan marketing is limited but artists like Lupe Fiasco, Nicki Minaj and Jay Electronica prove that strategic implementation of this marketing innovation will yield results. At a time where the record industry is in a severe decline, new and effective strategy is crucial to its turnaround.
Lupe Fiasco used his legion of fans, better known as “Lasers,” to petition Atlantic Records to green light his album. Similarly, Nicki Minaj’s “Barbies” fervently promote all of her projects. On Oct. 16, Nicki Minaj urged her followers to pre-order her album, Pink Friday, on Amazon. The status was retweeted 332 times and according to Topsy, there are 5,074 tweets mentioning the same Pink Friday pre-order link.
Minaj said in a MTV doc, ”My Time Now,” that immediately after tweeting, her album went from being No. 504 to No. 4 on Amazon’s best sellers list.
Plugged-in fans may not get paid for their services but they do see a return—recognition. For Lupe Fiasco, it’s starting a book club for his fans via Ustream and sparking debates on Twitter; Minaj actively retweets fans and responds to comments on Facebook; and Jay gives fans an all-access pass by instant messaging, Blackberry messaging, and Twitter following fans.
Web 2.0 even suggests that social media might help mitigate the damage done during a recession. Tight-knit communities can better weather an economic storm and social media facilitates this connectivity. In these cases a poor economy can motivate people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do for free—Think: open source software releases and live blogging—and for music, fan-sites and digital street teams.
By using social media—twitter, facebook and blogs— and other forms of direct-to-fan marketing, artists accomplish deep brand engagement and are more successful at expanding their reach and developing stronger fan bases that purchase faster and more often. But artists can’t do it alone, they need a team.
An artist manager is nice, but so is a digital marketing specialist. While a manger is out booking shows and studio time an artist needs someone building and maintaining their digital army. Many artists manage their own social media profiles but they will soon realize if they haven’t already that as their career blossoms, the time available for social media monitoring wanes. We’ve seen what the power of social media can do for an artist’s career but that kind of impact doesn’t happen on it’s own or overnight.
It’s 2011—build a team, build a brand and do it now.
Direct Message from @JayElectronica. A Fan Engagement Case Study.
Jay Electronica’s fan engagement tactics are very unorthodox and completely worth it.
My first direct message was from Jay Electronica in 2008, days after Christmas. I had just joined twitter and made the premature decision to follow every rapper on the network and Jay followed me back. Soon after, he sent a direct message—no words, just this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGPhpvqtOc&feature=related
It was a YouTube link to a music video of “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins—I’ll leave delving into the implications of this message for my readers.
Later that year, I was unfollowed. But I wasn’t alone. It was “The Great Unfollowing of 2009.” Jay Electronica unfollowed nearly all of his fans, truncating his follower list to less than 200. A year later, high off the heels of announcing his signing to Roc Nation, he followed everyone back—sort of.
In the small hours of Nov. 15, Jay Electronica announced he would follow back anyone who hit him up. And they did. Jay Elect was the proud recipient of over 1500 mentions just an hour after the announcement. He has since followed about 1600 fans, a Dave Chappelle impersonator, Joe Budden, and me.
Jay Elect also opened his AIM and ichat (SN: Jay Electronica) to the masses and encouraged fans to submit their Blackberry chat pins—a common practice for the crescent city emcee.
But is it worth his time? Affording fans access to everything from your AIM screen name and twitter direct messages to your cell phone pin? In a word: yes.
Jay Electronica goes the distance, and his fans take notice. Amidst the flurry of “please follow me” tweets were tales of Jay encounters by super fans.
Katie P. (@KPappsmear), of Los Angeles recalls a few Blackberry messenger conversations last year. While holiday shopping, Jay Elect messaged her about being nervous as he was preparing for a performance.
DJ Critical Hype (@criticalhype) got a few direct messages as well. Despite being an emerging DJ, he kept the conversation fan to artist. Student, Reggie Noble (@kidnoble) did too. He remembers the conversation feeling less like a fan to artist transaction and more like a normal conversation. He was spoken to, “just as a person.”
The most remarkable fan story came from Kevin Cooper (@cooperkm89), perhaps the biggest Jay Electronica fan on twitter.
Cooper has a Jay Electronica shirt he likes to wear to shows. Inscribed on it the infamous line from “Exhibit C”— “Call me Jay Elec-Hannukah / Jay Elec-Yarmulke…”— but more on that later.
At Cooper’s fourth Jay show, the New Orleans rapper pulled him and a crowd of fans onto the stage while opening for Kid Cudi in October at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).
“At one point during the show, Jay got back on stage and turned to me; And we proceeded to rap over his songs, face-to-face in center stage,” said Cooper chronicling his account.
“He was acknowledging that I knew all his sh*t, and that acknowledgment was much appreciated.“
But that wasn’t all. To security’s chagrin, Jay snuck Cooper backstage. No weed, no liquor, just talk. About music—fellow opener Chip the Rip and headliner Kid Cudi (whom Jay Elect had never met at the time). They even watched Cudi’s set together. Jay was intrigued by Cudi’s command of the crowd.
They soon after parted ways. Cooper could’ve joined Jay’s entourage for the night, but in fear of being a burden or exhibiting utter and complete stannery—he passed.
“I shook Jay's hand, said great show once again. He asked, ‘Did you have a good time?’ To which I replied ‘Oh yeah!’ Or something else equally dull but spurred on by an awed star-struck state that had not yet dissipated,” said Cooper.
But wait, there’s more. Remember when Jay Electronica punched a concertgoer at a Disco Biscuits show in Chicago? Cooper does. And yes, he was wearing that shirt.
After what Cooper says were pleas by Jay to stop fans from throwing items at him, he punched a DB fan after being hit with a beer bottle. Everyone in the venue had turned against Jay Electronica.
Subsequently, Jay Elect spent the rest of his set rapping to a handful of his fans in the crowd. He even jumped passed the barricade for a proper introduction. And when it came time to perform “Exhibit C,” our boy Cooper was a star.
“He pointed directly at me and did the verse on my shirt,” said Cooper. “Basically reading the verse off of my shirt, so as to draw attention to it.”
“That was really cool of him to do.”
And on Nov. 15, Cooper got a follow.
Jay Electronica doesn’t have fans, but brand evangelists. He breeds them. It’s not enough to make music people enjoy. Artists who take the time to develop a relationship with listeners build a stronger fan base.
For a previously unsigned artist with a few sporadic releases, his following is remarkably strong. In the wake of Jay Electronica’s Roc Nation announcement, he gained about 3k followers and an additional 3k after tweeting about his following spree—he previously averaged a 450 daily follower gain and currently has a total of over 128k followers.
Prior to joining Roc Nation, Jay Electronica had garnered a magazine cover, a track ranked amongst iTunes’ top 10 selling hip-hop music downloads and “the most buzz worthy artist” title by numerous media outlets—success unprecedented by an artist with no formal projects released or a record deal.
Research in the economic impact of social media and direct-to-fan marketing is limited, but artists like Jay Electronica prove that strategic implementation of this marketing innovation will yield results. At a time where the record industry is in a severe decline, new and effective strategy is crucial to its turnaround—just ask Cooper.
“I still get excited thinking about it,” Cooper says. “I've seen Jay four times now, and I've learned that if you show your appreciation, he will acknowledge you and be grateful.”
“Yep. Jay Elect reigns supreme…over everything.”
—@KD
Photo: pigeonsandplanes.com
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If Twitter were 100 people [infographic]. Check out the peak days and peak hours, if you're planning a twitter campaign, this data is useful for maximizing reach.
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