Lady Gaga And The Future Of Music Albums

The marketing campaign for Lady Gaga’s recent album release featured endorsements, merchandise, branding and promotional deals. The amazing success of Born This Way suggests this is the way forward for artists promoting their new albums. Selling 1,108,000 copies in the US in its first week, about 60% of which were digital downloads (the most any album has ever sold in a week, thanks largely to Amazon’s 99 cents deal) Born This Way outsold the next 42 albums on Billboard’s chart combined.

Products, events, deals and television appearances were all arranged to coincide with the release of Lady Gaga’s album, including a partnership with FarmVille’s Zynga and a performance on the final of American Idol. Steve Berman, vice chairman of Interscope Records said:

We wanted to approach this like we were opening a blockbuster film. It became: ‘We’ll put a flag in that date well in advance. We won’t move. And what we’ll do for the next six months is pour gas on that fire every day, really branding the date.’

NYTimes: “In Lady Gaga’s Album, Evidence of a New Order”