A Captive Audience
September 27th, 2006
It sounds like the dream of any music marketer: a huge demographic with few media distractions, a massive cultural influence, and virtually unlimited amounts of free time. Yet no major label wants to advertise to them, and even the indies have trouble getting in. RBC Records, a small Phoenix-based hip-hop outfit, is one of a handful of advertisers to reach out to these people, hungry as they are for the latest releases. But this isn’t Williamsburg and its hipsters or Silver Lake and its scenesters; this is the Big House, and the 2.2 million Americans currently incarcerated in prison.
Credit RBC for being creative: the label has adapted the latest viral marketing and ‘street team’ techniques to the prison yard, generating interest among inmates for the latest release by quasi-white-power hip-hop band Woodpile through fliers, free ‘merch,’ and sampler cassettes. RBC hopes the buzz from the slammer filters into the general populace with every inmate released back to the streets, leading to big sales. Legendary Sacramento rapper C-Bo pioneered the prison-based music business in the mid-90s, selling over 2 million albums without any support from radio stations or music video channels.
For hip-hop – where thug life has long been an important theme – advertising in prisons simply makes sense, bringing culturally relevant products to potential consumers. It’s like Mountain Dew at the X-Games or the Bentley booth at the Yale-Harvard tailgate.
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