Gareth Sweet
Copywriter
Website and promotion
For many people today, recorded music is a free product. It’s readily available for download from blogs or by ripping it from friends so why should they buy it?
What we need to do is give fans a reason to buy albums again; we need to offer them something that they can’t get from a free download. In other words we need to make the album exclusive again.
In 2002, Animal Collective created 300 one of a kind hand painted covers for 300 copies of their album Hollinndagain. Not surprisingly, this album instantly became a highly sought after collectors item.
What we propose to do is essentially the same thing, but on a much grander scale – we intend to create one massive artwork for 10,000 albums.
We get the band members to hand paint a massive one off artwork, big enough to cover 10,000 CDs and we film them doing it. However, at no point in the video do we actually reveal what the picture is actually of.
Once complete, we cut the art work down into 10,000 individually numbered, CD sized sections and make them available to people who buy the special Australian Tour Edition of the album, either on CD or through iTunes.
To promote the sale, we release the video of the artwork being created online as a viral, backed by an exclusive Animal Collective track, with details of how it was done and how people can own their own individual piece.
Once people have bought the album and received their one off artwork, they’ll then be asked to take a photo of the piece and upload it, together with their name, to a specially created website. It’s only after everyone who bought the artwork has uploaded their piece into it’s pre-numbered section online that people will finally be able to see what the picture is actually of.
In this way, not only do the people who bought the album own a unique Animal Collective artifact, but they also participate in the final creation of the artwork.
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