Decca’s Cecilia Bartoli Superfan campaign backfires

Total agreement here, too. Thank you, Graham. The campaign is ridiculous. They better should promote her new album with a bit more ideas than linking to iTunes.

I’m managing a fan-page – not for La Bartoli – with some other fans, and I don’t like the whole idea to make it a competition who is the “best/greatest fan.” In my case, I have personal reasons for that. First of all, I don’t like the expression. I can’t count the newspaper snippets anymore that all go along the lines “the fans were cheering, but well, meh, what do they know …. ” If you out yourself as a fan, you lose all authority on the matter, apparently. It is worse if you are female. Fans are talked about as if they were just unintelligent claque without any musical background or taste. So how would someone be looked at, e. g. in an autograph queue, who stepped up and said “I’m your biggest fan!”? To be a fan in classical doesn’t have the same innocence as in pop culture or if you go fangirling/fanboying a movie star.

To cut it short, I used to sign up for Bartoli’s previous campaigns, simply because I wanted to get the news by mail, but this one just irked me. I disagree with the post in one respect, the bit suggesting that this is a PR method derived from pop culture – I haven’t seen a competition like this before, in whichever context. What pop music and classical have in common though is that the management is often quite detached from the people who actually buy the music and the concert tickets. For them, the audience aren’t individuals, but several target groups they need to access. I agree that Bartoli might have had little to do with the creation of the idea. Yet, however uninspired the campaigns – most of us will buy the album anyhow, so they will file it as a success, and we’ll be rewarded with the next campaign just like it. La Bartoli clearly deserves better.