Comments on: Saul Williams’ NiggyTardust Album A Flop?

By: k

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:24:47 +0000

I just heard about this album and would love to buy it, but http://niggytardust.com/ doesn’t work! I tried Musicane.com, but there it’s like $0.99 per song and you can’t even buy all the tracks (couldn’t find any “add album”) so I’d say it’d be more of a success if, you know, it was more available…

By: Colin

Colin — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:16:11 +0000

The problem here is that some of the big marketing push came from the fact that this was novel method of marketing. But if everyone were to move to this sort of marketing an album then the novelty wears off and it no longer works.

By: Clyde Smith

Clyde Smith — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:07:39 +0000

Given the lack of marketing, I think this project did well and I don’t get a sense of defeat from Trent’s post.

But thanks for posting about it.

By: G

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:47:06 +0000

I would tend to agree with Dart. Financially a flop, but a success in terms of promotion. Saul’s exposure has grown.

This entire experiment could be viewed as a marketing campaign. Not for a record but for Saul the artist. More effective than the out-dated street-team tactics of Loud or the payola machine of yesteryear.

By: Dart_Adams

Dart_Adams — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:47:57 +0000

This is one of the issues about the archaic record label model raised by the new book by Matt Mason called “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism”. Instead of trying fight downloaders that want to get the album as soon as possible and for less than stellar quality, they offer you MULTIPLE options! They did no promotion and got the album into more than 150, 000 hard rives, iPods and Zunes. almost 30,000 people paid for it and even more people are going to hear it through blogs and online sources so when Saul Williams comes to town these people will have that dough in their pockets to make it to the show.

THAT’s the deal…and that’s what Steven Tyler said pretty much in Rosanna Arquette’s documentary “All We Are Saying”. The album is FAR from a flop considering that upwards of 500,000 people probably have that album in their iPods and Zunes right now if you include downloads through music blogs and websites that weren’t paid for at all. I’d consider it a resounding success, now Trent has to tweak his business model and reduce some costs in the future, I guess.

One.