Spotify Marketing: Dealing with Big Artist Personalities

How do you deal with the challenge of changing the mindset of these big personalities, which are typically music artists?

It’s a lot of talking. What we haven’t done so far, because we are building up this company, is co-acquisition. I haven’t rung up people to say, “Hey, I think you need this.” The people who approach us have come a long way and say, I think we need this and we convince them that that is the right path to follow. However, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of artists are lazy in that respect. They don’t want to do all the engaging little pieces. What we try to do is, make a plan for the next quarter and then pick a day where we record everything that we need for the next quarter and then use it when the time comes. This makes it easier to have everything in place; you don’t have to rely on their schedules or holiday plans.

I also understand that an artist, who is also a celebrity and gives out a lot of their personality to people, they don’t always want to be like this all year round. They want to create a space where they can just be themselves; they can be a private person. We have to be sensitive towards that. We need to deal with when they are willing to participate and, maybe, we can come up with ideas that work without the artist. We do a lot of lyric videos and other things where we don’t need them interacting, but it’s still valuable for fans.

What was the biggest challenge, specifically, on that point, in marketing Rammstein?

The band wasn’t available to us, at all, as I said. They were focusing 100% on recording the album and then preparing for the tour. There was no time when we could do any sort of promotion. Obviously, having this cover which is just a match, that’s a limitation in itself. We had one photo shoot that we could work with where it was a more satirical way of looking at the band. They’re always like fire, brutal and dark. They did one photo shoot where they all held a puppy and we were looking at it saying, this is gold; we have to do something with this.

I think the biggest challenge was when we announced the European tour, which was last year. We produced a very regional campaign, across Europe, that used these puppy images, but we created one ad for every city that was playing with things that you would think about in relation to that city; maybe prejudices that you had about people from that city, such as a little play on words and how Rammstein would come in. I can send you some examples later, but it was a very fun, entertaining and pretty risky thing to do with them as it was not on brand. In fact, it was particularly off brand. Because they had been around for so long, we thought that maybe we could spin this, for once.

Some of them liked it and some of them hated it; that’s what sometimes happens. Having to take that risk, that was probably the hardest challenge, I would say.