'Underground' Musician Buries Music Underground (Literally) For Fans To Find

Culture

from the go-dig dept

We’ve talked about plenty of examples of musicians doing creative things to connect with fans. One example was Trent Reznor hiding concert tickets in random places around LA, and then mentioning the coordinates on his website, leading fans to scramble and find them. It appears that “underground” musician Emperor X (aka Chad Matheny) is doing something similar, and fitting with his underground status. Ross Pruden points us to the news that Matheny has been recording early versions of new songs he’s working on to cassette tapes and then burying them in random places. He’ll later reveal the GPS coordinates, and if people can find the tapes (apparently it’s not always so easy), they get not just the tape with the music, but also “a secret code that will unlock more music on his website for the rest of the world to hear.” In other words, people have incentive to find the tapes not just for themselves, but for other fans as well.

Some will (of course) mock this as a “gimmick,” and even Matheny flat-out admits that it’s a gimmick — but it’s a “gimmick” that works. It gets his fans excited, it gets some more folks interested in his music, and it makes the whole thing fun. As the article notes, it’s sort of a way to bring back the old experience people used to have of trying to track down works from a more obscure artist:

“He’s creating an experience that really fits his music, and what it is is that he’s an underground musician,” Dahlen says. “Back in the day, there’d always be that artist that you were in love with. You had to find all their albums, but they were really unknown, and you would go to used record store after used record store trying to track them down. And then, finally, you find one of their albums in the bin, and you love it more because of all the effort you put into it. You have a stake in this musician now. And that was the wonderful experience about finding people who are off the mainstream. I think it fits perfectly with what he’s doing. I think it’s kind of brilliant.”

This highlights, once again, that the idea behind these actions aren’t that everyone should do it this way, but that each artist needs to come up with ideas that really fit with the type of artist they are. Something like this really appears to fit with Matheny and the fans of Emperor X, so it works for him. Other artists need to figure out what works for them as well.

Filed Under: chad matheny, emperor x, hiding, music