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[Part 2 of 2]

Last week I broke down how Charli XCX followed up Brat by refusing to play the follow-up game, and why every era needs an objective that moves you to a new position by the time it ends. If you missed it, part one is linked below, and it's worth reading first, since everything here is built on it.

This week is the execution. These are the actual tactics she used to get to that position, and how each one works for an artist at any size.

Iteration is so much of what Charli has done on this record. I think a lot about the locked groove on the vinyl, where David Cronenberg's amazing line about no one lasting forever just repeats over and over and over again. That generates a conversation.

Iteration is a thing I don't think many artists doing mid stuff think about enough. When you have a simple idea, how many different things you can do with it is what separates the good artists from the great artists. One of the things I've been really, really deep into studying is how to see more of a metaphor quotient, meaning when you see something, how many different ways can you say it differently. This is what makes artists truly great.

She dropped the Music, Fashion, Film full-length video on release day to generate even more conversations about the record. It's a 43-minute film that gave more context to the ideas behind each song and spelled it out for the people who just aren't quite quick enough to get it all. I'll admit, I think of myself as pretty quick, and she clarified some things I was wondering about. It was very helpful to go deeper with the work.

The key is that what you see her doing in that film is iterating on each idea. She plays with each idea in a bit of a different way. Even the music videos are alternate versions where she shows a little more depth of what she's talking about.

We'd be remiss to not talk about one of Charli's favorite marketing devices, which is the clout bomb.

For those of you who don't know, Brad Troemel has an amazing video about this, but it's basically the idea that when you get a bunch of famous people together, particularly when you're shocked they're all there together, people talk about it.

In this era, Charli does so many different things with it, even down to the album cover, which features John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese.

We also see it with her doing very small shows and bringing up artists like Kim Petras, Jane Remover, and underscores on stage so people talk about it.

As a small artist, this even works in the underground. One of the great seeds you can plant for the future is finding the most talented people you know and getting together, whether it's being extras in each other's music videos, working together on songs, or doing shows where you do a guest verse on an alternate version and film that footage and put it online. These are all Easter eggs you're laying for people to talk about later. It is the lore fans will dig up and keep spreading for years to come that makes it so you can stand on top of that later on and do bigger and better collaborations that are massive clout bombs.

Another marketing tactic anybody could do is what I like to call the one-two punch. One of the silliest things we used to do in marketing is go, oh wow, we're going to drop three songs on the same day, and the fans will freak out. The best thing to actually do, if you have three songs you want to drop so everybody gets the project, is to do it one day after another.

The internet is a fast-moving place, and every token of currency you have to get attention, you have to use these days. Dropping multiple things on the same day, or announcing a tour and your album, or your tour and a single, or your album and a single on the same day, is a waste of time now. The one-two punch makes people go, oh wow, they're really popping off; they keep doing things; this is crazy; each day there's something new. Charli was a master of this. She'd put up a single and then release the vinyl with a B-side that would get uploaded onto an alt account.

Charli surprise-released “Camera” with a music video just days before dropping her album.

Another piece of innovative marketing she's been engaging in, which I've been seeing a lot of people do, especially films these days like Backrooms and Obsession, is dropping all sorts of lore on other channels throughout YouTube. All the BTS of her videos went up on a channel that films behind-the-scenes footage of fashion shoots. With Obsession and Backrooms, everyone who worked on those movies went to a different YouTube channel to explain what they did on it. And we saw the results, which are some of the biggest indie movies we've seen in a long time.

The lesson for you all is that if you have anything you can show, use it. If your cameraman has a YouTube channel, if the person who featured on your song has a YouTube channel for their guitar teaching, do an unboxing video, do something together. Use every channel you have to try to get out there.

Another thing Charli did that reiterates the position she wants to be in, which is the more high-minded pop star who thinks above everyone else, is these Q&As with really fancy smart directors. This is a great marketing technique. One of the best iterations of it I ever saw was her husband's band The 1975, whose singer Matty Healy released all these conversations during COVID. Healy is one of the smartest artists in the world, and this worked well because he could have amazing conversations with people. I still think about many of those conversations and quote them all the time.

She's doing the same thing because that's what she's trying to position herself with, and because she's smart enough to pull it off. When we look at our LAMES analysis and try to see the things we can do, this is the type of thing we come up with when we see what our strengths are and then iterate on our strengths.

One of the other things is that this could get real pretentious real fast, so she had to keep it light. There's a lot of stuff like the Wink Wink video that has very light moments.

This album rollout also included a two-day press cycle where Charli and her friends were threatening to fuck up Peppa Pig.

When you know yourself and who you are as an artist, and you know your LAMES analysis and what your position is, sometimes silliness is what lightens this all up. You have to decide if you're that dark, mysterious artist who's never silly, or if you're going to have those silly moments. Frankly, this really lightened the mood a bit.

Lastly, we have to talk about the concept of anti-marketing. This trend is pretty interesting, and we're going to go deeper on it another time, so I'm not going too deep here. One of the things she did is make lots of smaller events, which is a big thing now. Phoebe Bridgers recently did a bunch of dates where everyone's phone got locked up.

Charli really made it so there wouldn't be a ton of footage leaving these small clubs she was playing, and the listening events were very, very small. There was one in Tokyo while I was there, but I couldn't quite get there.

Far too many of you are not thinking about what the next step is to get you somewhere higher on the ladder of the fan base I talk about, where we have 11 different rungs, and we can get you up a rung if we play our cards right. You need to think about what you want your position to be, and what the artist who does things in that position does, and let that lead you to your creative decisions.

Let's say you're hoping to be the artist everyone sees as the person you want playing guitar next to you in your video or in your live performances. You want to be the person actually playing the guitar while Lil Wayne pretends to. Then you should probably have a guitar on all the time. Make interesting sounds with your guitar. Go deep on developing your own style. Play a style of guitar not everyone plays that looks cool on you. Stand out in your own way. Make sure your amp looks different, but also make sure you can be a side person and don't steal the show.

Think for a while about the traits the next level you want to get to would have, and then think about what that artist would do. That's clearly what Charli was doing to make this amazing album rollout that took her to a level we're going to be seeing for years.

This is exactly what we go deeper on in the membership every week, where, for $5 a month, you get a FRESH weekly newsletter every Thursday and will be the first to hear about what’s happening in music marketing RIGHT NOW + access to my whole back catalog of over 100 newsletters where I explain things like this, answer your questions, give away cheat codes for how you blow up in your genre faster than other artists, and dissect how the biggest artists in the world are doing exactly what we're talking about today.

And if you didn't know, I'm writing a whole book on how to do DIY artist development and world building just like this and figure out your position, and my members get access to the rough draft as I write it, which you get if you pay that fee. So tap in and join us.

That's the two-parter. You can find Part 1 in the backlog if you skipped it, since the tactics here only work when you know what position you're aiming at.

And now that you know all this, you may have forgotten what I taught you in the Brat rollout piece, which really changed album rollouts to this day and which I still don't see enough people taking the lessons from. That one is linked here, and you should really read it.

Thanks for reading.