Arcade Fire

The band, their audience, and what’s in between.

Who They Are• The Arcade Fire is a Montreal-based band,

formed out of high school by founding members Win Butler and Josh Deu in 2001

• The group has a non-traditional line up, featuring over a dozen members in the extended band

Montreal ----

• Arcade Fire has a diverse sound, playing in indie rock, baroque pop, art rock and post-punk genres

• They employ often unused instruments, such as the hurdy gurdy, gadulka, concertina, omnichord and musical saw

Who They Are, Continued

• Arcade Fire gained national fame with their debut album Funeral in 2004

• In 2011, they went on to win the Grammy, Juno and Brit Award for Album of the Year for their album The Suburbs

• They are frequent guests on the popular live sketch show Saturday Night Live

Who They Are, Continued

How They Connect

• Unsurprisingly, the band can be found online at arcadefire.com, garnering premium SEO territory

• The site features information such as tours dates, videos, and album listings, as well as access to merchandise and third-party ticket vendors

• Beyond that, Arcade hasn’t engaged too greatly in social media

• Their Facebook account offers weekly updates that are more promotional than personal

• Likewise, their Twitter offers less than daily updates, only mentioning events that are upcoming

How They Connect, Continued

• Their Instagram account is even less active, with 5 total posts over the past half a year

• Overall, their social media presence is lacking, and fails to capture the available attention of the online fanbase

How They Connect, Continued

• However, as a promotion for their latest album, Reflektor, Arcade Fire created a “virtual projection” as a visual supplement to the album (found at justareflektor.com)

• The site syncs with your mobile device to allow you to interact with the music video through your computer’s web cam, directly engaging you in the content

How They Connect, Continued

• This is similar to an interactive video that accompanied their previous album The Suburbs

• At thewildernessdowntown.com, fans would enter their childhood address, which would be used with Google Maps Street View to put your home literally into the setting of the video

• This kind of promotion is highly effective, as it gives every willing fan a venue through which to engage and even create their own unique experience with the content

How They Connect, Continued

• Prior to their Grammy success, the Arcade Fire was very much an indie band, with a strong but small following

• This continues, though on a larger scale. It’s more accurate to say that fans find Arcade Fire rather than the other way around, as they aren’t very active on

social media

Finding The Audience

• While they don’t do much to promote it, the content produced by the band speaks for itself, whether its critically acclaimed and wide-selling albums, half-hour music videos with narrative and celebrity cameos, or simply interactive elements

Content – Quality over Quantity

Their premiere music video for Reflektor featured multiple

cameos, including Ben Stiller and Bono, leading it to viral success

I

• As mentioned before, Arcade Fire doesn’t seem to engage with fans in any traditional social media sense (via Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

• They missing out on a larger portion of their potential audience by failing to fully utilize these platforms

• However, their efforts to create interactive content in a medium that doesn’t require it allow fans to find their own way to engage

Engagement

• Like any other band, they promote through the standard venues, with posters for concerts

• However, they do employ more unique methods of promotion, in keeping with the interactive supplements to their albums

• Seen on the next slide is a cut-out figure of the band leader Win Butler, which was released to fans with the second latest album The Suburbs

“IRL”

• Generally, Arcade Fire fails to post or engage consistently with their audience

• Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts come at a frequency of less than one per day, well below the standard for optimal online presence

Consistency is Key

Conclusion

• The Arcade Fire is a fiercely unique band that connects with their audience in non-traditional

ways via interactive content, yet fails to take advantage of social media platforms for

marketing