Sunday, February 15, 2009 "The Dig" on Coffee Shop Marketing
Check out other Photos by Thomas Hawk on Flickr
Discovering a New Band the Old Fashioned Way
We've all been there. The coffee shop bulletin board. Free guitar lessons, a new room mate needed (fill in your long list of what you need in a person), a bed for sale, the next big little concert, jobs to save the environment (and get paid too!), and a realtor's business card. Times are tough for these posting boards. The internet has taken over and replaced them. Actually BB's were some of the first active places on the early dial up ISPs. So BB's at your local coffee shop are dead, right?
Maybe not. As the dirge of information increases online, bulletin boards at local coffee shops, (you'll notice most Starbucks and other chain shops don't have BBs) have a unique opportunity to serve as what modern day advertisers might call, "viral distribution centers."
Sure there is an overwhelmingly amount of useless information. Most people though, look because they are curious and sometimes, you find a golden nugget. Which I did on Saturday at the coffee shop.
Waiting for my cup of 21 de Septiembre coffee at Big Bear Cafe in Washington, DC, I noticed a stack of blank TDK CD's with red marker writing on each disk placed on the shelf sitting next to the board games. Curious to find out if someone had left their collection of CDRW disks lying around I picked up one of the discs and started to investigate. THE DIG, LIVE AT THE BLACKCAT, Mon, Feb. 16th was the first thing I noticed on the disc. Ok, so this is a local DC band making their way up and giving away free discs I thought to myself. The songs on the disc were listed out. 1.) She's gonna kill that boy. 2.) Penitentiary. 3.) He's a woman. On the top of the label, THE DIG, thedigmusic.com , myspace.com/thedigisup . As I picked up the entire stack of 50 discs I looked to see if all the discs are the same; if the band took the time to handwrite on each disc all this information. Yeup. Either this band is huge and has a sweatshop of interns writing out labels on CDRW discs or, the band sat around one night with a pack of sharpees and had a labeling party. I like the image of the latter.
Turns out THE DIG is up, on their new media marketing that is, and who ever is running that part of the band was smart enough to start interacting with their potential listeners in a very real way. In the coffee shop. After picking up the disc at Big Bear, I took it home, listened to it, and thought if I liked it that I would check out the web urls on the disc. The music was equally as sophisticated and intelligent as the way they got me hooked. Free music in a take home package, not over sold or too glitz. Simple, organic, hand made, but with a purpose. Kind of the way I like my coffee. The variety of promo websites turned out to be equally as adept and was surprised to find that this NY based band has over 10,000 followers on MySpace. On their home page you'll find the download for their free 16MB download that you can listen to on your computer. The whole thing got me feeling like the group was hinting at the Radiohead, free music strategy, without giving it all away.
I'll be heading to the Black Cat on Monday evening to see if their live shows are as smart as their marketing. One thing they've proven to me, coffee shop bb's aren't dead at all, you just have to do some diging, which is the fun part (Starbucks knows that coffee and music go together, but buying a CD or getting one free download from a card just isn't as interesting).
Reader Comments (2)
So it seemed like your band delivered, right?
Absolutely, The Dig was great. I'll put together a blog post by the end of the week about it. They'll be kicking off their tour in DC in March. Stay tuned for more information.