Hips Don't Lie: Machiavellian Marketing At Its Best

Since I would not normally pay attention to what Shakira's up to, I hadn't caught the Machiavellian sequence of album release, Hips Don't Lie featuring Wyclef Jean partial release (initially held back from digital downloads), followed by the follow-up album release with the single, followed by the digital download release of the single in stages from V-Cast to iTunes.

Now that's working an album/single combo to filth.  Talk about hustling!

The above linked NY Times article goes into more detail regarding how the single was made available on various platforms, including as an initally exclusive download on Verizon's V-Cast service.

Machinations aside, the release of an edited video of fan footage may be the most useful takeaway from this textbook case of marketing as mass manipulation:

At the same time [as the V-Cast release], Epic asked Yahoo Music to stream the song over the Internet. While Shakira finished production on the single's official video, Yahoo invited fans to submit footage of themselves dancing to "Hips Don't Lie." Yahoo then cut the samples together and posted the "fan video" on its site on March 8.

The fan video "went straight to No. 1 and became extraordinarily viral," said Jay Frank, the head of programming and music relations for Yahoo Music. Mr. Frank said the fan video was viewed more than a million times in the first few weeks of its release.

I definitely have a lot of mixed feelings about this approach, one that relies on the feeding frenzy aspect of pop music, but I do think it's a great example of how release strategies are an integral part of marketing.