Celebrity Post: The Xx Release Album By Sharing It With One Fan

The development of social media has made it possible for an individual to connect and communicate with thousands of people with just a few clicks. In the traditional sense, marketing enabled companies to talk to their customers, while now customers can interact directly with the marketer and with others. Because of this, it has gotten easier and easier for musicians to get the word out about their music by using blogs, social media tools, and promotional tools to engage people. 

An example of this is how the English band The Xx released their album, Coexist, by sharing it with only one fan and letting it spread. The band wanted to recreate how they got their start, which was by word of mouth. Here's what happened: The band teamed up with Microsoft to build a website that would track the path of the digitally distributed album. Then, a few days before the worldwide release, they released it to a single fan - then watched it spread. The beginning was slow, but then 24 hours after it was shared the site crashed due to millions of streams and so much traffic. The website showed that the stream spread slowly at first, then began to spread more rapidly among the Xx's online community, and then once media outlets got a hold of it, it was unstoppable. A day before the official release, the stream made it to the site Reddit, where fans made a campaign to make the stream available in every country. 

If that doesn't prove the value of social media marketing, I don't know what does. Social media and music downloading have made pre-releases an integral part of the modern music marketing process.