A Way To Reveal Album Cover Artwork [Case Study]
I won't teach you a rocket science here, but will tell a brief story on how I made a decent event from "nothing special" within a single day last week.
Background: XSSR Dubstep (a sister imprint of XSSR Music) is a digital music label of my friend, breaks/dubstep producer Mars. I help the label a bit with building online presence and marketing strategies. Situation: XSSR Dubstep's second release is out in late March, our designer (who is great, and is present on Posterous) has prepared an artwork for the digital 12". Expected scenario: It's not rock or some mainstream genre, and it's not an album, which has been 10 months in the works. Artworks for such releases - if they exist at all - are almost never announced separately from the release. Booooooring. Goal: Quickly and for no additional cost make something more interesting out of the cover announcement. Actions:- I ask the designer to send me a series of draft versions of the artwork, to showcase how the design was created, "step by step." Fortunately, he was able to prepare 6 images, capturing various stages of the cover's creation, leading to the final version.
- I create a Min.us gallery (very nice service) and a blog post on the label's website, where I upload first two pictures. Then make an announcement on XSSR Dubstep social network properties.
- Each day after that, I add a new image both to the gallery and to the blog post, making simultaneous announcements on Facebook Page and Twitter.
Result: Cover artwork announcement is stretched into a week (stretched from nada), making fans excited about the final look of the cover, as well as the tracks' names - which appeared on the design only in few days after the initial announcement.
Nice and easy, why don't you try someday? Have you done something similar? I'm sure many of you have, share your experience in the comments !