Target Marketing — or, A Brief Guide to College Rock
The dB’s, 1981: Gene Holder, Chris Stamey, Peter Holsapple, Will Rigby
There was a moment, around 2014, when I realized that most of the music I enjoyed was, at most, three or four degrees removed from R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe. I drew up a flow chart of all of the artists I knew who were associated with Stipe, then connected them to other artists. Unsurprisingly, there was an insane amount of overlap. Within a period of about ten years, Stipe or R.E.M. had collaborated with the Indigo Girls, Patti Smith, Kate Pierson, 10,000 Maniacs, the Golden Palominos, Neneh Cherry, Syd Straw, Richard Thompson, The Replacements, The Feelies, Camper Van Beethoven, and filmmakers Milos Forman and Wim Wenders. There was no end to the residents of the Stipe-a-verse.
I’ve already written my ode to R.E.M. , so I won’t wax rhapsodic here. After all, this is an article about marketing, so I’d better get to the point.
One of the bands on that flow chart is The dB’s, a quartet from North Carolina whose 1981 debut album explained their name: Stands For Decibels. It contained eleven bangers that ranged from driving power pop (Peter Holsapple’s “Black and White”) to jangly love songs (Holsapple’s “Big Brown Eyes,” Chris Stamey’s “She’s Not Worried”) to jittery, paranoid romps (Stamey’s “Dynamite”). The band, which consisted of Holsapple, Stamey, Will Rigby, and Gene Holder, put out three more albums, then broke up. Nothing quite matched the success of Decibels. But Holsapple and Stamey made their mark, and Stands for Decibels lives alongside The Feelies’ Crazy Rhythms (1980), R.E.M.’s Chronic Town (1982), The Replacements’ Let It Be (1984), Husker Du’s Zen Arcade (1984), Camper Van Beethoven’s Telephone Free Landslide Victory (1985), They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln (1988), and The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa (1988) as a landmark of the College Rock subgenre.
But what was “College Rock”? Put simply: College Rock was a phenomenon of the ‘80s and early ‘90s that included the aforementioned bands (plus some from the UK), many of which had not gone mainstream but were deemed cool enough by college radio DJs to play on stations nationwide. It was music you’d usually hear after hours on MTV’s 120 Minutes. The music didn’t just appeal to college students, but it had a certain anarchic charm. At my school, Wednesday nights featured a “blowout” keg party, the centerpiece of which was a singalong to R.E.M’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” with its centerpiece lyric (“Leonard Bernstein!”) becoming something of a rallying cry.
R.E.M. on MTV Unplugged, 1991. L to R: Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Peter Holsapple.
Holsapple continued to work as a sideman for R.E.M. and singer-songwriters like Syd Straw and Darius Rucker before joining alt-country “supergroup” Continental Drifters (also featuring Vicki Peterson of The Bangles, Susan Cowsill of The Cowsills, and former members of Dream Syndicate, the Bluerunners and the Steve Wynn Band). Stamey produced recordings for Whiskeytown, Le Tigre, Alejandro Escovedo, and Tres Chicas. The two reunited for albums periodically, including 1991's Mavericks, 2009's Here and Now, and a 2012 dB’s reunion album. The quality of the output varied; what never changed were the gorgeous harmonies and the tunefulness of their songs. Over time, as their work was evaluated, re-evaluated, and re-evaluated again, Holsapple and Stamey became alt-rock royalty.
Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple, 1991
It was sometime after the release of Continental Drifters’ album Vermillion (1999) that I lost track of Holsapple — and as a marketer, I’m tempted to wonder why. I just realized 2009‘s Here and Now is on my external “EW Music” hard drive, so I must have been aware of it, but I don’t remember listening much. I mean, it was no Mavericks.
So you can imagine my surprise last week upon learning that the boys had put out a new album two years ago, consisting of acoustic versions of dB’s classics such as “Black and White,” “She’s Not Worried,” “Dynamite,” “Big Brown Eyes,” and others. How had this treasure trove of Holsapplely goodness, this pot de creme of Stameyosity, escaped my notice?
Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey, 2021
I mean, I didn’t just casually brush by Vermillion and the earlier records. I own them. I am an avowed R.E.M. fanboy and devotee of that first dB’s record. How did I not know about Our Back Pages, which is, essentially, the unplugged version of that?
I don’t know what Omnivore Recordings did, marketing-wise, to promote the record, so this is no knock on them — but I do wonder if there was something they could have done to make me aware of Our Back Pages closer to June 21, 2021, the day of its release.
A starting place may have been the creation of a funnel that looked something like this:
As you can see, the mouth of the funnel is pretty wide, as it includes fans of every conceivable rock era and subgenre. You could target this group, but your audience will likely be in the hundreds of millions (what marketers call “spray and pray.”) From there, we narrow to alternative rock, which would include the bands mentioned earlier, but also alt-rock bands from the ‘90s and beyond — still pretty broad. Move down another layer, and we've narrowed to 1980s alt-rock fans. A little more specific, but it still includes fans of any of the bands mentioned. The next step would be dB’s fans, followed by the most specific audience, fans of the artists themselves.
How might Omnivore have targeted those lower levels of the funnel? Or, to be less specific: how might you, a marketer selling a product, reach your desired target audience?
(1) Bottom of funnel: if companies associated with your product have mailing lists or a social media following, both should be utilized to the fullest extent.
(2) Social media advertising. The targeting options on Facebook and Twitter allow you to zoom in on things like geographic region, age range, gender, and interests. It’s not foolproof, and requires some testing before you commit actual funds, but if you can get eyes on your product, you’re ahead of the game.
(3) Social media groups. If your intended audience is online, chances are, they’re in a group dedicated to or related to your product. I‘m sure there are groups dedicated to 1980s alt-rock, if not The dB’s themselves. Join them, and start interacting with members — though be careful not to hit people over the head with a sales message. Social media tends to discourage anything that looks or smells like advertising. If there’s a way to introduce your product that interests fans (say, a backstage video, or a rehearsal), that’s a more effective way to hook them, as it presents interesting, “sticky” content designed to stop scrollers in their tracks.
(4) Look up recent events your audience may have attended, even those tangentially related, and, if they are available, request or pull lists for an email campaign. In this case, Omnivore might have contacted the company that put out the group’s prior album to see if a list exists. Anyone who opts into the email list of a record company that puts out a Holsapple/Stamey record is likely going to be interested in a new release. (Sadly, the original dB’s albums are all out of print.)
(5) Think about what your audience reads, browses, and scrolls, and where they get their information. Might there be hard copy or online publications that offer space for ads?
(6) Leverage connections to similar organizations and ask them (politely) to post about your product on their social feeds. This is how I discovered Portland’s Eyelids, another (sort of) indie supergroup consisting of members of The Decemberists, Camper Van Beethoven, and Guided By Voices. Because R.E.M.’s Peter Buck produces their albums, R.E.M’s Instagram feed (which I still follow) promoted the release of Eyelids’ 2018 album Maybe More. Could R.E.M.’s feed have promoted Our Back Pages? It seems likely, given Holsapple’s connection to the band*. (Full disclosure: it’s possible this happened and I missed it.) The point is, referral’s a great way to promote; when a well-known entity in your field dedicates space in its feed to your product, that’s tantamount to an endorsement, and that’s huge.
Eyelids with Peter Buck, sitting, center
(7) Google ads. Ah, Google ads. Things that, to this day, seem to be the province of firms that do this and only this. That said, I’ve worked with some great firms — and for what it’s worth, have seen the light when it comes to the effectiveness of these ads. I’m not sure what it would cost to target phrases like “rock ’n’ roll,” “The dB’s,” or “1980s alternative rock,” but it’s worth a shot, because the more effort you pour into manipulating Google’s algorithm, the more likely your product shows up on page one of the search results.
(8) Finally, a brief dip into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While not exactly target marketing, it’s worth including here because any website, blog, or advertorial you create needs to incorporate the most common words or phrases associated with your product. Looking at what autocompletes when I Google “Peter Holsapple,” I see:
Clearly, Holsapple’s association with R.E.M. is a big deal. (*The “dispute” noted here is a rumored break with the band when Holsapple allegedly asked for songwriting credit on the band’s 1991 Out of Time album, which they allegedly denied. I’m unsure how big a deal this is, but people are still interested in it.) After R.E.M. comes Stamey and the well-received Mavericks, then Holsapple’s solo album Game Day. What does this mean if you’re Omnivore Recordings? It means that whatever text you put online about Holsapple (at least today) should include these words and phrases, in order to match what audiences who know Holsapple are searching for. (Shocker: nothing about The dB’s.)
We can talk all we like about whether Holsapple and Stamey have been properly recognized by the rock community. I think you can guess my answer to that. The one thing we don’t have to discuss further—unless, of course, you’d actually like to talk about it with me — is the need to target the right audience when promoting a product. Unless you’ve got money to burn, and let’s face it, very few companies do these days, you’ve got to take the time to think, and think hard, about the makeup of your audience. If you’re sending emails, postcards, flyers, or Google ads into the world without a clue as to who’s receiving them, you might as well be flushing money and personpower down the toilet.
A proper marketing campaign will always, always, begin with a discussion about who is most likely to respond to your product. Start at the bottom of the funnel and work your way up. Once you’ve passed the obvious, branch out slowly, carefully, into the unknown. If you’re not getting the response you want, stop and regroup. No matter how pleased it may be with the product — and believe me, I couldn’t be happier with mine — it shouldn’t take two years for your target audience to find you.
