To get your attention marketing has to be clever these days. Very clever. We now live in such a noisy and crowded environment, with millions of messages reaching us on a daily basis, that it’s virtually impossible to get noticed unless you do something remarkable. It seems that, for the most part, traditional media has struggled in the age of the internet, even though they may be brilliant, they’re simply too slow and cumbersome as organisations to adapt. We are over a decade into the wider public’s adoption of the internet, yet some of them are still failing. The music blogger seemed to step in to this gap as naturally as a boxer to the ring, being as equally linked to their community as they are the musicians. It was therefore only a matter of time before the bands cottoned on to this and started to sidestep traditional media, utilising our reach and hit their public. It also married perfectly with the new DIY approach that bands were taking up online – who needs the traditional routes to market anymore? This streamlined, interactive, direct approach has worked well for some time now and a precise example of how bloggers and bands can work together recently arrived with a video for The Pass. The four piece from Louisville, Kentucky, who have perfected the art of monumental dance indie anthems, approached the excellent music blogger Zach, from We Listen For You, and requested he made a video for their tune Vultures. His idea, (see the video below), was to create a collage of props and images that represent the names of over 39 music blogs. What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in charm and outright fun. As you would imagine, it swept around the blogosphere and Twitter like wildfire, as folk tried to guess all 39. The winner received a copy of The Pass’s full length debut album, Burst. Everybody seems to win in this clever – but by no means underhand – piece of marketing. This is one of the buzz bands to watch for in 2010, with hit after hit in the waiting. This kind of masterful, throbbing, upbeat indie is of the highest order, with bubbling synths and giant choruses. Sounding in part like Passion Pit, it’s actually the album that The Killers would love to be able to make, if they weren’t so lost in the game. They put it up for streaming in its entirety on their Soundcloud today. The Pass officially release their work on September 21st, on Sona Blast Records, and we are pleased to state that it’s an LP that’s just as packed with fresh ideas as their commercial approach. (MB)
Find them here: Myspace
Hear them here: THE PASS – TREATMENT OF THE SUN
Hear them here: THE PASS – TRAP OF MIRRORS
Hear them here: THE PASS – CROSSWALK STEREO
