8:43am
Thursday, Jan 4.
The “new” Beatles song, Now and Then, “feels calculating and cold, like the tech mimicking a late Beatle,” writes The Ringer.
The new release is an older song that never made the cut until Paul McCartney used AI to recreate the late John Lennon’s voice.
The Ringer article goes on to say,
“On the Mount Rushmore of the Beatles’ impact on popular music, one is the group’s groundbreaking embracement of technology and teaching its pop peers to embrace… all the tools at one’s disposal.… That the remaining Beatles would go all in on AI shouldn’t be shocking.”
Using every tool at your disposal is an easy way to dilute your effect, in my opinion. Better to use the tools you need, when you need them.
And AI generally isn’t the tool I like to fall back on. Like the Beatles’ song, output from AI feels cold to me.
However, a positive lesson to learn from the Beatles comes from the same article:
“Is there another group so good and so committed to reselling its myth to each generation?”
As a marketer, that is something to remember.
There are millions of customers entering your market every day.
And most don’t know who you are.
So your job is to retell your story, resell your services, constantly.
The Beatles are good at this, with new reissues and remasters being released all the time.
Taylor Swift is good at this, too.
She’s been in the news a ton this last year, re-releasing old music and going on a huge “greatest hits” type tour.
And I’ve come across a number of people who claim to have her marketing secrets:
• Hypnotic events, where people enter such an emotional state they can’t remember anything and obey her commands to buy merch
• Personalized attention to fans, because when you talk to one person in your marketing you talk to everyone (but when you talk to everyone, *|FNAME|*, you talk to no one)
• Easter eggs and hidden messages that draw fans in to discover the meaning for themselves, deepening their emotional connection and time commitment
I don’t dispute any of these “secrets.”
But I think there’s more to it—something more cold and calculated.
I think it’s a P.R. move to align herself with Travis Kelce, the quarterback for the KC Chiefs football team.
Now, maybe you don’t care about Travis or Taylor. (I don’t either.)
But celebrities rely on their celebrity status to elevate their own brand.
And when you join the forces of a pop star’s fan base (mostly young women) with a football player’s fan base (mostly young men), there will be fireworks.
They’ll start to care about one another, to an extent. (Until Swift and Kelce break up and he uses that pain to win another Superbowl).
So ask yourself:
How can I elevate my status by joining forces with another?
And
What can I do this week to reintroduce myself to an audience?
For more on the failure of today’s music to be anything special, here’s that Ringer article.
Keep your focus,
Jeffrey
P.S. Allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is HOV. H-to-the-O-V.