In these hard times for the music industry, you have to keep fans interested, or at least try to be inventive, so why not a treasure hunt?
Foals are giving away free cassette tapes of their new album – yes you read this correctly, cassettes are back! – but for this they have launched a world-wide treasure hunt, hiding cassettes at various locations, and sharing the GPS coordinates via social media. It’s cryptic stuff if you don’t know what they are talking about, stuff like 45.523047, -122.684571 #WhatWentDown, 33.394399, -111.939584 #WhatWentDown, 34.063791, -118.358885 #WhatWentDown… that last one was apparently in front of the LACMA museum in Los Angeles!
On their Facebook page, fans who have found the tapes, have shared pictures of the locations. That reminds me when Joyce Manor had hidden CDs of their new release on street benches everywhere in LA, but this was very local compared to this enterprise, and this means that Foals has a world wide team hiding these tapes everywhere, from Madrid, Paris, Oslo, Berlin, Hamburg to NYC and Austin? I am amazed of the amount energy and the inventiveness bands should display to get some publicity in 2015, and why cassettes? Because they probably look cooler than CDs
The new album of the Oxford band is called ‘What Went Down’ (you may have guessed) and will be released on Friday August 28th, but you can listen to a sampler below.