Marketing and Music: Blink 182 Rewards Fans For Stealing its Music

Reward the Behavior You Want to Encourage

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Sara Russo, like any other sane person, loves Nutella. So much so, that in 2007 she demanded that the gooey hazelnut perfection have its own world holiday.

Sara started a dedicated website for her efforts to establish World Nutella Day. She created a Facebook group that at one point had 40k Likes, 7k followers, and over 700 fans sharing Nutella recipes.

Sara had created a community of some of Nutella’s biggest fans so they could have a place to come together and share their love of Nutella.

Eventually, Nutella found out about the website, and immediately sent Russo a Cease and Desist letter and told her to shut the site down.

This is sooo typical of big brands who cannot stand the idea of their customers having any sort of control over brand messaging. Even if those customers happen to be fans who absolutely love the brand.

Fans of the World Nutella Day idea predictably went to Nutella’s FB page and told them they were done with the brand, etc etc etc. Eventually, Nutella backtracked, and reached a deal with Sara to take over the site, which now carries on in its current form.

Blink 182 Catches Music Thieves In the Act, And Then…

The story of Nutella’s ham-fisted response to one fan helping to proactively grow the brand is all too common. Typically, when a big brand encounters a customer who is promoting the brand unsolicited, the brand’s will first want to shut down their efforts, then ask questions.

Which makes Blink 182’s response so refreshing.

In 2011, Blink 182 was ramping up to release its first new single in 8 years, Up All Night.

Perhaps accidentally, the band started searching for its music on YouTube. It discovered that its fans were creating a TON of music videos where they stole the band’s music. Their fans would take Blink 182’s songs (All The Small Things was a popular choice), and create their own music videos for the songs. There were countless examples of these videos; fans basically dancing, laughing and making complete asses of themselves. All while using Blink 182’s music as the soundtrack for their shenanigans.

Technically, these were copyright violations. Technically, Blink 182 had every right to crack down and bust these fans and come after them legally.

Instead of doing this, Blink 182 did the smart thing: They said ‘Thank you’.

The band partnered with AT&T, and reviewed all the fan-made videos featuring its music. Over 100,000 in all.

Then Blink 182 ‘stole’ their music right back from their fans. They used fan-created videos to make a music video for their new single Up All Night.

Then they THANKED their fans and mentioned every single one of them in their video. Here’s the product:

Is this a polished music video? Of course not.

What it is, is Blink 182 understanding that these weren’t people stealing its music. These were fans that loved the band, and who were showing that love through its music.

If Blink 182 would have cracked down on these fan for ‘stealing’ its music, it would have faced the same backlash that Nutella faced over targeting Sara Russo. For the same reasons.

Instead, Blink 182 was smart enough to understand that it was blessed to have fans that loved them this much. So it embraced them, and thanked their fans.

Reward the behavior you want to encourage.

Oh and then for good measure, the band created an ‘awards show’ and singled-out some of their fans for doing the best job on their videos:

Notice how the script has been flipped: Nutella made its fan the villain, Blink 182 treats its fans as if THEY are the heroes. For doing the same thing that Sara Russo did.

Give Up Control to Get Control

In 2001, Amazon was mere weeks away from insolvency. The brand was on course to become one of the more prolific dot-com busts.

Then Jeff Bezos did something that earned him ridicule and mockery. He launched Amazon Marketplace.

Wall Street hated the idea. The branding ‘experts’ panned the idea. They said Bezos was diluting the Amazon brand and giving up control to third party sellers.

But Bezos had a different mindset. He was betting that customers would appreciate having a much wider selection of products, and wouldn’t care if they came from Amazon or another seller.

Bezos was proven correct. Amazon Marketplace saved the company and currently accounts for over half its sales. Not bad for a company worth a whisker’s width short of two trillion.

Bezos understood what rock stars do: Giving up control can actually give you MORE control.

I saw a podcast with Naval Ravikant (who is absolutely brilliant) once, and the host asked him about all these Twitter accounts that had popped up that reshare his quotes. The host asked didn’t that worry him? Wasn’t he afraid that someone would mistake the quote account for being him, or that the quote account might incorrectly attribute a quote to him?

Naval’s response was that we all should hope that others will take our content and share it. If you click on the link above to his X account, you will see that he is constantly amplifying other accounts that quote him. Why in the world would he not?

Why did Nutella go after a fan for promoting them? Because sometimes, companies would rather stifle a message and have complete control over it, than let their fans freely promote them.

Happy to see Blink 182 followed Naval’s model.

That’s it for this edition of Marketing and Music, I hope you enjoyed it! Next week will be a fun one, I’ll have a very interesting post on how to better collect feedback on Tuesday. Then on Thursday,

Bette A. Ludwig, PhD

is here with this month’s edition of The Brand Diaries!

Have a great weekend!

Mack

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