How To Keep Quarantine Releases Fresh as Touring Returns
It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for– live music is FINALLY returning. Festivals are ready to run and world tours are being announced, meaning the concert void that has been in our hearts for the past two years is finally being filled again. Rolling Loud, coming around in July, and Justin Bieber’s Justice World Tour are just a few of the announcements that have come forth recently. Fans, brace your wallets.
When COVID-19 hit last March, every tour scheduled for the next year was most likely optimistically postponed to a “to be announced” date or eventually cancelled. When considering artists’ tour schedules, most tours begin six months after an album release. In those six months, artists still have to count on their fans being invested enough in the music to keep their tickets and come to the show. This was much easier in pre-covid times, when those six months were often filled with press tours, signings, or other in-person marketing events.
This task became more difficult when tours were delayed another two years due to COVID-19. Any artist who released an album right before the pandemic hit did not have a chance to do the proper album roll out and tour across the world. While fans are excited and ready to get back to shows (59% of fans are ready to return to live music within two months of vaccines being available according to a survey by MRC Data), they may not be as restless to hear the album that they listened to front to back in March of 2019 and have since forgotten about. Now, fans are going to be forced to choose between their favorite artists, and it’s marketers’ jobs to keep their artists’ music on their fans’ minds. There are various approaches marketers can use to do so.
1.) Take advantage of viral content to bring fans back to your music
Indie-pop band Cannons, signed to Columbia Records, have a tour planned to start in November, preceded by a festival appearance in October. However, their last album, ‘Shadows,’ was released in July of 2019, deep into the summer of when COVID first hit. Over two years later, they are planning to tour this album and have implemented creative ways to keep their name fresh with fans and drive streams back to their 2019 LP. Besides releasing two singles in 2021 alone, they recently released a ‘Covers by Cannons’ EP that features three covers. One of these covers includes Harry Styles’ “Golden.” Posted on YouTube in November 2020, the cover garnered over 700,000 views and recognition from Styles himself. The success of this project inspired the band to release the “Covers by Cannons” EP. “Golden” is accompanied by “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon and “Pretty Boy” by The Neighbourhood. This three-track project of relatively low production cost gave their fans a refresh of Cannons on their playlist without distracting from their most recent body of work that they plan on touring. Most importantly, it got fans listening to Cannons again and consequently having a reason to revisit “Shadows.”
Cover albums, or EPs, can feel like an ancient idea, but for some artists they can be the perfect balance between keeping themselves relevant to fans without overshadowing a pre-covid release they are proud of but haven’t gotten to tour yet. When covers such as Cannon’s “Golden” cover or Miley Cyrus’s “Heart of Glass” cover make traction on social media, it feels necessary that artists capitalize on these opportunities and keep their names at the forefront of fans’ minds while doing so.
The one potential downfall to this strategy is that while these strategies are keeping artists relevant, the pre-covid release itself is not the highlight of the release. If the artist’s main goal is to make their old release feel new again, they may look to a different approach.
2.) Keep feeding fans album-relevant material
I believe that one of the biggest impacts COVID-19 had on the music industry is the way that it brought back the need for full-out album eras. Artists needed, and still need to, stretch out their releases as long as possible so that fans still want to hear the album when they can finally perform live again. No one did this quite as well as Dua Lipa. Dua has shows lined up in the UK starting in September, and the excitement for her music is as big as it would have been when the album was released in March of 2020.
Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia era has exemplified how through the power of marketing, albums can stay feeling fresh even as they have lived with us throughout the almost entirety of quarantine. I think that one of the main tactics that we can learn from Lipa’s album roll out was that if you release an influx of remixed albums and revitalized albums, something will catch and bring a whole new life to an old remix. I am not suggesting that every artist has the budget to release as much music as Dua did (Levitating (feat. DaBaby), Club Future Nostalgia, Future Nostalgia (The Moonlight Edition), etc.), but there are big lessons to follow from this album release.
This approach can feel like throwing music at the fire to see what catches flame, but nonetheless, Levitating (feat. DaBaby) took off and Dua is currently double-promoting two singles including “We’re Good” off of Future Nostalgia (The Moonlight Edition). Ultimately, Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia era has guided other artists to the idea of deluxe albums that feel more like refreshed versions of another album, or collaborations that can make an older song sound completely refreshed. While collabs and deluxe albums are nothing new, I think they are important marketing tools now more than ever in revitalizing old releases and helping fans to appreciate their pre-quarantine music in a new light.
Are you ready to return to live music?