Viva Brother

Before you continue reading, this is not going to be a review of the recently released Viva Brother album, entitled Famous First Words. I have no inclination to firstly listen to said record; nor to bother penning 500 words of vitriol and malice towards a band that don’t have much of a future in the music industry.

Note: I did see Brother (before the legally enforced name change) supporting The Streets, and wasn’t impressed. But that’s not what this post is about.

This post is about the success of music PR, and how (if done badly) it can ruin the credibility of a band, as well as something of an insight into certain ‘tactics’ have been used by the ‘marketing team’ behind this band.

Musicians often strive to be perceived as ‘credible’, but Viva Brother are no longer in a position to control their popularity. Here’s why:

1.) Poor Rebranding

What many people might not know is that Viva Brother haven’t always been a lad-rock ‘gritpop’ band. They were formerly emo pop-punk groups Wolf Am I / Kill The Arcade (YouTube video of one of their songs which hasn’t been expunged from the internet by Acidlove – VB’s record label).



I don’t mind bands following the current trends of the time (which then would have been Enter Shikari / Bullet For My Valentine / Lostprophets and so on...) but when a new band totally changes their music style it can look as if they are trying to piggyback the successes of others (e.g. Kasabian / Oasis / The Enemy) just to sell records, something which in this example looks crass and desperate.

2.) Ill-considered Street Teams

Employing a street team to post on message board forums without research into the interests of its members is a pretty simple mistake to make, similar to sending a press release to a journalist who won't be interested. Drowned In Sound is one of the UK's most vibrant music communities, with a definite slant towards music that is less 'mainstream'. Not exactly the best place to pitch Viva Brother then...

On the DIS community pages, several posts have been made by street teamers, proclaiming how good Viva Brother are, and then offering a link (through a referral system) to pre-order or purchase the album on the Acidlove site. Nobody likes the idea of clicking on carelessly made referral links, especially when purchasing anything as personal as music, and I would be very interested to find out what each click-through and sale is worth in terms of financial return to these ‘fans’.

If street teams are to be anywhere near effective, then it might be worth them integrating themselves into the community before posting about a new band or artist. Just registering and suddenly proclaiming a band to be a successor to a sliced white loaf is often going to draw cynicism from its members, and the band will often have a tarnished name on that website. On DIS, users can tag forum threads with other 'relevant artists', and certainly didn’t hold back on Viva Brother...

3.) Poor use of Social Media

A little bit of research into Viva Brother’s street team found a Twitter page had been set up, which seemingly has the sole aim of making sure the hashtag #FamousFirstWords entered the UK trending topics list, so that it would be seen by anyone visiting the site that day...

Twitter presumably has measures put in place to ensure that spam tweets will never make it onto the trending topic list, so this is mainly a futile measure that only those already interested in the band (and following the relevant Twitter accounts) will see in their timeline.

4.) Personality and interview ‘tone’

Since the height of bands like Oasis, for some reason there seems to be an over-riding perception that bands often have to be outspoken in interviews to get themselves in magazines such as NME and Kerrang. Unfortunately modern music print journalism (with its falling ABC’s as a result of the internet) is often reliant on a juicy quote in features and interviews, but too many bands are choosing to slate other bands, in order to try and stay in the public eye.

I know VB aren’t the worst offenders for this (hello Liam Gallagher) but when you go ‘on record’ with a quote such as this..

“People are afraid to write massive songs that’ll sound good on the radio. We’re self-elected to do that. We nominated ourselves because we had to”

.. you really need to back it up with some good songs. Which they haven’t. Many of the music publications and websites have also realised this, and this week has seen some scathing critical reviews (5/10 from NME, 2.9 from Pitchfork, and 1 Star from The Guardian).

To conclude, this isn’t a blog post about how much I dislike Viva Brother. It’s about how much I hope that the PR and Marketing departments change their approach to music promotion. If a record label signs a band to a deal worth a rumoured £250,000 it’s fair to assume that there is adequate resources to support the band with a launch plan that doesn’t follow the well-trodden routes of the past.

That is unless Acidlove have realised that Viva Brother are not the cash cow that they had initially hoped for...

Paul