The promotion of Out of the Cradle
 

I saw this was being discussed on 2 different threads and, since you're all stuck with a nerd who happens to be a business major specializing in marketing, I wanna understand the promotion behind OOTC.

I was reading that it was heavily promoted back then (I can't exactly remember it cause I was probably doing things your average, healthy toddler was up to, such as make trouble :lol:), complete with music vids that were aired heavily and a tour, and yet Wikipedia says it reached #128 on the album charts. What exactly went wrong (no pun intended), aside from grunge being front and center?

moved from the other thread
 

i'm deleting my original message in meaning of OOTC and moving it here (don't know how to do it appropriately, sorry):


not sure whether this is the right thread but i'll ask anyway... my question is about OOTC promotion:

i've been reading here on the ledge that WB heavily promoted OOTC but it still didn't do well. so i thought about 1992/93, and my conclusion was that OOTC timing was all wrong - this was the time when grunge became huge, and i think in europe house/techno was still front and center, if i remember correctly.

i believe when you all say that OOTC was heavily promoted, however... this was the time when MTV, VH1 etc were a constant background for me, and when i would go and see all kinds of concerts in venues large and small, anywhere between atlanta and florida... nirvana, STP, metallica, pearl jam, smashing pumpkins, you name it, everybody was touring at the time. this was also the time when clinton ran for presidency and don't stop was everywhere. however, i don't remember hearing anywhere that the guy singer from FM has a solo album out... whereas in 1997/98 i remember the dance being all over tv vividly. and in 2003 i remember syw coming out and hearing peacekeeper. i didn't follow what FM was doing at any of those times. when lindsey was touring with OOTC in 1993, you'd think that any promotion could have been riding the wave of don't stop re-emergence nicely so i wonder why i didn't notice it if it was so pronounced... and the timing maybe was not that wrong?

so - can it be than OOTC promotion may have looked more pronounced than it actually was to a FM fan who was following everything happening with any FM members anyway?

I hate to say it, but maybe it did look more pronounced to a fan who wanted to hear from Lindsey after TITN and it looked like more, but from someone objectively thinking, what was it really like?

Saying that "Out of the Cradle" was heavily promoted doesn't specify the most important part of the promotional story: airplay.

The album had virtually no airplay.

All the late-night talk show appearances, all the interviews, all the magazine & newspaper articles don't amount to a hill of beans in this era if your songs don't get played on the radio.

"Say You Will" suffered the same fate. We -- because we are fanatical & we follow the band's every move -- saw Fleetwood Mac everywhere: on TV, in concert, in print.

But we didn't hear Fleetwood Mac on the radio that year. Neither did our neighbors, who don't give a damn about Fleetwood Mac & didn't look for them on "Good Morning America" or in the New York Times. All the millions of dollars spent on "promoting" the band in other media didn't make the album a hit.

Airplay, ladies, airplay . . .

^^
How could that have been changed, David?

ah - sounds like that might be it! like i said, i used to watch music channels and listened to the radio at the time a lot, and i never ever heard any of OOTC songs till i started looking up FM and LB last year. without the internet, youtube, amazon and ebay, i still wouldn't have heard anything from OOTC or have had a chance to actually buy it;)

re SYW, i wasn't FM fan then either, but i do remember hearing peacekeeper on the radio and seeing that today show performance (maybe b/c my daughter was born the same day when SYW came out apparently:laugh:). i've never heard any of the other SYW songs before though...

Back when SYW came out, I was in junior high and the closest thing to rock I was listening to was Linkin Park and i think I did see commercials for it or hear about the album, but I kept on wondering about the name and who that big guy that looked like Hagrid from Harry Potter was :laugh: (of course, that was Mick, but when I found my parents' CD of Tango in the Night, I still remembered the name I had heard before, but I did think the cover looked cool)

As for radio, I was listening to the local top 40 station at the time and they play mostly pop and hip hop, so I probably never heard FM on the radio till i started listening to rock stations years later (where I hear 'em a lot)

Oh, but its not like they didn't try. WBR hit radio hard. For all the TV talk show appearances Lindsey did, he did in-studio appearances at something like 6-8 radio stations across the country. They paid big bucks to guys like Jeff McClusky to crowbar the window open for the limited spins it got, and the songs simply weren't resonating with any discernible format.. whether it be pop, modern rock, or even AAA.

Also, Cassie- the album's lack of success had nothing to do with grunge, which- at that point, in 1992- hadn't begin to dominate radio or even sales outside of the small handful of big names. There was plenty of room for a veteran rock artist to have commercial success releasing quality yet quirky/hard to pigeon-hole tunes. For example, Peter Gabriel's "US", released in Fall '92, had two US Modern Rock #1 hits- lead single (& plodding "Sledgehammer" rewrite) "Steam" and "Digging In The Dirt". Gabriel vs. Buckingham circa 1992 is not a perfect comparison, but it serves its purpose in showing that Lindsey had a perfectly level playing field for the opportunity of having his songs heard & appreciated by his audience upon its release.

when in 1992 was OOTC realesed? grunge was everywhere at the time, may have been just a few bands but still. i've seen Nirvana in 1993, and by that point grunge was huge for a long long time already. but like i said, i don't remember hearing anywhere that somebody from FM had a solo record out.

A nice theory, but no. WBR threw an obscene amount of money away (in hard dollars & time/focus that could have been allocated elsewhere) on marketing this abortion. I couldn't believe the dollar figure when I first heard it; without posting the exact number, it was described to me as nearly the same as they spent on Van Halen's F.U.C.K. album the year prior.

June 16, 1992.

And grunge/handful of bands had the buzz/sales, but the charts (especially the modern rock chart, which is a more accurate bellwether for this purpose) wouldn't be truly impacted by alternative/grunge until 94-95. In 92-93, you still had acts like Sting and the aforementioned Gabriel dominating the modern rock chart.

EDIT: see for yourself...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_...k_hits_of_1992

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_...k_hits_of_1994

and...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...States%29#1992

("Wrong" peaked at #23 and "Countdown" at #38 on the mainstream rock charts. Grunge didn't seem to keep Bad F'ng Company from being #1 on this chart for 6 weeks in early Fall '92)

that's actually pretty good comparison, and along the lines i was thinking.

listening to OOTC now, i like it but i don't find it as quirky or different/artist-specific as Gabriel's work seem to have always been. what confuses me with Lindsey is that he seems to be musically all over the place during the same time/era - i don't think i can pin one song as representing his style for an era. look at gyow and ngba, or countdown and street of dreams...

at the time OOTC came out, the audience that would need to be hit with promotion are people tuning back into FM via don't stop resurgence, not people who were looking toward new and progressive things b/c OOTC was tinkered with too long to be progressive at the time. does that make sense? this was the time i bought on some sale FM greatest hits (and didn't like it much) which tells you i was open to look into FM-related stuff even though what i listened to at the time was mostly grunge... but i never got a whiff of all that promotion...

thanks for the links LukeA, will look through... but i disagree that 94/95 was a peak of grunge. like i said, by the end of 1993 nirvana was almost not cool anymore... and sting and gabriel always had a very distinctive style, even though they were tinkering in various degrees with the world music etc.

Yes, absolutely. Few people seem to remember/want to admit this, but a major reason why the OOTC songs failed to resonate is because the songs sounded 4-5 years dated upon their release. When a work of art is meticulously labored over, you hope (as the artist, or as a fan) that its considered ahead of its time (ie. "Pet Sounds"). OOTC is Bizzaro World "Pet Sounds".

They were quite cool with me and my crowd back then... but, its not a matter of "cool", really- it may have lost its luster with its initial, core fanbase, but commercially, it was more popular than ever, as it had assimilated into what was then considered "alternative".

well yeah, Cobain sending a bullet through his brain in early 1994 may have had something to do with that second peak... apparently, according to wikipedia, smells like teen spirit stayed nirvana's biggest chart hit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smells_Like_Teen_Spirit), and nevermind came out in 1991. in 1992, it seemed like everybody owned a copy of it, and nirvana was already parodied by weird al.;)

funny, to me what is called alternative was in the early 80s - bands like the cure, sisters of mercy, even smiths (i date myself:rolleyes:), but at the time i was not living in the US yet; looking through the links for the early 90s charts you posted LukeA makes me nostalgic...

anyway, back to OOTC - i didn't know it even existed till last year:D.

Camper Van Beethoven
 

seeing Cracker on this chart reminded me - i assume you all know that Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker have overlapping members? i had no clue (even though voice sounded vaguely familiar when i listened to CVB's Tusk) till i read David Lowery's blog for the first time, a few months back... entertaining read.