Lady Gaga Is Doing Something Interesting With "Disease"

Minimum Viable Videos Helped Reignite What Could Have Been A Flop

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Jesse Cannon
December 31, 2024

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Music Marketing Trends is a Newsletter by Jesse Cannon that breaks down how musicians really get their music heard. If you know a story we should be telling or an artist we should cover just hit reply to this email.

Lady Gaga’s Born This Way & Artpop have long been fabled as some of the most disappointing returns from an artist that was expected to exceed the success of their debut album’s near Diamond-certified status. So after Harlequin was widely rejected as something no one seemed to understand, it made sense that when her new single “Disease” was getting less than the reaction they would like to see. So they kept pushing the single in a way I haven’t seen in this market. This method does match what we have been seeing from the K-Pop world lately, (which I like to watch, as they tend to have some of the more data-driven innovative marketing). It’s Christmas break so let’s look at what Gaga is doing to reignite her single “Disease” while it’s mid flight, since I think DIY artists and the biggest artists in the world can learn from it.

“Disease” was released on 10/30/24, and it’s hard to argue the video is not bold and a unique fork in the road for Gaga’s sound and image. While I have not been a fan of much of her output since The Fame Monster (which is a string of the best pop songs of the decade IMO), I found this video and song combo to be some of her best work. It could have been that releasing it the week before an election carried an ominous vibe shift or just that it was too far a diversion from her last successful material, but the reaction on Mu-Anon (aka the discourse on Twitter) and from The Girlz and The Gayz did not look warm.

But this is where it gets interesting. After suffering bad reactions to material in the past Gaga learned that sometimes you need to keep pushing the public to understand your direction. Two weeks later she publishes “Disease (The Antidote Live),” a Minimum Viable Video live from the studio accompanied by only acoustic guitar and piano. A few days later, “Disease" (The Poison Live)” delivers another alternate version from the same studio accompanied by electric guitar, with Gaga giving an impassioned performance. And a few days later, the lyric video.

I recently talked about how LE SSERAFIM have pushed out over a dozen long form music videos to promote their banger “Crazy”. Which is kinda um… crazy? But when you think about it, it’s cheap and easy to make Minimum Viable Videos, and they can remind people to re-up their relationship with your song. And that seems to be what is happening for Gaga. Numbers have been rising for “Disease” as she followed the Charli XCX model of keeping the conversation around the song condensed. When you change the way people can hear a song in a shorter time span, you allow more buzz to happen around the song and online conversations to proliferate. And it seems to have worked, as “Disease” is getting a rare second-life for a pop song from an artist this size as the song reenters the pop charts and seems to have worked to keep reminding her rabid fanbase to reup their relationship with the song. The strategy has yielded the outcome she was looking for. So the lesson of this tale for any artist is it sometimes takes pushing when you take a new direction.

Matty Healy of The 1975 recently said in his interview with Josh Citarella that you are unlikely to love your favorite artist the first time you hear them and the same goes for an artist changing their sound. Gaga clearly had a vision that took some listeners a few listens to get on board with, and continuingly reminding them to go deeper with the work has proven effective for converting them to repeat listeners.

Happy new year! Thanks for a great first year of Music Marketing Trends!

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