Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible: A New Media Marketing Success
Published by Barbara Baryenbruch Luhring March 18th, 2007 in Technology News.Canadian Indie band Arcade Fire was founded in 2003 by wife and husband team, Régine Chassagne and Win Butler. This seven member band combines an impressive number of instruments (guitar, drums, bass guitar, piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass, xylophone, keyboard, French horn, accordion, hurdy gurdy AND harp) with chorus-like vocals to form an acoustic wall of sound. Arcade Fire definitley has musical chops, but the success of their latest album, Neon Bible, is a testament to their finely tuned new media marketing chops.
The band pays for its own recordings but has an affiliation with Merge Records, a small label based in Durham, North Carolina. Together, they have wildly succeeded at exploiting the peer to peer marketing opportunities available through the Internet. They leveraged MySpace capabilities by leaking over 100 songs on MySpace under fake band names to ferret out the 11 most popular songs for the new album. They heightened the anticipation of Neon Bible by embracing MP3 music blogs and the buzz they were circulating. Arcade Fire posted live performance video clips as well as a parody promo video on YouTube, the latter of which had more than 88,000 views. The video promo also gave out a 1-800-NEON-BIBLE toll-free phone number that let callers listen to their music. Neon Bible is a concept album featuring a story line and when Arcade Fire leaked the album ahead of the actual release, they leaked the last song first. It drove their fans crazy and many waited until the entire album was leaked to start listening so they could listen in numerical order!
In addition, since February of this year, Arcade Fire has also courted and conquered some high profile old media by playing on Saturday Night Live, as well as being profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. The results of their efforts? Their widely acclaimed record debuted the week of March 8, 2007 at No. 2 on U.S. and European charts, and No. 1 in Canada! Pretty impressive.
It’s going to be fun to see where Arcade Fire goes from here. And for someone who tracks Internet marketing trends, I anticipate their next guerilla advertising move as much as the next 11 tracks of music they produce.
Thanks to Gregg Luhring!
I love the Arcade Fire. Their music is great; as is the variety of instruments, the catchy songs, and so on. I strongly recommend this band to people who enjoy indie rock. Neon Bible is my favorite ablum so far..
Fantastic group. I first saw / heard them on youtube. Absolutely wonderful.
Bill