Charli XCX Changed Album Marketing AGAIN!!! MUSIC FASHION FILM Album Rollout Analysis

If you work in the music business, just about everyone agrees that Charli XCX's Brat is the most game-changing album marketing and rollout of the last decade. But, one of the biggest problems an artist has is if you make the most amazing thing of an era, well, now you have to follow it up. And this time, you're going to have to go bigger and better. So, how does an artist actually top that so you're perceived as still moving upwards? Because that's a big deal in this business, is if you're not growing, no one cares. Since the pressure to always one-up yourself, especially in pop music, is always there, and we recently saw what happens when you show us the Life of a Showgirl, and the fans say, "I can't relate." So, this video, I'm going to show you how Charli XCX won the game again by playing a different game than everyone expected. And oddly enough, she's actually done this earlier in her career before. So, by the end of this video, you're going to understand how to play the album release game in a whole new way, and how you can do it even if you're one of the smallest artists in the game. Now, after Charli XCX dropped Brat, and we all saw how amazing the rollout was, I made a video where I showed that before Brat, there was this whole thing that no one really knew what to do with an album in the streaming era once it was out. You had to tour, maybe you make some music videos. And I made a whole diagram about this where I had called this area after an album was out the WTF area. But, Charli showed that you keep the conversation going, which is very important for what she did with this album era. During Brat, she released remixes. She kept people talking. The songs had new reinventions that made people discuss how she changed them and how the different collaborators she did on a quote-unquote remix record reshaped what you thought of them. And largely, what I think Brat really changed in album marketing and how people have thought about it since, and the way I've seen it influence the biggest album marketing now, is that everybody kind of learned that you have to keep the conversation going after the record, not drop a remix record like 18 months later. But, one of the main things I find with artists who don't get what's going on with marketing and kind of can't see the hidden strings behind the actions is they first don't understand what positioning is. Now, positioning means that when one friend describes an artist to another, how do they describe them being different to the other artists in the genre? It was very clear after Brat, Charli transformed from the pop girl who's been messing around with underground producers and kind of has her own porky thing going on to the actual mascot of underground culture in dance who's having the party 365 days a year, who's making edgy and honest music that's way, way, way more unhinged than all the other pop girls. It was genius and the position was wide open. So, let's be honest. Look at the other pop girls. No one was doing a good job taking that part of it. And positioning's important since when you are seen as the second-rate or even the fifth-rate version of an artist, you're not exciting for fans to talk about, to spread the word about you and get you new fans, which is the number one way you get fans. And also, you don't get gatekeepers opening as many gates since they can just open it for that top-tier artist. But, what many of you also don't get is when you're talking about an era for an artist, that era has an objective. In fact, I've kind of stopped liking calling eras eras. Like, sure it's fun if we're talking to the fans to say that stuff, but I like to call them objectives because that's what we're really thinking about during an era. And that objective is to go from the place where you are before the era starts to a new level that's even higher up when the era ends. We need to get to a next level of the position or reinforce that we are the best person in that position and everyone below us is playing child's play. Especially is since if you stay in one position, someone can come and do it better than you and all of a sudden, they become ascendant and everyone's talking about them. And then when you do what you've kind of just been doing, and it doesn't hit as hard, well, that's when you become a legacy artist, and your career starts to fall off. Having a goal for where your era is going to take you to in positioning by the end is important, or else you're going to make the incoherent mess of videos you see from so many artists who never quite make it. In fact, one of the main things when I see all the genres that I watch on a regular basis of those artists who are bubbling under who kind of got a buzz, but they're not really popping off yet, is one of the things, if their songs are good, is they're often just creating things that kind of don't have any legibility. They don't make sense. They may make sense to the artist, but they don't have this purpose that's elevating them towards a position where people will go, "Ooh, that's what's special about that artist. I have to tell my friends about this." They don't have that objective that gets people to start thinking about how they are different. And that objective gets people talking and helps build you up to become the position that you want to get to. So, what we're often thinking about as we have these objectives is how we reverse-engineer how people talk about that. And what we're going to show is how Charlie did that. And I should say, if this interests you, it's exactly what we discuss in my membership channel every week, which for $5 a month, you get over 6 hours of new videos every month, as well as my back catalog of over 160 videos where I explain things like this, answer your questions, as well as giving away cheat codes for how you blow up in your genre faster than other artists, and dissect how the biggest artists in the world are doing well exactly what we're talking about today. As well, we also talk about the latest music promotion methods, and once a month I listen to any songs my members submit of their music they want me to listen to. And oh yeah, if you didn't know, I'm writing a whole book on how to do DIY artist development and world-building just like this, and figure out your position. And my members get access to the rough draft as I write it, which you get if you pay that fee. So, you should really tap in by clicking the link in the description to join us. Anyway, back to Charli. One of the things to remember about artists who are this good is they know what they wanted to achieve with an era. With Brat, she wanted to express herself authentically, which is why everyone talked about how the lyrics felt way more raw. That was the word everyone kept using. As she had radical honesty. After doing an album before that in Crash, her previous work that was met with like a meh from a lot of fans. I mean, I loved it, but it failed to get her huge pop success, and she said herself she kind of sacrificed a little of her authentic self to try to play the game of pop stardom. Whereas Brat is when she decided to lean into who she authentically is. Brat showed us that she didn't need to be like the other pop girls. She was her own vibe. But with Music, Fashion, and Film, her latest record, she is very clearly trying to show us she's thinking on another level than every other pop girl. In fact, maybe even three levels above them. Basically, she's saying to anyone who she be compared to, "Oh, you think you're making cinematic [ __ ] I'm thinking about that even deeper. Oh, you think you get fashion? You think you know how to play with conversations and get people talking? Watch this." It elevates her to the top shelf. When you're a brand or you're a director or someone else creative and you want to do something with art, between this and her soundtrack to Wuthering Heights, the rave reviews of her acting in her up show, which I'll admit wasn't my personal fave, the roll out of Music, Fashion, and Film confirms that when a brand or an art director wants to reach for the top shelf of a collaborator to make high art, she will be the highest of high shells, and that's what she was going for. But how'd she do it? Okay, let's first talk about something I said earlier. She kind of decided to not play the following up game. So, a little while ago she wrote this Substack post about not going away. And that was kind of where she decided to do the thing where what a lot of pop stars do is they decide to go away for a while and kind of hope you forget that amazing thing they did. And by the time the star returns, you'll just be glad they're back and forgive that it's kind of mid. But one of the things she was doing once Brat ascended her is she was making a lot of movies. But one of the ways she decided to pad the landing of going from Brat over to music fashion film is that she did the soundtrack to Wuthering Heights. It kind of said, "I'm going to change a little bit, but you know, allow me some space to wander around and create." Now what's funny is she's done this in the past. After her massive success with Sucker, which had these massive massive hits, she made a lot of mixtapes before coming back with a full length. And these mixtapes allowed her to play in this experimental pop world of PC music {dash} hyperpop that we all have come to love. It's been a seminal era for her. But one of the interesting things, I made a video about this years ago, is that when you call it a mixtape, you're basically saying to critics and people, "Hey, you can't judge this as one of my records. Even if it has as much runtime as many of my records, I'm playing around, so don't judge this like it's one of my main works and it's part of my main canon." So noticeably, what the Wuthering Heights soundtrack allowed her to do was exactly that while she prepared for music fashion film. But when it came to making music fashion film, she decided to go a different route and I'm not just talking about making rock music. Okay, so if you're a follower of this channel, you've probably heard me talk about this concept that I came up with called the contradictions of the conversation. And on Brat, the lyrics took this concept as far as it can go. In fact, it's really what made me crystallize this idea I had about contradictions being the conversation and really bring it to life. You know, we were all discussing about how she was pondering things like whether to have a child or do another bump of coke, but on this record, the contradictions and the conversation started to become something that was happening from line to line in the song lyrics. When you listen to songs like Wink Wink or rock music or even the instantaneous contradiction that is the song Yeah, I mean it literally has no lyrical depth aside from now I'm going to contradict myself. The contradictions are way more instantaneous and it gets people talking the second the song comes out. Now, I know a lot of you are saying, "Great, Jessie. That's great. She has millions of people if not tens of millions of people tuning into her every word. How the hell do I do this?" Well, I think this is one of the things that we do have to explore. Is a lot of people don't get that vulnerability is one of the main things that connects you with others in songs. And it one of the main things you will hear people talk about constantly. In fact, I was literally just reminded of script writer Charlie Kaufman's bath to speech when I was listening to a podcast by Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon today. And one of the main things he talks about is how fearful people are of being vulnerable, about saying that thing they're afraid to say. And when you actually start to say those things and mess around with them and play with them, what you start to do is create those conversations. You get people actually talking. And so many of you in your music don't dare to go anywhere near that border at all. Now, you could argue a lot of this Charli XCX record is playing with the audience. I mean, when you name a song Wink Wink Wink Wink and say, "Maybe I [ __ ] your dad. Just kidding." You have to wonder if she's referring to her husband's band The 1975 song I'd love it if we made it, which has a lyric that talks about this type of provocation where he says, "We're [ __ ] in a car, shooting heroin, saying controversial things just for the hell of it." Sometimes it's not just vulnerability. Sometimes we're getting the audience to sit up straight while we talk about a greater issue and get their attention. All of these things can be true and we can use the different devices within our music and within ourselves depending on what we want to express. And whether this is all artistic intent or not, a lot of what does marketing and really helps artists grow is honestly creating these references where fans can spot. In fact, iteration is so much of what Charlie has done on this record. I think a lot about the locked groove on the vinyl that you can see here on the side where David Cronenberg's amazing quote, "No one lasts forever." just repeats over and over and over again the lock groove. That then generates a conversation. Iteration is a thing I don't think that many artists that are doing mid stuff think about enough. It's that when you have a simple idea, how many ways you can bring different things you can do with it out of it is what separates the good artists from the great artists. One of the things that I've been really, really deep into studying is how to see more of a metaphor quotient. Meaning when you see something, how many different ways can you say it in a different way? This is what makes artists truly great. And when you watch Charli XCX's music fashion film full-length video where she what she did with this video is she dropped it on release day to generate even more conversations about the record. What she did was put out a 30-minute film that gave more context to the ideas behind each song and spelled it out for the people who well, who just aren't quite quick enough to get it all. And I'll admit, I think of myself as pretty quick, but she clarified some things for me that I was wondering about and it was very helpful to go deeper with the work. But the key being what you see her doing in this film is iterating upon each idea. She plays with each idea in a bit of a different way. Even the music videos are alternate versions where she shows a little bit more depth of what she's talking about. Now, we'd be remiss to not talk about one of Charli's favorite marketing devices, which is the cloud bomb. For those of you who don't know, Brad Tramel has an amazing video about this, but it's basically the idea of that well, when you get a bunch of famous people together, particularly when you're shocked that they're all there together, people talk about it. In this era, Charlie does so many different things, even down to the album cover, which features John Cale, Martin Scorsese, and Tom Ford. We also see this with her doing very small shows and bringing up artists like Kim Petras, Jane Remover, and underscores on stage so that people talk about this stuff. Now, you as a small artist, this even works in the underground. One of the great seeds you can plant for the future is finding the most talented people that you know and getting together, and whether it's being extras in each other's music videos, working together on songs, or doing shows where you do a guest verse on an alternate version, and filming that footage and putting it online, these are all eggs you are laying later for people to talk about you. It is the lore that fans will dig up and keep spreading for years to come that will make it so you can stand on top of that later on and do bigger and better collaborations that are massive clout bombs. Now, another marketing tactic that anybody can do is what I like to call the one-two punch. So, one of the silliest things we used to do in marketing is we'd go, "Oh, wow, we're going to drop three songs on the same day, and then the fans will freak out." But, the best thing to actually do if you have three songs that you want to drop so that everybody gets the project is to do it one day after another. The internet is a fast-moving place, and every token of currency you have to get attention, you have to use these days. Dropping multiple things on the same day, or announcing a tour and your album, or your tour and a single, or your album and a single on the same day, it's a waste of time these days. The one-two punch makes people go, "Oh, wow, they're really popping off. They keep doing things. This is crazy. Each day there's something new." And Charlie was a master of this. She'd put up a single, and then she'd release the vinyl with a B-side that would then get uploaded onto an Alt account. Another piece of innovative marketing that she's been engaging in that I've been seeing many people do, especially films these days like Backrooms and Obsession, is that they're dropping all sorts of war on other channels throughout YouTube. For example, all her BTS of her videos was on a channel that films BTS and shows behind-the-scenes shoots of fashion shoots. And with Obsession and Backrooms, everyone who seemed to work on those movies went to a different YouTube channel to explain what they did on it. And we saw the results, which is some of the biggest indie movies we've seen in a long time. But the lesson for you all is this, is that if you have anything you can show, if your cameraman has a YouTube channel, the person who featured on your song also has a YouTube channel for their guitar teaching, do an unboxing video, do something together. Use every channel you have to try to get out there. Now, another thing that Charli did that reiterates going to the position she wants to be in, which is the more high-minded pop star that thinks above everyone else, is she did these Q&As with really fancy, smart directors. Now, this is a great marketing technique. In fact, one of the best iterations I saw of this was her husband's band The 1975, who during COVID released all these conversations with their singer Matty Healy, who's one of the smartest artists in the world. And this worked well because he could have amazing conversations with people. I still think about many of those conversations and quote them all the time. And she's doing the same thing because that's what she's one trying to position herself with, and two, she's smart enough to pull it off. When we look at our lanes analysis and we're trying to see the things we can do, this is the type of things we come up with when we see what our strengths are and then we iterate on our strengths. Now, I know this video is getting long, so I want to just go over some of the smallest details in here. Now, one of the other things is this can get real pretentious real fast. So, she had to keep it light and there's a lot of stuff like the wink wink video has very light moments. I mean, this album rollout included a two-day press cycle where Charli and her friends were threatening to [ __ ] up Peppa Pig. But, let's be real here. When you know yourself and who you are as an artist and your layman's analysis and you know what your position is, sometimes silliness is what lightens this all up. You have to decide if you're that dark mysterious artist who's never silly or if you're going to have those silly moments like that. And frankly, this really lightened the mood a bit. Now, lastly we have to talk about the concept of anti-marketing. Now, I think this trend is pretty interesting. We're going to go deeper on this in another video, so I'm not going to go too deep, but one of the things she did do is make lots of smaller events, which is a big thing now. You know, BB Bridgers recently did a bunch of dates where everyone's phone got locked up. Charli really made it so there wouldn't be a ton of footage leaving these small clubs that she was playing. There was list big events that were very very small. In fact, there was one in Tokyo while I was there, but I couldn't quite get there. But, lastly I want to leave you all with one big thing to think about even if you're the smallest artist in the world. Far too many of you are not thinking about what the next step is to get you somewhere higher on the ladder of the fan base that I talk about where we have 11 different rungs and each one we can get you up a rung if we play your cards right. You need to think about what you want your position to be and what the artist who does things in that position does and let that lead you to your creative decisions. Let's just say you're hoping to be the artist that everyone sees as being the person you want to have playing guitar next to you in your video or in your live performances. You want to be the person that's actually playing the guitar while Lil Wayne pretends to. Well, then you should probably have a guitar on all the time. Make interesting sounds with your guitar. Go deep on developing your own style. Make sure you play a style of guitar not everyone plays that looks cool on you. Make sure you stand out in your own way. Make sure your amp looks different, but also make sure that you could be a side person and don't steal the show. Think for a while about the traits that the next level that you want to get to would have, and then think about what that artist would do it. That's clearly what Charlie was doing to make this amazing album rollout that took her to a level that we're going to see for years is going to level her up. So, now that you know all this, you may have forgotten what I taught you in the rollout of the brad video, which really changed album rollouts to this day, and I still don't see enough people figuring out how to take the lessons from. So, that video is on the screen right now, and you should really watch it. Thanks for watching.