Amanda Palmer and the Vagaries of Viral Marketing
Female artist’s belly too fat for record label - The F-Word
Call me a cynical manipulative bastard, but if I had an album and I wanted some serious free promotion, I would consider staging a fight with my record label. The contract is for x number of albums, by which time x years from now everyone has totally forgotten, and even most of the faces at the label are different, so when and if you renew you can brush it all under the carpet, ‘just business’.
Great viral meme. I almost certainly would never have seen the video without the meta-narrative of an asshole record label oppressing a normal female body tickling my injustice button. Would you? I mean, it’s a great song with a great video, but how many music videos do you really watch in a given month?
I’m Not saying this is staged, just pointing out the incredibly net-positive effect this thing will have on the brand of Amanda Palmer. I guess what I’m saying is that even assuming that some schlub at Roadrunner is so incredibly sexist and ignorant as to ask for the changes reported here, it seems somewhat unlikely that they would be so far beyond that, to be so short-sighted as to take a firm stand on the issue and deliver some sort of ultimatum, and that this ultimatum would be made by someone who actually had the authority to do so, which you would HAVE to assume would come back to bite you in the ass if you didn’t have a good mechanism to profit by it. Obviously I’m projecting, but it does seem like a lot to believe.
If I were CEO of Roadrunner and I knew for sure I had a lock on her contract, and it got back to me that Amanda is pissed over some sexist thing one of my producers has suggested, I’d apologize to her, get him to apologize, move him to some other project away from her (or use it as an opportunity to fire him if I didn’t like him or it was politically necessary), encourage the story to spread all over the net as fast as possible, and then sit back and wait for when the fervor is getting really intense and the boycott is looming, before getting out there with Amanda, with her triumphant and the label rep contrite and making overtures to the community that forms around the story, play it down and isolate the action from the company, standard pr crap. Then, what the hey, you attempt to work with Amanda to engage that community with some outreach, maybe a book deal for all the beautiful bellies, with the proceeds going to breast cancer or some such, and a concert tour of badass women rockstars, again with the proceeds going to charity, and the whole episode becomes part of her little narrative of fame, her cult of personality, the story of the time she stood up to her record label and forced them to change, and still nobody really remembers or cares about the fine details, and everybody smiles that we’ve gotten to make the world a better place, and she can reference it with her fans like some sort of inside joke that makes everyone feel all warm and fuzzy and connected.
The net effect of all that is that her audience grows a lot stronger and more devoted (which is both hard to do and vitally important), there’s a ton of free publicity for the album and all the marketing materials (like the video), profits are up, it becomes a little less acceptable to be a sexist in the record business, and the company gets to put a feather in its cap for changing what shouldn’t exist in the first place. Or maybe I’m just a cynic looking for all the angles, and they’re a bunch of sexist assholes after all. Hard to say, really. I’d LOVE a more in depth article. Because quite frankly, right now this is all just gossip and drama, and it doesn’t mean much.
