Marketing Techniques Examples

Prince CD Give Away:

In on July 24th 2007 Prince brought his 10 track album "Planet Earth" out for free with a special edition of the Daily Mail. "It's all about giving music for the masses and he believes in spreading the music he produces to as many people as possible," said Mail on Sunday managing director Stephen Miron. "This is the biggest innovation in newspaper promotions in recent times." (Katie Allen, media business correspondent The Guardian)

This CD give away gave Prince a huge amount of publicity in the UK. Allowing people to have his music for free was a big risk in the music industry, many people from inside the industry thought that he was crazy to so. Giving his CD away for started to get a lot of attention from the media, increasing Princes publicity. When the Issue of the Daily Mail containing the CD was released, the newspaper had to increase the number of prints that they brought out that day to cope with the number of sales that they had. Millions of people all over the UK were listening to the free CD that they had received in newspaper.Prince lost a lot of money i the release of the CDs, but because of the huge amount of publicity that he received, millions of people were listening to his music and buying tickets to see him perform live, eventually breaking even and then quickly making a profit. This Idea would not work theses days because not a lot of people these days buy CDs or collects CDs, this would work as a free download from itunes or from other music websites like Spotify this would work if you could get enough publicity for it on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter.


Carl Cox USB Album Release:

DJ Carl Cox's new album has been announced to be released on a USB stick. The DJ believes thats this may or may not be the answer to illegal file sharing, " I think it is a good idea, but weather it will catch on I don't know." Carls fourth album, All Roads Lead To The Dance Floor, will be available for purchase on an 8GB branded USB stick for £20 plus a small postage and packaging fee. The buyer will be allocated a code that enables them to download the album on to their stick, as well as additional content such as live performances, video footage, extra demo tracks and other related media. The material will be slowly released in stages over 6 months, starting with the 14 track album and six demo tracks, followed by the performances and tour footage.


This is a huge risk as the album is going to be so expensive, it is debatable weather people are going to buy it. One risk is that people won't listen to his album a huge amount because the only way to listen to the tracks are to plug it into their computers, they won't be able to put it onto their iPods or MP3 players.