The Lenny Kravitz Revolution

Being an “analog girl in a digital world” (to quote granola chanteuse Erykah Badu) isn’t the greatest stance in today’s music industry, when everybody from Rick Rubin to Soulja Boy is chasing the new web 2.0 business model for how to deal with declining sales and an increasingly MP3-savvy audience. Bohemian rock star Lenny Kravitz drops his eighth album in 19 years this week, It Is Time for a Love Revolution, and somebody affiliated with his project is heavy marketing his release cyberpunk style.

Virgin Records still hosts LennyKravitz.com, but it’s been redesigned as a hub of hyperlinks with tendrils all over the Internet. EPKs (or electronic press kits) of artists’ interviews interspersed with their new albums’ music were once only for us journalists, but Lenny’s is made available for everybody over on Amazon.com as a “trailer” for the album, along with the videoclip to “Love Love Love.” Links to Amazon and iTunes are all set up to get your album preorders on.

More inventive synergy with Facebook and Flickr comes into play on LennyKravitz.com as well. A “Today’s Top 5” list switches out a daily quintet of users who added the loverevolution application on Facebook, where the Lenny Kravitz page has 1,764 fans and counting. (His MySpace page boasts 89,101!) Finally, his Love Revolution gallery on Flickr features a group photo pool of 211 members posting flicks of wedding dresses, cute puppy dogs and old Lenny concert pictures. It’s a pretty strong music promotion 2.0 effort on Virgin’s part, especially for an album that Wikipedia says already “leaked on P2P on 30 January 2008.”

About the Author
Miles Marshall Lewis is author of Scars… and There’s a Riot Goin’ On. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Essence, The Village Voice, King, Dazed and Confused, and many other publications. Lewis has served as music editor of Vibe and deputy editor of XXL; he blogs regularly at Furthermucker.com.
See all posts by Miles Marshall Lewis.