WELCOME

Syd is thankful. She wants us to know that on behalf of the band she is a part of: The Internet. Saying it in between ad libs and repeating "thank you Montreal, I really mean it" all along the show. 

The ease with which each member of this band performs and their apparent complicity is a beautiful sight. 

Despite Syd and Steve Lacy having an extensive catalog of solo song, this concert is dedicated to The Internet's repertoire. Going back and fourth in between Hive Mind and Ego Death, you can follow the story line along the show with Syd giving the reason why/for who she wrote some of the songs she performs. 

Next to Syd, you can't ignore Steve Lacy. Moving with so much confidence and ease in his Margiela boots and rocking a hot pink velour shirt with matching gloves (it is "fucking cold" in Syd's words), he looks like what the word cool mean. Changing guitars all along the show, sometimes playing a pink one, a blue one or a green one, he takes his time to adjust them while Syd interacts with the crowd and reply to fans by telling them she loves them too before she sees Steve's nod from the corner of her eye to let the band know that he's ready to go. 

The set, designed like a living room, makes you feel that you are at one of their jam sessions. The kind of proximity that makes someone throw a box of chocolate tied in a red bow on stage. 

This vibe stays intact for the entire length of the show and makes you feel like you're hanging with some friends especially when you see Syd sitting on the couch while the Patrick raps and Steve performs a song.

Back to Syd's soothing voice when she sings the therapeutic Better With Time that she introduces by saying that she wrote it to help her fight her depression. Her ending the show with saying that performing is therapy to her gives even more meaning to her last round of thank yous, we help her feel better and she lets us know throughout the show. 

After a second 30-seconds ovation, Syd thanks the crowd and asks them if they have enough energy for another song. Not the usual encore scenario, no pretending. They're real and they're being themselves. Each band member with its own style and vibe, as if they were just chilling in Syd's parents' basement. 

The exact feeling they want to convey with this set design.

Her show starts with the audio of an interview of her as a child listing the instrument she plays and saying that she wants to be "a singer, songwriter and performer" and her performance shows you just that. She navigates easily between instruments during the first 5 minutes of the show before letting her voice do the talking. She is here to stay and her performance is how she's going to prove it.

My favorite type of content to capture during live shows is video. It's the only way to show how in sync the light show and the music notes are. Each stroke of light is perfectly in sync with the music and help frame H.E.R. in a halo but always dark on her eyes, hidden behind big glasses anyway.

In addition to the light show, a few songs were accompanied by footage of her & her band on tour and showing the complicity between them, showing H.E.R. without her glasses for only a few seconds before the moment is replaced by another frame, like a blink. A few fans were added to the montage for the empowering 'As I Am' to (I'm guessing) illustrate how this song intended to make women feel. Genius.

Another detail that I noticed and enjoyed during the show is how her logo is her stage name "H.E.R." with the letters out of focus and a little glow around them juxtaposed with the artist standing in front of it in a halo of light similar to the glow around the letters and not showing her eyes. Having a look at her Instagram account and overall social media/media presence you realize that all of her visuals are mostly pictures where you see her silhouette but no clear shape, she's always presented as a mystery. Having her perform the song that propelled her to stardom "Focus" wearing glasses to hide her eyes and standing in front of a blurry logo makes you wonder if the logo will clear up when/if she decides to let us see her eyes.

I personally think she already knows when she'll let us see more of her. If she plans on doing it but her stage name standing for Have Everything Revealed makes it feel like that's the plan.

After being brought to tears by the crowd, she thanks us and leaves only to reappear half a second later rapping like a young Lauryn Hill. Maybe the ovation took time from the scheduled break before the encore.

This was an amazing live performance. And made me want to see her perform again and in the same breath made me understand that it's artists that are this thoughtful of every details that goes in their performances that makes me want to see them live more than once to witness their growth.

She ended her show by letting us now that she was "only 21". She's only getting started.

This is a subject that I've seen float around on Twitter a lot since J. Cole went gold in two weeks with a very minimal (almost non-existant) marketing plan and other artists did less with way more.

The way I see it, the answer is as simple as to each his own. 

To elaborate, I decided to go through my three recent favourite album roll out strategies and what makes them strategies even though it does not obviously look like it.

J. Cole is an artist that is NOT out there, you have artists posting Instagram posts and tweets everyday but J. Cole is not one of them. Therefore when he is active on these social networks you pay attention because it's rare and when it does happen, there is a purpose behind it. Cole studied communication so I believe that he know what I know and one of my favourite takeaway from my 3 years of studying communication: the medium is the message.

J. Cole got so big and is able to be a (B-List) celebrity thanks to his fan base, and thanks to the time of the internet and instant communication, he only needs them to make a big BANG. So for his marketing plan, he decided to use his fan base as the medium. He went directly to the fans, had real & genuine interactions with them ($ a dream concerts, visiting fans, etc.). 

To announce the launch of his new album, only thing he did was tweet the trailer of said album on November 16th and then he let his fans spread the word. After that, he went to several radios around the US to give them a listen of the album. While in one of these cities he went to visit a fan at her house to give her her very own listening session of 2014FHD with J. Cole.  In the middle of his radio tour, he announced that he would be back to 2014, Forest Hills Drive to host a listening party for some fans who would get to hear it before everyone else. How genius is that?? I'm not saying that it wasn't genuine but it is still a genius marketing move. By inviting fans to his home and giving them the opportunity to listen to the album before everyone else, he made them feel special and part of something bigger than them; they knew what the world was going to hear before and the artist gave them access to it and was with them when they listened to it. He also played perfectly around the subject of the album which is finding your way back home when you get a bit lost in the world and brought his fans to "the only place like home he's ever known". A day after the listening sessions, the album leaks online. Two days after the leak, he releases the video for the first song off of the album, says nothing about the leak. He just tweets an iTunes link on the day of the release of the album and that's it. Meanwhile, his partner at Dreamville and very good friend Ib tweets and he asks people to show him how much albums they got. A retweet by Ib means a chance that J. Cole sees it and decides to pop up at your place so people buy tons of albums (up to 20) and tweet their pictures to Ib, more sales. Then the FMSL Tour, Fuck Money Spread Love, J. Cole decides to just go on the road and stop whenever, tell his fans where he is and meet them with their album so he can sign them. Now, if you're a fan & you haven't bought a physical copy of the album yet, you're going to go buy it in case J. Cole comes to your city and is somewhere where he can sign it for you, more sales. 

Like he said in Let Nas Down, he is "just a man of the people, not above but equal" and he's trying to find way to incorporate that idea in his marketing strategy and he did it brilliantly. I'm not saying that his approach was anything short of amazing and real, it just clearly had as an end goal to sell albums, because this is his job, & it succeeded. 

Now if we go back, out of nowhere Beyoncé drops an album with no promo, no announcement, no leak, no rumour. The album is just here, on iTunes and it sold, a lot. Beyoncé won. A few months before this new album, Beyoncé started the Mrs Carter World Tour where she visited countries around the world and performed old songs. This was Beyoncé's marketing plan. By reminding people around the world who she is, how amazing of a performer she is and how good her already existing songs are; she made them crave for more so when the album landed on iTunes one night, people instantly downloaded it. It was a risk on Beyoncé's end, but when you can sell out a world tour with no new songs I don't think releasing an album out of nowhere is scary to you..

Once again, very different but still a marketing plan called the Mrs. Carter World Tour.
Here is a little excerpt from an article that I had saved and that applies to Beyoncé's and J. Cole's approach: "By releasing Beyoncé as a surprise and forcing the world to hear it all at once as the full album experience it was designed to be, she seizes control of the narrative around the record. It's not about singles, it's not about sales, it's about her making a statement, and the insistence that the world should come to her, and not the other way around. This is the very best kind of hubris, and it spins her creative and commercial risk into a strength. Beyoncé is telling us that she's bigger than hits, and she's got far more important things on her mind. And she's right."

Another brilliant marketing strategy for an album was Jay Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail. Jay Z and Samsung teamed up to offer the album to the first one million people to download it through a Samsung application 3 days before the release date of the album. Three days before its release, MCHG would already be platinum. After announcing this partnership, Jay & Samsung teamed up and released mini movies featuring Jay Z and some of the biggest producers in the hip hop world working on Magna Carta Holy Grail. It gets people excited. Another tease, was the tracklist + lyrics of the songs with some words scratched out appearing randomly on Internet. More excitement being build up around the release of the album. Fast-forward to three days before the launch of the album, the day a million Samsung users get the album for free. The app crashes, the album leaks, everyone downloads it. But Jay Z still sold a million copy to Samsung so he is already platinum, the app crashed. That's not his problem. He #BreaksTheInternet and goes about his life.

This was probably one of the greatest marketing roll out for an album. In Jay Z's words: new rules.

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Artists are getting more and more creative with their rollout strategy and really tailor them around their persona and need to make sure it's something that would excite their fan base and get them to tweet, talk, share and make this new album into the next big thing. A traditional rollout strategy - like the one Nicki Minaj did for The Pink Print, a really good album btw - is not enough anymore. Fans are still going to look at it and pay attention but they still need something exciting that is going to make them want to talk about it, share it. 

So, to answer to that question I've seen on twitter and couldn't elaborate well in 140 characters, yes. Artists do need a marketing strategy to launch an album, they just need one that's exciting and that will get people to talk about it and really anticipate it.