The world of music promotion services has evolved so rapidly and so fundamentally over the past two decades as how we make and consume music has also changed, as well as how new music and musical trends *get noticed and popular.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the music industry is seeing tactics and strategies that are so innovative and successful that they become a standard going forward.

Here are just a few examples of the earliest examples of music strategies that have since become the norm.

Bohemian Rhapsody

One of the biggest, most successful and most beloved songs in history, *Bohemian Rhapsody was a song that succeeded in large part because it didn’t play by any of the established rules of music at the time.

However, if there is a single strategy that made it a number one hit multiple times and helped it linger so strongly in the minds of millions of people, it is in its first music video, arguably the very first to be a fundamental part of the song’s sales strategy, although it was largely a way to avoid either performing the song on TV or having Pan’s People dance to it.

Seven years later, Music Television launched, ensuring that every song that had even the slightest chance of becoming successful would have a music video to coincide with it.

I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor

The mid-2000s was a time when all of the rules for music success were being rewritten on the fly, and one of the greatest examples of this was how a small band from Sheffield exploded seemingly out of nowhere to have a number one debut hit with an independent label.

Of course, *I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor and its massive success was not completely a shock; the band had built up a huge underground following in Sheffield to the point that even before a record deal their songs were turning up on file sharing sites and early social media platforms such as Myspace.

This underground buzz, especially when the follow-up song *When the Sun Goes Down proved that it wasn’t a fluke, highlighted the growing power of internet marketing and especially social media.

Crazy

The debut single by Gnarls Barkley and one of the most successful singles in the history of the UK was also the first song to top the UK Singles Chart after music download sales began to be counted, stayed on top of the charts for nine weeks and likely would have retained its moment had it not been deleted by the band.

Interestingly, whilst download sales became the norm for decades, the rise of streaming services and streaming charts has led to paid sales reducing in prominence.