Music Marketing Success With Videos: Garcia Goodbye, SoundTube, Vine Madness

I've gathered together some pretty different examples of music marketing and tools related to videos though only one is a straight up music video tool. Garcia Goodbye took a small marketing effort and made it big with a video minidoc. SoundTube is an easy way to turn your SoundCloud tracks into YouTube videos. And the 6-second video pseudo-gif creator Vine is blowing up with the support of Twitter.

Of the following three topics, I would have said two of them were headed for failure. Garcia Goodbye's effort underwhelmed me but it's been taken up by others quite quickly and I would now call it a big success.

I definitely expected Vine to be a flop and I think a series of PR events explains much of the response but so far it's been a big success as well. Then again, most other short video apps have already peaked so maybe I can eventually claim to be correct. That or everyone will forget about my FAIL and move on.

Garcia Goodbye: How to launch a single…literally

I heard from a Belgian band Garcia Goodbye about what initially struck me as a pretty random marketing effort that I would have advised them to do differently. They released a helium balloons with USB sticks featuring their new single, "Horizon," and waited to see what happened.

You can dig into the details via the above video and their guest post at Dotted Music but the big event was that they ended up driving 800 km to visit this guy who responded from the furthest distance away.

Despite the fact that the history of releasing balloons and messages in bottles, for that matter, goes back a ways, the response to the video shows that people still enjoy simple stories about humans connecting with other humans. For example, a friend of their's submitted it to Coldplay's Hypnofeed where it quickly appeared and it's also been picked up by Belgian news sites as you can see from the YouTube video stats.

As one of the band members wrote me, "Our cheapest video ever is giving us tons of attention." Nice work guys!

SoundTube Converts Your SoundCloud Tracks Into YouTube Videos

SoundTube is another neat hack by Lee Martin that allows you to easily turn your SoundCloud tracks into YouTube videos.

Lots of people are posting audio tracks with a single pic as a quick way to get on YouTube and Bad Panda Records is one example.

They big upped the hack on Twitter calling it a "neat and timesaving trick." I don't have any music on SoundCloud so I couldn't test it directly but it sounds like it would be worth checking out.

Vine Usage Blows Up In First Week

I wrote about Vine in a roundup of apps for making short videos of which there have been quite a few over the last year or so. I panned Vine at the time but also included some ideas for using short video apps for music marketing.

Since then I've seen others posting about music marketing with Vine but so far we've all just come up with ideas that were already pretty obvious from earlier products.

But, despite my negative response, Vine is growing rapidly aided by the incredible pr coup that came with being acquired by Twitter less than a week after launch.

And it didn't hurt that Facebook blocked Vine's access to friend-finding and then a porn controversy hit. Not that anybody would try out an app just because it made it easy to get amateur porn via one's iPhone.

I'd call it a PR Trifecta but some tech bloggers think it's going to get even bigger because they think it's simply a great app.

When apps like this are blowing up marketing opportunities abound. I'd say go ahead and take whatever idea you thought of and maybe even explored with earlier short video apps, repackage it as new and put something out to draw music media coverage during this initial period of interest.

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Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/App.net) also blogs at All World Dance: Videos and maintains Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.