Rollout Roundup: Ranking and Critiquing The Best Marketing Rollouts in Music

I wrote about the past few weeks and one of my favorite marketing trends, the documentary, making a resurgence.

Because I’ve been busy with work (planning rollouts of my own!) over the past few weeks, I decided to write about the past few weeks of rollouts here.

Youngboy Never Broke Again - Sincerely Kentrell (Album)

Strengths: Interesting Billboards are the future. “Out Now” billboard copy couldn’t be more boring, and YB’s team understood this. They placed “YB Better’ billboards around major cities, nodding to the popular internet troll’s slogan about the rapper. Including a song that YB recorded from jail, the marketing team here was clearly working overtime to make sure they checked all the boxes for this project without the physical presence of the artist.

Weaknesses: With NBA Youngboy currently incarcerated, it’s hard to get any new photoshoots and visual content set up. This release was of course missing the very crucial aspect of visuals for that reason.

Kali Uchis feat. SZA - fue mejor (Single)

A collab we’ve all been excited about.

Strengths: Stunning visuals, and I mean STUNNING. From the video to the accompanying stills, these are two artists through and through. The creative direction was perfectly tailored to the artists’ fan bases. Kali recently launched a fas

Weaknesses: Would love to see the two more active in engaging with each other on socials! Kali has recently been active on twitter, but I would love to see her lean into more direct-to-fan content in the near future. SZA is a bit more illusive on socials, which is in line with her brand, but I would have liked to see this stunning piece have more longevity in marketing. As time passed, it seemed like hype for the collaboration died down much more quickly than it should have for these two superstars. I would have loved to see some interesting post-release activations that let this collab live beyond its release week.

Latto - Big Energy (Single)

Strengths: Visuals, a lot of lead up for a single, social media consistency, and the mini doc. Latto revealed a mini docuseries on her Youtube, “Life with Latto” with the first one centering around this single. She also posted a choreography tutorial after the release, which I thought was such a fun and engaging content piece! If you’ve been reading this for long, you know that I’ve been predicting BTS and documentary-style content to be the next rollout trend, and that’s been proving both true and effective. With the digital space becoming more important and more authentic, fans are increasingly interesting the what goes on during the creative process for artists behind the scenes.

Weaknesses: I would have loved to see this song take off more on tiktok! It could have been beneficial to run a more targeted campaign given the nature of the song which seems like it would do particularly well on that platform. Latto’s twitter campaign where she answered fans stories about dating mishaps was funny and engaging, but would have been way funnier as a tiktok series where she responded to comments with videos. Twitter has been losing its Q&A appeal, as twitter hashtag questions become overwhelmingly used in rollouts and now lack originality in my opinion. A good way to look to the innovative version of this would have been a tiktok or even IG live where she brought fans up to tell their stories.