2. The Piggybacking Strategy
When you’re not well known, the quickest way to get the word out there is to piggyback on something that people already know about. One the best known forms of piggybacking is listing out the bands you “sound like” on your web site. This gives new listeners a clue as to what to expect by drawing on what they already know. Of course, another popular piggybacking tactic is to cover a well-known song. Often, these covers become your initial best-sellers. But they also act as a gateway. If listeners like your version, they’ll likely check out your original material.
But piggybacking on other bands or cover songs isn’t the only thing that you can piggyback on. You can piggyback on anything that already has an audience.
For example, our own band, Beatnik Turtle, wrote a song called “Star Wars (A Movie Like No Other)”. It summarized the entire original Star Wars trilogy in a single song. Around the same time, StarWars.com released a video mashup tool and so we decided to make a video for the song. The video ended up getting played over fifteen thousand times thanks to the active community at that site. That popularity led to it getting picked up by Atom.com which in turn led to it being aired on SpikeTV to celebrate the Star Wars 32nd anniversary.
Current events and popular culture provide opportunities for piggybacking as well. When a topic is hot, a large number of people will be searching for information about it. For instance, The Brobdingnagian Bards, a Celtic Renaissance musical duo, are always looking for trends to ride, so when the Monty Python musical Spamalot got popular, they posted a blog entry about Spamalot and also mentioned that they covered a Monty Python song previously. The post got a ton of hits, got them noticed by new fans, and resulted in sales.
But piggybacking isn’t always about how to get publicity. It can be for a good cause as well. Grant Baciocco of Throwing Toasters put together two compilation charity albums called Laughter Is a Powerful Weapon, with music donated by himself and many other well-known comedy artists. The money from one went to the Twin Towers orphans fund and the other went to the Red Cross for Katrina victims.
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