Let’s take it back to last summer. The sun peeked over the clouds of spring, pandemic mandates were being lifted left and right, and the music industry was being set ablaze in Los Angeles. No, it wasn’t due to the record high temperatures or the arid Santa Ana winds emblematic of June in California. The music industry was brought to a grinding halt by a simple set of billboards that read “CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST” plastered over a pair of pastel stars with a phone number below.

*Courtesy of r/tylerthecreator on Reddit*

After calling the number, you can hear Tyler, The Creator’s mother ranting about the trials and tribulations of raising her son. Thus began the concentrated frenzy of a rollout for Tyler’s latest classic record CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST. Besides the genius production, intricate, vivid world-building and luxuriously braggadocious bars, the album’s succinct and memorable rollout was the unexpected recipient of heaps of praise from fans and industry execs alike.

Despite encapsulating fans in a universe brought to life by vivid lyrical images of Swiss lakes, music videos akin to fully-fledged Wes Anderson films, and accompanied by the launch of a luxury brand that just smells of opulence, Tyler, The Creator was simply trumped by a masked Kanye West as he began a rollout of his own. Seared into the very fabric of social media dialogue for months on end, the summer of 2021 was home to two of the most remarkable marketing campaigns the contemporary music industry has witnessed. The unmitigated and astounding success of both campaigns begs the question: what’s more important? The music, or the marketing?

Well, if you ask Kanye West, the answer is very simple: rollouts. A Billboard report from 2021 showed that between just two of the three listening parties Ye hosted for Donda in Atlanta, the rapper generated between $1.5 and $2.7 million. Additionally, the pure spectacle of the listening events drove his streaming numbers up 37% in just two weeks according to the same report. According to MRC data, that equates to $350,000 on top of whatever he took home from the listening events. Conversely, Donda recently reached one billion streams on Spotify which after both Spotify and his label take their piece of the pie, equates to less than $2.5 million net revenue in seven months.

Of course, we all understand marketing occupies a significant space in the selling process for any item, good, or service. However as it pertains to music, the marketing scheme can often directly contribute to the product overall. “[Tyler] creates these worlds that people are obsessed with,” said music marketer and artist coach Amber Horsburgh on the Trapital Podcast. “Everything from the teasers, to the passport on the cover, the billboards, music videos, everything he posted on Instagram, it was all from the same world. And that world was very different from the ones he built for ‘IGOR’ or ‘Flower Boy,’ so it became this really compelling artistic reinvention.”

Geniuses of the marketing game like Tyler or Kanye generate such compelling worlds and realms of artistic vision that their fans buy into the music with their ears and their wallets. At both of the Donda listening parties in Atlanta, Kanye was seen donning a baggy Yeezy Gap puffer jacket. Simply due to the iconic nature of the moment and performance, Yeezy Gap made $7 million overnight following the release of the jacket according to Yahoo Finance.

Similarly, Tyler’s new luxury line, GOLF le FLEUR*, accompanied the release of CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST. While the financial data isn't available yet, if a $225 fur ushanka hat is selling out in minutes, it's safe to assume it was a massive success. Fueled by each respective rollout, fans not only wanted to passively spectate the universe created by Ye and Tyler, they wanted to be a part of it physically.

This is all to say at the end of the day, if the music is subpar, the spectacle of an album’s rollout will be unquestionably diminished. However, an effective campaign can make a listener have plenty of positive predispositions about a record, in turn upping the chances that an artist strongly resonates with a listener. “Your brand is way more than just your music,” states Puris Music Consulting’s website. “Your brand has to consist of everything from your name, your wardrobe, your messaging during your sets, your nonverbal communication from the stage, your album art, your community service platform, your story of why you are an artist and so on.”

Plenty of an artist’s focus in the modern music industry is or should be locked on branding correctly. Why? According to a study conducted by a marketing strategy consultancy group, 78% of anything you and I buy, as music consumers, isn’t about the content of what we are buying, it’s about how we feel about the content. Think about how artists are introduced to us. Oftentimes we view multiple pieces of branded content before hearing a second of sonic content. Whether it’s cover art, an artist’s profile on a streaming service, a concert set, or their social media presence, artists work just as hard on their music as their marketing agencies do on promoting their branded content.

Unless you’re a business savant and musical genius in an all-in-one package like Tyler or Ye, hiring a consulting or marketing agency is the most common, yet most costly strategy for upcoming artists. Thankfully, the most efficient form of marketing is free. According to Nielsen Holdings, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising. While artists with established and lengthy discographies are able to utilize word-of-mouth marketing more immediately, it’s not an impossibility for smaller artists. It’s proven that out-of-the-box ideas are more than capable of matching the efficacy of a fully-fledged campaign.

Look no further than Soulja Boy’s initial utilization of YouTube, which revolutionized music marketing for years. At the time an innovative strategy, Soulja was the first artist to successfully promote his music through the platform, sparking conversation industry-wide. Generating over half of a billion views (510 million), viewers were captivated by music’s integration into the internet. Shared hundreds of thousands of times and generating heaps of traditional media coverage, “Crank That” flew to the top of the charts. And considering a study conducted by Swedish researcher Guy Madison and Gunilla Schiölde found that repeated exposure to music categorically increases your enjoyment of it, regardless of its complexity or your “taste,” Soulja’s strategy has been copy and pasted by the entirety of the industry since.

Let’s be honest, we can all agree “Crank That” isn’t a musical masterpiece. But its promotion strategy, however, was nothing short of brilliance, allowing it to be one of the most successful smash hits of the 2000’s.

While potent and timely case studies, Tyler, Soulja, and Ye are far from the only successful campaigners. The music industry is constantly searching for innovative ways to captivate fans beyond the traditional product. In some ways, the money is talking just as loudly as the music is playing.

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