I was just looking for the new Coldplay CD on my shelf and couldn't find it. Why? Because the spine is printed green on black, making it very difficult to read. I had to pull multiple CDs off the rack before I found it and by then I was annoyed.
If you're making really inaccessible artsy music, I could see that you might not care very much about the readability of your CD spine. Who cares if the three people who buy your CD can find it later. It's not like anyone would want to listen to your CD more than once anyway.
But if you're a popular band with a whole marketing team designing your cover and creating a "brand" to keep your band "front of mind" for as many people as possible, you'd think that finding your CD among a rackful of other competitors' CDs would be a high priority, wouldn't you?
Simultaneously, two thoughts occur to me:
1. A story I read long ago about zookeepers hiding lions' food so that the lions have to "work for it," making their environment more stimulating as a result, thereby leading to greater lion happiness. Maybe locating your belongings is "hunting" for modern-day humans and I should be thanking Coldplay's marketing team for making my environment more stimulating.
2. If the CD had been easy to find, I never would have blogged about it.
Maybe those high-paid marketing people know what they're doing after all.
1 comment:
Yeah... You know I've got to say. I want to listen to that album now. Of course I downloaded it and I listen to it off my modded Xbox which gives me a nice alphabetical list of all the albums that I've got on my computer upstairs and then plays it on my home theater system with a click of the remote…
Come to think of it I can’t remember the last time I actually opened a branded CD case and put the CD in a CD player. No joke it’s been at least 2 years and another 2 before that since the time before last. Crazy.
Anyway, this is all to say that the marketing fellows did a DAMN good job after all considering I’ve never even seen a Cold Play album cover and have been listening to them since the leaked copy of the first album hit the internet a full month before the CD was on the selves for sale.
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