The RIAA and the major record labels continue to misunderstand the web. It feels like almost daily, they make moves that position themselves as draconian, out of touch or just plain evil.
Well, apparently it’s not just their executive team. Their PR folk don’t get it either.
I recently received the following email from a communications team member at EMI Records promoting OK Go. Here is their pitch, unedited except for names/links removed:
I work in the Interactive Marketing department at EMI Music, and am currently working with OK Go on their new partnership with Promo Jam. The band is offering a free download of “White Knuckles (live)” in exchange for a tweet about the initiative. Here is a link to the giveaway:
Link removed
Please let me know if you have any questions. I’d also appreciate any feedback you have about the band and its Twitter initiative. Below are the links to the band’s social media networks:
Links removed
Wait, what? This – from the same record label that worked hard to make the same band’s viral videos less viral?
It gets much worse than that. Consider this is also the same label that:
- Attacks artists for creating mashups
- Sued Vimeo for allowing users to create lip dub videos their artists actually support
- Has consciously destroyed innovation
- Tries to bankrupt CEOs of companies it doesn’t like
- Tries to hide kids education anti-piracy objective
After all of that, they actually expect music fans/marketing bloggers will support them?
Further, they have a legal disclaimer at the end of their email, saying:
This e-mail including any attachments is confidential and may be legally privileged.
They’re pitching me – and also trying to scare me not to tell people they have pitched me. And yet, they want to be social…
Digital reputation issues aside, they don’t even have a clue how to pitch a blogger – or in this case, a Twitter user. Since they sent the pitch to my @thefuturebuzz.com email address, they know I also have this blog. But clearly they don’t read it. Consider:
- I dislike both the RIAA and major record labels. A quick search on my blog would have made it obvious I would have disdain for this pitch.
- As an independent, creative commons artist who likes obscure music and unknown artists – in what reality am I going to hype a major label artist?
- They’re asking me to Tweet about their initiative? Seriously? This band has 300,000+ followers on Twitter. What possible benefit could they get from me sharing this with my 5,000 followers?
- Even if they did want me to write this up as a social media case study as the end of the pitch infers, they don’t include any stats. There’s nothing to write up.
- They have no relationship with me and they’re directly asking me to do something for them.
Amazing this is what their digital marketing/PR team members are wasting their time doing, instead of getting to work on solving reputation management issues. Or better yet – fixing their company so we don’t have hundreds of reasons to hate them in the first place.