Marketing Strategies of Ariana
A couple weeks ago I tweeted about how I was creating a scaffold for creating an Ariana Grande style track and how she did it herself. I received a tweet in response that essentially asked if I should be looking more into the marketing and promotional strategies of her music and releases. This made me sit back and really think about what impact marketing has had on “Thank U, Next”, and this is the response I came up with:
Since the release of “Thank U, Next”, Ariana has shifted away from traditional pop marketing and promotion for her new music, and instead, is focusing more on an adhoc release schedule. This blog post will go deeper into my reasoning behind claiming the above three things to be the new strategies Ariana is following.
Starting with the creation of the songs themselves, taking press and gossip and using them to create her own narrative. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, late 2018 Ariana was confronted with the overdose death of her rapper ex Mac Miller, a new relationship with comedian Pete Davidson, and ultimate downfall of her engagement with Davidson. After ending her relationship with Miller and swiftly starting a new one with Davidson, Grande received a large amount of backlash. People claimed she was moving on too fast and was cruel to leave Miller after he had just released new music about her. Below is a comment Grande tweeted in response to this criticism.
Her whirlwind relationship with Davidson was highly publicised and Grande admits that “it was an amazing distraction. It was frivolous and fun and insane and highly unrealistic, and I loved him, and I didn’t know him.” Grande dropped her album “Sweetener” in the August of 2018 in a traditional pop way; months of marketing, teaser drops, launch dates, cross-media promotion. Less than one month later, after Millers untimely death, Grande went radio silent on all social media for a couple days before posting a dedication on instagram. Other than that, she tried to stay out of the spotlight and remained relatively quiet on all her platforms. Soon after in October, her engagement to Davidson was broken off. All this insane press coverage on the in’s and outs of Ariana’s life would have to have taken a toll on her, but instead, she turned to music creation to heal. She describes “Thank U, Next” as “this moment of self-realization. It was this scary moment of ‘Wow, you have to face all this stuff now. No more distractions. You have to heal all this sh*t.” Grande took all the bad stuff that had happened to her in the previous 3 months, all of the press and gossip surrounding her, and turned it into a song that acts like a diss-track, without any actual “dissing”.
Regarding the teaser culture of releasing songs, Ariana has now become famous for tweeting possible lyrics to song’s that are soon to release. This started of course, with “Thank U, Next”
By teasing a new song in this format, Grande gives her fans a taste of what’s to come in the actual narrative of the new song, rather than the music. In majority, people care about what Ariana Grande has to say and how she’s going to say it, rather than the musical elements. By teasing in this way, Grande is indirectly hinting at new content coming, rather than outwardly previewing clips of new music or even more obviously, tweeting the classic “New things to come, can’t say much”.
This leads into my last point, that she is releasing music on her own schedule, when she wants and how she wants. This quote from Grande’s Billboard interview sums up my point perfectly:
“My dream has always been to be — obviously not a rapper, but, like, to put out music in the way that a rapper does. I feel like there are certain standards that pop women are held to that men aren’t...We have to do the teaser before the single, then do the single, and wait to do the preorder, and radio has to impact before the video, and we have to do the discount on this day, and all this sh*t. It’s just like, ‘Bruh, I just want to f**king talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do. Why do they get to make records like that and I don’t?’ So I do and I did and I am, and I will continue to...To drop a record on a Saturday night because you feel like it, and because your heart’s going to explode if you don’t — to take back your narrative… I don’t want to do what people tell me to do, I don’t want to conform to the pop star agenda. I want to do it on my own terms from now on.” - Ariana Grande
The actual impact of this is huge, as it circumvents the traditional “planned” release of pop music and really pushes against the system that has been put in place for so long by traditional media. It shows an awareness of the rising impact of social media and the internet/steaming platforms on music. Grande has realised that she can gain more traction for new music by focusing on this social media based spontaneous release because it feels more “authentic” to consumers. Grande is being more forward and direct with her listeners by teasing lyrics and dropping music first for twitter to see. Is it actually more honest or just gives the illusion that it’s more honest? Probably a bit of both. This style of modern marketing gives listeners more ownership over new Ariana Grande music, as it feels as much homegrown as it does professional.
