Marketing the Dylan Machine and Leveraging His Latest Achievement

Yesterday Bob Dylan received his Nobel Prize and diploma. The speculation was that he might not, but that didn't make sense to me. He accepted the honor in a private ceremony that included champagne. The only ones present: the 12 members of the Swedish Academy. And Bob. The concert he gave later that evening was reportedly most excellent.

Another Dylan-related event occurred yesterday as well. I received an email touting the release of three new Dylan albums, which brought to the foreground my ongoing admiration for the Dylan marketing machine.

THE MARKETING/SALES FUNNEL
Example from StevenDennnis.com

After half a lifetime in marketing, one is easily tempted to see everything through a marketing lens. The success of the Beatles was, in part, a marketing achievement. Pop 40 radio stations play the songs, building awareness for the product. Repeated airings lead to familiarity. Record stores were located everywhere making it easy to consider a purchase. Posters and T-shirts give fans the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty. Naturally it helped that they produced good "products."

To some extent the only thing that's changed today is the purchase step, as Amazon.com and iTunes have eliminated the need to visit a bricks-and-mortar outpost.

(See more variations of Marketing Funnels here.)

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The Stockholm Waterfront concert hall seated 3,000 last night and as has been the custom these past four years, Dylan and the band opened with Things Have Changed. The current set list is packed with classics including Don't Think Twice, Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row and Tangled Up In Blue. But there are faves from his later years also worked in, including Beyond Here Lies Nothing and several tracks from Tempest. And he's also pulling from the latest reconfiguration of his catalog, crooner covers like Melancholy Mood.

Yesterday's email was about three recent releases that just "happened to" fall on the same day as this private medal ceremony. Under the Covers is a 20-song compilation of recordings of other peoples' material. Dylan has purportedly recorded as many as 500 songs by others, so I can imagine this is potentially the beginning of a new series of products for avid fans. When I was in college Dylan took some heat for releasing an album of covers, but to be honest I really liked that album, which began with Lily of the West and included Mr. Bojangles and Big Yellow Taxi, among others.

Under the Covers opens with Pancho and Lefty, and filters through a host of songs on various themes, many of them familiar to the long-time follower, songs like Cocaine and Hard Times. It's available for purchase here on Amazon.

The second album being ballyhooed in yesterday's email was yet another I'd not expected called Acoustic Recordings. There's almost no information about the album at Amazon.com other than the price ($16.99 if you're a member of Amazon Prime) and that it's a 3-CD set of acoustic recordings of "Legendary Radio Broadcasts."

And finally there's Triplicate, his most recent studio album, which has been billed as Dylan's first 3-disc album, once again featuring classic American tunes. Produced by Jack Frost, this is his 38th studio album, a sequel to last year's Fallen Angels.

The release of Triplicate was preceded by a lengthy interview with Dylan himself, prominently displayed at BobDylan.com. The interview itself created a stir, covering a full range of themes from a lifetime as well as certain features of the new 3-disc set. Yesterday's email included endorsements from reviews, designed to assist fans in making that important purchase decision at the tail end of the funnel.

"A sensitive and exquisite 30-song extravaganza." - The Guardian

"As he sings these mountain-scaling melodies and conjures the ghosts of vanished lovers hovering over the verses, he doesn't just bring these songs back to life. He makes a pretty good case for why they should live forever." - NPR

"Strong performances, great repertoire, some of his best singing in years." - Mojo

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One thing the Nobel Prize has done is bring a new audience to the top of the funnel. Listening to radio shows like John Bushey's Highway 61 Revisited on KUMD then increases familiarity, if you're new, and reinforces loyalty if you're an old-timey fan like the rest of us.

Speaking of long-time fans, we're less than two months away from Duluth Dylan Fest. Ring them bells. Here in Duluth we will be celebrating the weeks of May 20-28. Check out the schedule here. Or follow updates on Facebook.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Open your eyes.

P.S.: If you're an artist who has created Dylan-themed or Dylan-inspired paintings, check out our Call for Art. 

This Wheel's On Fire, Woodstock and Marketing the Basement Tapes

It's been a month since release of The Bootleg Series #11: The Basement Tapes, and though I've yet to weigh in I'm tilling the soil and planting seeds. There's plenty of chatter these days with almost everything Bob Dylan does. He's become an icon of our culture (though he famously disdains labels, so as soon as I wrote that I wanted to take it back.)

For the past month I've been listening to RAW, the 2-CD version of this bootleg collection, as opposed to Complete, the full 6-CD version. Simultaneously I have been paying attention to the reviews, some in surprising places. I've already noted the New Yorker feature, and I can't imagine a release of any Dylan music without a Rolling Stone feature. I suspect that marketing data is available to show that any time they can find an excuse to get a Dylan cover they increase sales by 10%. Just guessing, because those are the only ones I buy.

What's interesting about the Rolling Stone cover and the New Yorker piece is that they both rely on photos which originally appeared as part of a Saturday Evening Post feature in which a photographer and journalist went up to see what was happening with regard to Dylan's recovery from his motorcycle accident. I have had a copy of that Saturday Evening Post for so long that you can see how faded the ink has become when you compare the two pictures here. Perhaps the Rolling Stone photo looks richer because it's been re-mastered somehow. You can certainly see that it's been recycled from the same shoot.

Well, as I was saying above I've been prepping to weigh in on this latest Bootleg Series and one of the ways I've been gearing up is by reading Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire, a book that I will also review during another space of time. Helm was one of the original members of The Hawks, the band recruited to join Dylan in his new "electric" phase. You may recall from Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966 how these concerts generally unfolded. The first half of the concert would be Dylan solo, acoustic guitar strapped across his should, with a tight hold on his audiences. Part two would be Dylan pugged in, The Band (formerly The Hawks) producing a blistering sound that had the same effect in town after town: loud boos. The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert in Manchester culminated in one fan famously bellowing "Judas."

The tour began in the U.S. though before Dylan took it abroad, and with the exception of Texas, the results were the same everywhere, and Levon Helm really disliked it. He and the Hawks were accustomed to crowds embracing and loving their performances. Suddenly they were being disdained, almost violently. Ironically, Dylan loved it. Helm didn't say it this way but Dylan seemed to consider the publicity from this insulting treatment to be equivalent to writers who get tagged as "Banned in Boston."

Before they left the country Helm split the tour. Helm skipped about passing time in various ways including briefly bussing tables in Florida and working oil rigs off the Gulf coast. After Dylan's motorcycle accident Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and gang were invited up to Woodstock, as was Levon Helm, and something magical happened. The creative energy was uninhibited, channeled into a different kind of sound independent of performance driven material. Whereas the Hawks cut their teeth as performers, this was a whole different gig, hanging with Bob and just letting the juices flow.

Fast forward. One of the tunes Dylan and Rick Danko co-wrote was "This Wheel's On Fire." It later became the title of Helm's book about the history of The Band (and his personal history). It also became the selected song from The Basement Tapes for this promotional video narrated by Jeff Bridges and released today to promote the Bootleg Series Volume 11. Watch it here.