360DigitalInfluence

In the fury of learning about the new music platforms, we should also take a look at some of the lower-tech ways to make music work for brands.

Covers have long been a mainstay of YouTube content.  Two recent cover promotions are worth noting.

A.V. Club Undercover (Starbucks)

They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba
This promotion is now over a year old; Starbucks re-upped.  The premise was fairly simple; the folks at A.V. (the straight man music site affiliated with the Onion) made a list of 25 nostalgic indie songs and threw it out to 25 bands.  Each band picked a song to perform in the site’s Chicago office.  The longer the band waited, the smaller the list got.  This nice, simple game mechanism encouraged bands to record songs early and added an extra layer of drama for those of us watching the promotion.

The second year of the promotion caught fire when Gen X favorite They Might Be Giants covered Chumbawumba’s 1999 hit “Tubthumping,” supported by most of the staff of the A.V. Club.  HuffPo picked it up, and it pulled in 34,000 Facebook likes.  (Note John Flansburgh even throws in a “coffee drink,” in one of the lyrics as a tip of the hat to the sponsor.)  The video was wrapped well with a branded open explaining the promotion and pervasive Starbucks branding throughout the page.

Why It Works

Why?  Many of the same elements that drive pass-along.

• Familiarity.  Readers have an easy point of entry with songs they know.
• Unexpectedness.  Sometimes the covers work; sometimes they don’t.  The tension drives curiosity.
• Remix.  The great pillar of internet content.
• Network effect.  In the A.V. Club example, not the fans of one band, or two, but fifty.
• “Try It At Home.”  Covers encourage us to make our own covers, and to sing along.

Mashable Weekly Covers

Mashable started a cover promotion last week with an even simpler premise: it pulls 10 covers of a specific song, lines them up in a slide show, and asks users to pick their favorite.  Simple, elegant, and a good distraction for the at-work crowd.  They’re also able to merchandise it appropriately during the VMA’s, as they did tonight on Facebook.  This is a promotion that has lots of legs, because it can be adjusted for seasonality, topic, or celebrity according to the editorial calendar.

http://mashable.com/2011/08/28/youtube-cover-katy-perry/

Mashable’s brand permission in this space is relatively thin.  It will be interesting to see if the promotion holds up over time.

You can imagine securing rights to songs commissioned for traditional advertising; asking fans to cover; curating covers that pop up after campaigns and asking for ratings; or encouraging covers of songs in the public domain.