Music Marketing Inspiration: “Rubber Band” Photo Series Features Local Musicians

Photographer Wes Naman got a lot of attention for his "Scotch Tape" portrait series and so, when he decided to embark on a related "Rubber Band" series, he chose to photograph local musicians. Adding a nice touch, each individual portrait has its own blog post on his site featuring a bit of info about the related band and links to their websites. Though it's not a marketing project, it definitely suggests some possibilities for marketing music.

You may be familiar with Wes Naman's "Scotch Tape" series. The photos quickly went viral due to their startling take on portraiture from the odd to the disturbing.

Behind The Scenes | Wes Naman | Rubber Band Series

Now Naman's back with the "Rubber Band" series featuring Albuquerque musicians with their heads wrapped in rubber bands wearing either their own or another band's t-shirt.

It's another powerful series that manages to avoid being a gimmick due, again, to the startling distorted portraits that emerged from the process.

With the "Scotch Tape" series Naman is said to have allowed many to repost the photos for free or for much lower sums than he could have made. So this time he's working with a licensing and PR firm to extract more revenue from this series.

From Free to Paid

Naman's approach may well result in an interesting case study to consider what happens when free or cheap releases spread widely and then are followed with a pay-to-play offering.

I checked in with the folks at Tandem Stills + Motion regarding promo pics of which there are none. But they did inform me that the typical licensing fee for a single image was $400.

I informed them that our business model doesn't support such expenditures and didn't hear back so I don't think they're working too hard on the PR aspect. They seem to be taking the all-or-nothing route which is fair in terms of licensing but telling me about the above video might have been a productive move on the PR side.

That said, I took the fair use route to create the above thumbnail of a detail from the portrait titled "Half Ghost" to encourage people to check out the post and find out more about this work. I'll pull it if requested but it falls well within fair use guidelines as I understand them from recent court rulings related to Google News.

Bringing Attention to Albuquerque Musicians

But Naman wants to bring a bit of attention to Albuquerque artists as he told Wired:

"Even if we get half the viewers we got with Scotch tape, and even if half of that half listens to the music, it's still a good way to get it out there…I'm hoping it gives Albuquerque a little bump, the Colbert bump if you will."

Both the gallery of portraits and individual blog posts refer viewers to relevant websites and social media accounts and a small percentage might make it through to the actual band sites.

So it's certainly a postive gesture even though Naman's clickthrough math is a total fantasy given the behavior of most people on the web. I'd love to be proven wrong, even after over a decade in web publishing, but I'd be surprised if a sizeable percentage of people who see these pics ever go further.

Music Marketing Inspiration

But the project certainly raises some possiblities for music marketing campaigns and points to the value of working with a creative pro and spending the money to get a great product.

If together you can come up with an amazing series of photos that feature band members, make them freely available on the web to encourage distribution and present them so the band will always be referenced, then you've got a powerful tool for breaking through the noise.

Thumbnail: Detail from Half Ghost portrait by Wes Naman.

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.