Ghost Town, a fairly new rock/electronic band, started getting popular in a very interesting way. I personally am in love with this band, so when I say that the band depended heavily on the social media in order to get popular I don’t mean that in a mean way. The members of the band, Kevin Ghost, Evan Pearce, Alix Koochaki, and Manny Dominick, aren’t the most richest of people. So in order to get the word out about Ghost Town they went to a pretty well-known YouTuber named Imamachinist. Alistair is well-known on YouTube for being an extraordinary painter so Ghost Town convinced him to paint their album covers for them. Whenever the band released a new song Imamachinist would put up a speed painting of the album cover with their music playing in the background. And if that didn’t get them a lot of views as it is, other popular YouTubers like HaiLedaBear and AmberKatelynBeale started putting their songs up in the background of their videos.

After they started to get a bit popular from their first song being spread around by others, they posted on their fan page on Facebook that they would release a new song ever Tuesday. On top of that they provided a link where you could download all of their songs for free. And every week when they released a new song they held a contest where everyone simply had to share their link and they would be entered to win free and cool prizes. It was really neat to be able to see this band grow from 100+ likes to 18,941 likes in the span of a month or two. As of recent events, such as Ghost Town trying to go on tour to meet all of their Ghosts, they can no longer afford to give their songs for free. But they still hold contests for their new songs.

The way they got their band out there was also very interesting and reminded me of when Max Morgan, a Galway graduate,  came in to talk to our journalism class about how the social media can be a very effective marketing tool and just be a good way to get someone’s message out in general. I applaud them for being clever and getting their band out there. I hope to see a lot more from this band in the future.