Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Viral marketing is the buzzword as artists and representatives of the global music industry gathered in Berlin to discuss innovative ways to combat piracy and illegal downloads.
This year’s combination trade show, conference and festival has been overshadowed by plunging CD sales worldwide amidst the turmoil in the music industry over new web-based music venues.
More than 2,000 musicians were in Berlin for the event in hopes of signing lucrative contracts with executives of major labels. And those executives are huddling to come up with strategies for saving the industry. Viral marketing is one of those strategies, involving word-of-mouth marketing via weblogs and Internet forums and chat room and such wide-open cyber-venues as MySpace and YouTube.
Marketing strategists cite the Arctic Monkeys as an example for how to break the mould on traditional marketing.
The four young lads from Britain defied conventional industry wisdom by side-stepping time-honoured marketing procedures and making their music available free of charge via the Web. The resulting word-of-mouth buzz propelled them to the top of the charts.
The Arctic Monkeys thus made obsolete the traditional procedure of pressing a demo and hawking it to label executives and radio station programme playlist managers.
The Arctic Monkeys cut out the middle man by posting their own home page on the Internet and offering their demo singles as free downloads. They burned their own CDs and distributed them free of charge at live gigs.
— The Guardian
