Last Friday (29/04), Canadian rnb artist Drake dropped his latest album – VIEWS. While I’d never really heard much of Drake’s work, the critically acclaimed Hotline Bling is totally my drunk/sober jam; and so I thought for my daily interaction for that day I could review the album, seeing as music is a passion of mine and I would love to work as a music critic. However, I found my thoughts could actually be summarized in tweet form.

Hotline Bling is obviously an exception to this rule.

 

 

However, instead of reviewing a somewhat underwhelming album, I’m going to anecdote a little. The next day I was driving down Spencer from North Melbourne, and had to stop at the lights on Abbotsford Street. On one corner of this intersection there are large amounts of promotional posters – usually for bands. I’d driven past it a few times in that last week, and only on this point did I notice two pieces of promotional advertising for VIEWS.

The first was a minimalist 4×2 poster that read
“DRAKE
#VIEWS
FRIDAY”

The other, a longer poster that featured a wide shot of Toronto’s CN Tower (the subject of the cover art for Views), covered by the text “#VIEWSFROMNORTHMELBOURNE”. This hashtag, while returning a whopping ZERO! search results on instagram – is a play on the working title for the album – Views From The Six (“The Six” being reference to the merging of six municipalities to form the Greater Toronto Area).

The idea behind these posters was obviously to drum up some sort of interest in following the hashtags and seeing the conversations online – or to upload some sort of instagram post related to the posters – but perhaps the ball was dropped a little on this one.

It’s interesting how marketing groups now use social media tools such as hashtags to generate interest around a new product, though. On Friday night, #VIEWS was the top trend on Twitter in several countries – but the tweets themselves and the comments made about the album were pretty mixed. Nonetheless, as they say, any press is good press; and Drake’s album certainly got my attention; and possibly the attention of many other Twitter users.

 

[Also it’s totally turned my T.O. obsession up to 11 and I am shamelessly procrastinating assignments by watching Raptors NBA Playoff games]