The 2010 Grammy Awards was filled with wall to wall celebrities, spectacular performances, surprising appearances, shocking winners and most importantly marketing! There was the in-your-face outfit of Lady Gaga and the much anticipated performances by Beyonce, Drake, Green Day and Taylor Swift but, in between, were the extensive marketing efforts of the Grammy Awards.
Promotion is nothing new to the Grammy, I mean, they even had Steven Colbert do some product placement for the iPad, but the most prominent promotion to me had to be the efforts put on by our old, not-so-popular-anymore, friends at MySpace. They had a few plugs during the show, but most of their efforts seemed to focus on the red carpet interviews and where to find your favorite artist on the social networking website.
Previously I spoke about MySpace’s efforts to stay afloat by acquiring imeem.com. The buyout turned out to be a monopolizing effort since they closed down the music sharing site that allowed users to create playlists and embed players from various social networking sites.
On Grammy night, their efforts were focused on bringing us all back to where they felt music began getting popular on the internet. It’s undeniable that MySpace had a major affect on the music industry, but I was taken back when one artist said something along the lines of “We gotta take it back to where it all started… MySpace!”
I felt that the promotions were a bit desperate, but desperate times do call for desperate measures. Question is… did these efforts help?
I personally can’t answer by what magnitude, but I will say that it caused me to log into my own MySpace account after months of forgetting its existence. The main issue with MySpace now is that many have moved on; if you’re no longer connecting with the people you once connected with, the reasons for going on to MySpace are limited … probably why they are focusing their efforts more on the music sharing aspects of MySpace rather than the social community.
Godspeed MySpace, hopefully your marketing efforts are not all for nothing.
Related posts:
One Trackback
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dave Smith, Ed Reuben, Tearle Brown, arthurcooper, Nabin Shrestha and others. Nabin Shrestha said: MySpace & the Grammys: “It all started with MySpace”? | Internet … http://bit.ly/bKSngJ [...]