Billie Eilish has no major radio hits. But she does have the No.1 album

Billie Eilish is a 17-year-old pop singer and writer that is catching the attention of millions of people all over the world with her unique approach to musical creativity. Billie is at the early stage of the digital era and is using that to her advantage by creating music to accompany that era and stimulate early demand in digital-related music.

Although Billie has no radio hits, that is no indicator of her success. When Billie's album "When we all fall asleep, where do we go?" debuted, within the first week, she moved over 313,000 copies. The interesting part is that in order to get these numbers many people are commercialized via radio, yet Billie is able to reach and even surpass these numbers without the help of radio. Through this, Billie was able to be No.1 on the Billboards chart which is remarkable for not only someone so young but someone so new the industry as well. You may ask, well how did she do this? The answer extends farther than her talent. Billie's marketing team and management team play a big role in her success. 

Billie's record label steered away from radio and focused on building her brand through releasing songs one by one, while also creating anticipation, which ultimately increases demand. Streaming has become the new way that the recording industry gets the bulk of their revenue due to the decline in demand for physical copies such as CDs. Although this cuts revenue, Billies marketing team have found ways to promote her albums and get her name out to the public. By maintaining the high demand for Billie's music, her team "Interscope enlisted every major streaming service as an ally, doling out secondary promotional content that each could claim as 'exclusive'". Not only does this generate more anticipation for the album, but also helps the streaming services gain more popularity. This is a win-win situation. Even Amazon had a partnership with Billie, where she picked out her favorite items that matched the different themes of her songs. She also did promotional campaigns with Youtube, Apple music, and Spotify. Billie's response to her success is "I was trying to do things I wanted artists to do when I was younger".

In a broad sense, this related to technology. As the revenue inflows change from physical sales to online sales, the marketing approaches do too. More specifically this relates to the informing aspect of promotion by telling the target market who Billie is and why she is someone you want to listen to.  Billie is relatively new to the industry and for a while, she was hardly known by the public, her team did a good job at promoting her because now she is traveling all over the world for tours and performances. Along with informing, this relates to branding, her marketing team debuted Billie's early songs one by one to create consumer demand for her music style due to it being more digital based. By using this approach, this allowed people to get a feel for who she was and what kind of music she created. The marketing team was able to get direct feedback by seeing if the music was added to peoples playlists. After seeing her numbers rise and feeling assured they released a full album knowing it would be popular and added to streaming playlists, which it did.

I picked this article because I personally like how Billie is different from any other artists in her genre. In a way, she is creating her own genre by not following the norms in her industry. This represents product differentiation at its finest.


LINK:https://www.wsj.com/articles/billie-eilishs-no-1-album-debut-followed-unusual-strategy-no-hit-singles-11554723001?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2