Wisdom of Crowds Steers Coldplay’s Strategy for Viva La Vida

When a band creates a new album the music label tries to guess which song should be the single that best represents that album.  It is the “selected” single that the label will spend massive promotional dollars for things like a CD single, music video and radio play.   This is all done as a way to promote the album, as that is where the label makes most its money.  Hence the art of this process is to try and predict what the crowd will like best. 

Because a music label cannot possibly afford to promote every song on the album, if they are incorrect in their prediction and they select the wrong single it can have a negative impact on the overall sales of the album.  This means that the record label has wasted a lot of money and possible doomed an otherwise good album or even the entire band. 

Last year Coldplay released their new highly promoted and anticipated album Viva La Vida.  Their label, EMI, chose the song Violet Hill as the lead single to promote the album.  In doing so, EMI created the standard promotional content and programs around the song including free early downloads for a week.   Violet Hill was released on May 5 digitally, as CD single and a music video.  As a way to leak more of the album out EMI then released the second single Viva La Vida on May 7 digital only.   In conjunction Coldplay did an advertisement for Apple’s iTunes in May and used Viva La Vida as the song.   

The interesting thing was that even after all the promotion around Violet Hill it was Viva La Vida that became the big hit as an almost overnight success.  Viva La Vida quickly reached the top spot of the UK Singles Chart and Billboard Hot 100.  According to Wikipedia it was “the band's first number-one single and a Transatlantic number-one.  Viva la Vida was well-downloaded in the internet, becoming iTunes' second best-selling song of 2008”. The crowd spoke and with its wallet.

EMI, responding to the crowd, scrambled to appease the market by going back to make a music video and a CD single for the song Viva La Vida long after the album was released.  Both were released on July 29, 2008.  Arguably it was because of this change in focus to the single Viva La Vida that powered the success of the compilation becoming the worldwide best selling album of 2008 according to Wikipedia.

In a very direct way the collective wisdom forced EMI to change its strategy quickly and with that change they were able to ensure that they matched the market trends.  I’ll tell you – this “wisdom of crowds” stuff is powerful!!!

The Crowd is gathering……