One of the most overlooked aspects of music is how it’s promoted. While on the surface it might seem like a lot of business major mumbo-jumbo, when you take a deeper look into things you come to realize it can be a fascinating world that combines artwork, physical media, live performances, and puts it in a blender owned by a record label. What’s specifically fascinating about this topic is how it gradually kept evolving over the years as new technology emerged — with the industry seemingly evolving with it. So, in this article, I’ll briefly take a look at the history of marketing and promotion in music throughout the mid-to-late 20th Century before delving into today’s ecosystem and the problems I have with it!
A Brief History of Modern Music Marketing
While music marketing can be traced back all the way to medieval times, the point of interest I want to start with takes us back to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. During this time (and still to this day) music labels were the ones largely controlling how artists and their music were marketed. They’d give musicians the funds to record songs in a professional environment and their labels turned these recordings into albums and singles that were then sold at stores and promoted in the radio, kinda like a musical symbiotic relationship. They also decided the album artwork, promotional material, and managed tours for these bands. In terms of how audiences were built back then, radio airplay and live performances would be the most popular ways artists gained a following. The Beatles, for example, gained recognition in the United States after exploding in popularity in Europe in large part thanks to their live performance where they performed in various big cities in the United States and beyond.
Finally, music was sold as physical vinyl records that people would go to local stores and purchase! What was important about vinyl as a medium was how it brought the album cover into the limelight as a form of music promo. Not only did they serve as an artistic statement and a representation of the themes and the sounds of the album, but it also made for alluring packaging to a potential buyer, who would see a cover during their crate digging session and go “Oh, this looks cool!” This tradition still persists today, with the album cover being one of the main things that grabs your attention whenever you’re browsing for new music at a physical location, or even through Spotify and Apple Music playlists. Whether that’s because of how provocative or aesthetically pleasing it is, this is one of the traditions of music marketing of old that still survives today!
MTV, Local Scenes, & The Early Internet: Music Promotion in the 90s & 2000s
Now that we briefly discussed the history of how music was promoted, we can take a deeper look into one of my favorite eras: the 90s and the 2000s! Starting off with the latter, we saw how music became a huge part of modern culture, influencing fashion and just the general aesthetics of that era alike. During this time you also had the rise of local scenes in different cities across the globe, which acted as little nesting spots for genres and communities centering around them. Perhaps the most famous example (especially in the 90s) was the Seattle grunge scene! What’s interesting about this era for me is the humble beginnings of the bands in this scene. They would usually play in local bars and cafes with different groups touring together. Over time, the grunge genre and the social scene behind it started gaining traction before eventually blowing up due to a variety of iconic releases coming out during the early 90s, such as “Ten” by Pearl Jam and “Nevermind” by Nirvana. Why do I mention this? Well, it shows how, in many ways, music promotion during this era was super grassroots and DIY, with local communities being really important for artists to have their music heard by a wider audience. Bands would play shows with each other and get their names out there mutually, a similar thing to what radio did for music marketing earlier on but in a cooler, more alternative way.
Music marketing in the 90s and the early 2000s was also defined by the popularity of MTV and the early internet. Before it turned into reruns of Teen Mom and Ridiculousness, MTV aired a ton of music videos from a wide variety of artists — from Madonna to Sunny Day Real Estate — showcasing their music to a global audience and garnering new fans as a result. They also had programs such as 120 Minutes, which allowed more underground bands in the world of alternative music to play their music live. Some of the most iconic bands to perform on this program include The Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead, though my favorite bands featured on the show were Catherine Wheel and HUM! The program also became iconic due to them premiering the music video to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, further bolstering the 90s grunge scene we discussed previously!
It’s also important to mention TV Commercials when it comes to music marketing, which helped to promote the primary physical music mediums at that time: the CD and the cassette. A lot of these commercials typically showcased the album artwork while also showing music videos made by the band, giving a short but concise look into the band’s musical world. Some of my favorite examples include this commercial for Facelift by Alice In Chains and this one for Evanescence’s Fallen!
The late 90s and early 2000s also saw the rise of the internet, causing a lot of bands to promote themselves online as well. My favorite part of music promotion from this era had to be the band websites, which were filled with so much personality and charm! Compared to a lot of websites nowadays, which mostly feel like a place to buy merchandise from, these usually felt like a hub that was made for the fans. They included blog posts about the band, dedicated areas to see their music videos and promotional material, and even forums for the fans to discuss their music! Another iconic part of these websites were their visual aesthetics, which incorporated Adobe Flash animation and made them feel super alive! Take the old My Chemical Romance site as an example. It feels like something a fan would’ve sat down and made; it adds this charm to it that makes me miss an era I was way too young to be a part of.
Finally, because of the advancements in technology that took place during this era, we saw new and exciting ways for artists to push out their new albums! There are so many examples I could discuss in this article but, for the sake of brevity, I’ll only mention one of my favorites, which was done by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails! During the rollout of their 2007 album Year Zero, they released an entire alternative reality game about a dystopian America ruled by a fundamentalist dictatorship in the year 2022 (I will not comment about the parallels this has with today).
Modern Music Promotion & The Death of the Album Rollout
Moving on to the modern day, it’s important to note that a lot of changes have taken place between now and then; social media and phones have largely taken over as the main entertainment medium, making TVs more irrelevant than Shane Dawson in 2026, and streaming platforms have overtaken most other forms of music consumption. And that’s not even mentioning how MTV isn’t even Music Television anymore!
In terms of how this relates to music promotion in the modern day, I’ve noticed how ,in a lot of ways, it has lost the community aspect that was prevalent in the 90s and 2000s; now it’s turned into a rat race for who can blow up on Instagram Reels the fastest. I’ve also noticed that music promotion really isn’t about the music anymore. Rather than having a platform where bands can play for a wide audience, they’re only given 30 seconds or less to fully grab a prospective listener’s attention, thanks in large part to short-form social media sites like Tiktok and Instagram having the music itself take a back seat. Instead of having a band blow up thanks to their music, it’s more so because of a challenge they do or because of a relatable dark academia POV caption they put with one of their songs in the background. Don’t get me wrong, I feel like local scenes are still prevalent, especially in smaller indie and punk circles, but not to the same genre-defining level as in the 2000s and back.
Finally, I feel like these changes to music marketing have affected the album rollout in many ways, with it losing a lot of the impact it had in years prior. This is evidenced in various reports by the RIAA, which show that a majority of artist revenue in the 2020s comes from being in playlists and individual song plays rather than whole albums. Platforms like TikTok have also affected this, with songs being tailor made to have specific portions that can become popular on the app. The rise in streaming and the large-scale abandonment of physical media can also be considered a cause for this shift. Before, you had to sit down and listen to an album front-to-back, making it a medium you had to dedicate time towards. Compared to the age of streaming, where I feel like it’s much easier to listen to an album once, add the few songs you like to your playlists, and not really think about the album anymore — kinda like the musical equivalent of an amusement park ride. Because of all of this, the album rollout isn’t given as much love as it used to, with maybe a few videos coming out for it on YouTube and Instagram with not much else behind it.
Despite all these complaints I have, there are still examples of artists putting in a lot of work and care into promoting their albums! One of my favorite recent examples comes from Halsey’s promotion of their 2024 album The Great Impersonator, which featured them doing photoshoots based on different inspirations for the album as new singles were released. For me, it’s one of the latest examples of an artist putting in a lot of work into promoting their music and having an exciting album rollout. It would be really cool to eventually see more rollouts like this one happen in the future, though we’ll have to see if they can still have a space in this fast-moving age!