Anti Marketing: The Next Day
David Bowie said, "there is no PR campaign. We’re just going to drop it on 8 January. That’s it." It’s a timely reminder that mystique is a valuable commodity.
At the stroke of midnight on 8 January 2013 — David Bowie’s 66th birthday — his YouTube channel broadcast the video for a new single, Where Are We Now?, and announced the release of new album, The Next Day. As his first new material since 2003’s Reality, it shocked music fans and made headlines the world over. Nobody knew how David Bowie had kept a forthcoming album secret. Even before the recording of The Next Day had begun, journalists were speculating that David Bowie had retired from music due to rumour of his health issues.
After the album’s release, his longtime producer (and personal friend) Tony Visconti tweeted he was “so relieved to talk about the new DB album after two years of silence” — this in an age of gossip websites, smartphones, and social media. Complete secrecy was a precondition from the beginning of this album project: early on, David, Tony, and session musicians were obliged to move studios after the studio owners allegedly leaked information about who was working there — David eventually asked employees of The Magic Shop and Human Worldwide studios, where the album was recorded, to sign NDAs. This was further supported by quite an extremely strict entry policy — not even his own roadie was allowed in the studio.
Part of the reason David Bowie was able to keep his comeback a secret until the last minute is down to the remarkably low-key nature of his business arrangements: a reaction, Tony Visconti suggests, to the early 70s, when David Bowie’s management company Mainman “had about 45 people looking after him, or allegedly looking after him”, an arrangement that ended in chaos and litigation.
Learning from that mess, in 2013, David Bowie’s New York office had a staff of one. He had no official manager, relying instead on his business manager Bill Zysblat — a figure “as low-key as you can get,” according to David Bowie’s biographer Paul Trynka — who began life as the Rolling Stones’ tour accountant before joining David in the early 80s, and his fiercely loyal PA Corrine “Coco” Schwab. “She’s been with him since the mid-70s,” said Paul Trynka. “Some of the musicians who worked with him hated her, but they invariably point out she’s smart, sometimes intimidatingly so, and utterly devoted to Bowie. He trusts her absolutely.”
His deal with his record label seems equally unique: he had no A&R man supervising his work, which, said Tony Visconti, “is not normal for any star”. Even Rob Stringer, the president of the Sony Music and one of the most powerful men in the music industry, only became aware of The Next Day’s existence a month before its release date, when he was invited to the studio in New York to hear some tracks. Tony Visconti told The Guardian “He came to the studio. He was thrilled. He said ‘what about the PR campaign?’ And David said, ‘there is no PR campaign. We’re just going to drop it on 8 January. That’s it.’ It’s such a simple idea, but Bowie came up with it.”
The album cover for The Next Day was devised by graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook. It shows David Bowie’s “Heroes” album image covered with a white block and the words “The Next Day” and is intended to suggest that new great rock music (the white square) can obliterate the past — but not entirely (the old image is still partially visible). The white square turned into a viral internet meme. All over the internet people were posing with white squares obscuring their faces or slapped into the middle of a scenic shot. One had even been painted on the pavement outside The Evening Standard offices and Instagram got so covered in white squares. It worked — not just in London but in Berlin, New York and San Francisco too, with fans tweeting images of posters that had been white-squared on the streets — some of them by Jonathan but others produced by the record labels.
Meanwhile some mainstream advertisement were carefully planned to stand out. One weekend paper ran a Jonathan Barnbrook-designed advert with every lyric from the new album printed in four continuous columns, with the only reference to David Bowie being the last few words — “David Bowie. 11.03.13.” Another showed a white square image containing the words “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming” and the album release title “The Next Day” without no reference to David Bowie at all. Then on 1 March, more than a week before the album release, it was made available for anyone to stream for free and legally on iTunes.
“There might be a lesson in there for the wider music industry,” suggests Tim Ingham, music industry analyst, columnist, and founder of Music Business Worldwide. “We live in an age when distraction is everywhere, consumers are multi-screening — and multi-screening is actually an acceptable verb — and the industry assumes that to get what marketing departments call cut-through or mind-share for music you have to bombard people: artists are supposed to be in a constant dialogue with their fans, via Twitter or blogs or Facebook. It’s a timely reminder that mystique is a valuable commodity. You can perhaps give people more by giving them less.”
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails told The Hollywood Reporter he appreciated David Bowie’s marketing approach. “It wasn’t like the Arcade Fire album [Reflektor] and its yearlong rollout, where it was like, ‘OK, I get it. You’ve got an album out, you’ve played every TV show in the world.’”
The Next Day topped charts worldwide and debuted at #1 and #2 on the UK and the US album charts.