How I'd Market Lin-Manuel Miranda's Newest Project
What I'd do as "Chief Virality Officer" of the new Warriors concept album.
Hello and welcome to the 13 (!) new subscribers since my last post, Shut Up and Quibble. If you find today’s piece interesting, feel free to forward it along to someone in your life whose favorite rapper is the Marquis de Lafayette.
A few weeks ago, Warriors, the new concept album written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis, was made available for streaming.
Based on the 1979 film of the same name, the star-studded, gender-swapping, genre-blending, 26-track, 80-minute-long record follows the eponymous Warriors – a Coney Island gang of women falsely accused of shooting another crew’s leader1 at an impassioned, city-wide truce meeting of 60,000 gang members at Van Cortlandt Park.
The Warriors must then make their way back home, all the way back to Coney Island, crossing through rival turf every step of the way.
For those of you who don’t live in New York City, that means safely traversing the Bronx, the entirety of Manhattan, all the way to the southern tip of Brooklyn:
Along the way, they encounter an onslaught of gangs representing different genres.
You’ll hear frightening salsa, deceptive R&B, sapphic ballads, genuinely-terrifying metal, boots-the-house-down ballroom, and punchable ska punk, to name a few.
It’s an absolute sprint of a record, and boasts Broadway and hip-hop stars alike, not to mention all the world-class musicians who have played on dozens of iconic tracks.
From Nas and Busta Rhymes, to Ghostface Killah and RZA (Wu Tang Clan), to Billy Porter and Michaela Jaé (FX’s Pose), to Marc Anthony, to Ms. Lauryn Hill’s first new track in 25 years, to several original Schuyler Sisters from Hamilton (Phillipa Soo, Jasmine Cephas Jones) and plenty others from the extended Lin-Marvel Cinematic Universe (Joshua Henry, Sasha Hutchings, Aneesa Folds), this record has everything2.
Despite all this, the album doesn’t appear to have much word-of-mouth buzz, despite LMM and Davis checking all the PR boxes (the duo went on Sway in the Morning, Lin appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers and Mike Birbiglia’s podcast Working It Out, the marketing team hosted multiple pop-up events in New York City, and so on.)
In fact, I’m willing to wager many of you are hearing about this project for the first time right now. And even if you’re peripherally aware, you haven’t actually listened yet.
To get a rough sense of how many superfans exist atm, the /r/warriorsalbum subreddit has fewer than 500 subscribers. (For a ceiling contrast, /r/hamiltonmusical has 120,000.)
The #warriorsalbum hashtag has 331 uses on TikTok, and 500-1000 uses on Instagram.
As for the casual fans, the album’s Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook pages have 18.1K, 7.3K, and 235 followers respectively, at the time of writing this article.
While the follow counts are nothing to sneeze at, all of them could be doing a better job of being part of the top level of a digital marketing funnel.
I first introduced the concept of the digital marketing funnel in The Top Mistakes Every Comedian Makes On Social Media, but I’ll re-share a relevant excerpt:
Regardless of what you post, consider that each individual social media channel (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc.) sits at the top level of a funnel designed to guide your digital audience downstream towards a specific series of actions:
That action might be to buy tickets to your upcoming tour, or to watch your newest hour-long special, or to subscribe to your mailing list, or to listen to your podcast.
But more often than not, the funnel is leaky.
Instead, comedians tend to pinball their online audience back and forth between their various, undifferentiated digital platforms at the top level of the funnel.
Rather than all pointing towards the same action, their Instagram bio links to their YouTube channel. Their YouTube videos embed their inactive Twitter account in each video description. Their Twitter bio plugs their abandoned podcast from 2021.
None of it is optimized for conversion, and so there’s a ton of friction between their growing social media presence and half-filled seats at their live shows.
All of this same logic can be applied here. Only instead of a podcast or tour, it seems like the primary goals are to 1) drive album streams and 2) collect email addresses from those wishing to unlock the lyric booklet on the official Warriors album website.
With these desired follower actions in mind, there is room for optimization here.
Currently, the link in their official TikTok bio, Warriors.lmk.to/album, straight up doesn’t open on my computer:
Nor does this expired link to “Win a lyric book” in their Instagram bio:
Here’s what happens when you click on it:
And the other link in their bio redirects to a Linkfire – which is a music-focused, LinkTree-style URL compiler for audio streaming services – with a TeeRico3 link above ten different audio options that vary in free vs. paid listening options:
The Facebook page meanwhile, simply links to the official Warriors album website:
The website has an extremely subtle, “Sign Up To Read The Lyric Booklet” banner at the top of the page, and de-emphasized buttons to “Stream” and “Order” the album.
I’m quite visually impaired, so perhaps this reads more clearly to those of you operating with full sight, but I feel like all of these should be 10x more eye-catching:
The inconspicuous “Stream” button takes us back to that same audio streaming service aggregator, and the social icon section at the bottom of the homepage doesn’t link back to the Warriors Album official Facebook, only their Instagram and TikTok:
Funneling towards audio streaming services (rather than a mailing list or ticket link) means we can analyze a metric we’ve never delved into here before: streaming figures.
The listed streaming options in the Warriors Album Linkfire include YouTube (Watch), Spotify (Play), iTunes Store (Download), Apple Music (Play), Amazon Music (Shop), YouTube Music (Play), Pandora (Play), Deezer (Play), and Tidal (Play).
That’s far too many to digest at once, so we’re just going to focus on Spotify for now.
Primarily because its one of the only options with publicly available listener data, but also because it’s where the Warriors album has by far the highest amount of plays.
In general, the more a streaming service sounds like it could be the name of one of Frank Zappa’s children, the lower total plays your song will have on its platform.
A Spotify “Play” is counted when someone listens to a song for over 30 seconds.
Below are the number of plays for the first five tracks on the Warriors album:
This decreases over the course of the 26-track album, which intuitively makes sense.
But the album only having 170K streams on its Finale – which we can loosely interpret as a barometer for full playthroughs, as that seems like a rare track for people to listen to on its own4 – seemed a little low, nearly a month after its release.
I wanted to get a sense of how these numbers compared to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s other projects, as well as all five shows nominated for Best Musical at the Tony’s this year (in other words, how does Warriors compare to both LMM’s other work, and how does it compare to other “recently released” and “good” musicals on Spotify?), so I pulled the following data. The Warriors album is highlighted in red:
Obviously, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s other musicals have been available for several years, so it’s a bit of an unfair comparison. Still, it’s good to know what the ceiling is.
I’ve also included 2019 Tony Award Winner Hadestown’s 2010 concept album and subsequent Original Broadway Cast (OBC) recording, although the concept album likely ballooned once the musical gained steam.
But it’s encouraging to see Warriors is getting significantly more play than every other Tony Award nominated show this year outside of The Outsiders, which actually won the award for Best Musical.
The closest analog of all these albums would be the Hamilton Mixtape, which similarly featured a wide range of notable artists covering/re-imagining songs from Hamilton.
“Wide range” is a particularly apt description, because the range between the Max. Plays and Min. Plays as a percentage over Max Plays was the highest we observed, when removing outliers (it appears Hadestown belatedly added some tracks to both).
The Lauryn Hill track has the second-most listens after the opening number, likely because she appeared on personalized Spotify playlists like Release Radar for many of her 13.9 million monthly listeners on the platform:
Still, every additional stream helps, especially if that’s one of the KPIs to determine a future for this album (namely, will it be adapted into a staged musical?)
Talk to any burgeoning musical artist and they’ll tell you about the importance of pre-saves and getting “playlisted” (verb) on Spotify.
Perhaps the Warriors PR team should look into getting tracks from Warriors added onto Broadway-specific, musical theatre-specific, showtune-specific, or even LMM-specific playlists.
Because “Discovery” will be the second-highest contributor to future fandom, behind word-of-mouth.
For the record, I actually think their PR team has done a great job so far.
More crucially, they have a great product.
The album rules. And the right audience will find it.
But the biggest bottleneck here is accessibility.
I can explain.
There’s an incredibly instructive moment in the J. Cole documentary, Road to Homecoming, which follows the rapper in the lead-up before releasing his LP, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, which famously went triple-platinum with no singles or features.
It’s stuck with me ever since I watched it in the basement of a longtime Friend of the Mailing List’s childhood home. It starts at the 1:45 mark of the clip below:
In this excerpt, we’re shown how J. Cole went above and beyond to ensure his album was, “car ready, laptop-ready, radio-ready”.
He’s listening to his own album in those crappy, Apple earbuds because “that’s what everyone [was] listening to music with” at the time. He’s also shown listening intently while driving his car, off his MacBook speakers, and while riding his bike.
He’s beginning with the end result in mind, and thoughtfully anticipating about how his fans will be engaging with the album.
And he’s diligently taking notes.
Companies call this user experience (UX) design.
While the producers of Warriors undoubtedly did this on the auditory end – and it shows – this incredibly dense, rich, layered album all but requires you to keep a tab open with the lyrics handy. Or at least during your first, proper, focused listen.
And herein lies the friction.
Currently, there are two main ways to obtain the official lyrics.
There’s a public version on the website Genius, which mainly serves as a constant reminder of whose saying which line. But there are limited annotations thus far.
The far better, red and black edition exists on the Warriors album website, and comes with detailed character depictions, a diagram of who’s in which gang, and unspoken stage directions interspersed throughout the tracks that help paint a complete picture.
Presently, you need to enter your email on the website to “unlock” the lyric booklet:
Fair enough. Presumably, the .PDF file would then get sent to your email, and now you’ll be infrequently messaged with marketing communications, right?
Nope.
It just opens in the same browser tab.
It doesn’t send you a digital file of the lyric book, or even email you at all.
And so you have to type in a new email every time you want to access it.
In an incognito browser.
It’s honestly really annoying.
And once it is open, it’s not very legible. The font size is teeny tiny, and the booklet was not created with rich text, which would allow for quick font size adjustments.
Furthermore, it’s even smaller and more difficult to engage with on a mobile web browser, which is where I assume 90% of Spotify users are listening from, device-wise.
Clearly, the marketing team made this choice to cultivate a massive mailing list to reach out to with future updates and announcements (big advocate of this choice, all artists should strive to own the deliverability of communication to their fans!!).
But they did not “J. Cole” it at all.
How are you envisioning this booklet hits the eyeball on mobile? On desktop?
What app does your audience use? Do they have multiple tabs open?
Do they refer to the lyric book more than once? Or just that first time through?
Are they playing a video game while they casually listen? Or are they hyper-focused?
Are people listening to the album by themselves? With their partner? Their roommates? On nice headphones? In a car? In a box? With a fox?
Have they considered selling physical copies of the lyric book, a la the Hamiltome?
It would make the perfect coffee table book.
(And if we can get a LARGE PRINT version, too, that’d be ace).
This extends to their YouTube videos, where only 8 of the 26 songs got the full-song animation treatment. The songs are also listed out of order on this official playlist, which complicates things for the listener:
They came out incredible, and really help you visualize the action. But if the goal was to make this a multisensory experience, adapt the whole thing!
You’ve built an amazing world, let us get comfortable and explore the studio space.
Alternatively, go the way of Weird Al Yankovic’s recent animated music video for his Polkamania compilation, and commission different animators for each song:
I tend to harp on this kind of stuff because I’m half-blind.
But people with visual impairments are a perfect audience for concept albums. Because we don’t receive much visual information from our eyeballs, we are forced to have big imaginations. I had so much fun reading full-length plays and listening to OBC musical recordings in high school, simply imagining the shows in my head.
It’s oftentimes far more enjoyable than being too far away at an actual show.
But all that begs a larger question, which also happens to be the first question I ask every client on our initial call.
Who is your audience?
To my mind, the audience for this album are a few types of “personas”.
The first is current and recovering former theater kids.
This one is pretty clear cut, and seems to be the main one they’re targeting.
But try and think about who these people are in their 20’s and 30’s, and how you might reach them.
What is their media diet?
Do these people actually listen to Mike Birbiglia’s podcast, or Sway in the Morning? Or are there more theater / Broadway-focused podcasts, substacks, etc. that may not have a million listeners like Sway does, but have the exact right 50,000 listeners?
It’s also an inherently New York album.
Can we get Lin or Eisa on Subway Takes? Or an interview with the Subway Oracle? Or any of those Fallen Media-coded, Washington Square Park man-on-the-street interview shows? Something young and trendy New Yorkers actually watch?
If not, what insight can we derive from this audience?
Gen-Z has been derided for turning Manhattan into a content playground. If we’ve identified these people as a target audience, can we devise some sort of “Survive the Night” scavenger hunt that might appeal to them? And entice creators whose audience might overlap with the Warriors’ audience to participate?
The second persona to target is what I’d label “The Art Appreciator”.
The Appreciator is the kind of person who loves art that lends itself to rewatchability. The Bo Burnham stan. The Christopher Nolan-head. The person who has TVTropes bookmarked. They love falling down internet rabbit holes, or James Acaster’s four-part special Repertoire on Netflix. They enjoy podcasts like Strong Songs with Kirk Hamilton.
They’re also the kind of people who tracks their media consumption on sites like Letterboxd and GoodReads. They read Pitchfork music reviews, or Vulture columns. They care what Anthony Fantano thinks about a new album before they listen to it.
Then there’s “The Imagineur”.
Lovers of fantasy. Of Dungeons and Dragons. Potterheads. They play video games with beautiful worldbuilding. Perhaps they subscribe to Dropout. Or have seen all of Miyazaki’s animated films. These kind of people will engage with the album as an exercise in playing around in a sandbox with a never-before-seen construction manual.
Once you’ve identified these personas, think about their habits. What podcasts do they listen to? Where do they live? What kind of jobs do they work? Are they single? Do they have roommates? Do they go to the movies? Do they even have Spotify? Or are they more likely to engage with this album as a series of YouTube videos?
Are they tech-savvy enough to figure out how to receive the lyric booklet?
By truly knowing who these people are, and understanding how they spend their time both digitally and IRL, it will completely demystify how to reach them.
Then, once you’ve fully fleshed out these personas, meet them where they are.
That way, when you commission an audience-aligned creator to make a “Van Cortlandt Park to Coney Island Speedrun” YouTube video that gets 200,000 views, or have QR codes at all the key locations of the musical (Grey’s Papaya, Union Square, The Bizzie’s East Village Loft, etc.) that directly stream the song set in that location, or have a pop-up lyric book signing event at The Drama Book Shop, or get Mercy’s track featured on a Spotify playlist like Broadway Belts with 124,000+ listeners, it’s not an accident these people become fans of the album.
And share it with their friends.
Who share it with their friends. Who share it with their friends.
Because they still felt like they discovered it.
I first fell in love with musicals in high school, thanks in large part to my friend Max.
He’d play songs from various musicals as he drove us to / from school, or to go get bubble tea. I’ve written about this before, but that’s the secret to “going viral”.
Virality inherently means shared from person to person, not thousands of people targeted in isolation.
But creating space for those moments to occur doesn’t happen by accident.
It starts with accessibility: tools and experiences that make it easy for anyone to immerse themselves in the story. Lyrics that are simple to find and read, visuals that enrich the listening experience, and platforms that invite discovery are all crucial.
Accessibility builds the bridge, but champions—those passionate fans who turn their love into action—will be the ones who carry the songs across it.
And yes, sometimes those champions are the kind of people who sit down to write 3,000-word mailing list columns breaking it all down, because they simply have to.
Because they still felt like they discovered it.
David Zucker is a digital marketing consultant based in New York City. A former analyst at TikTok, his unique, data-driven approach has catapulted the growth of his clients’ audiences. He works with an international client base of comedians and companies within the entertainment industry. He also happens to have oculocutaneous albinism, a rare genetic disorder which renders him legally blind. This condition offers him a unique perspective on both live and digital comedy, especially with respect to accessibility.
Cyrus, played by none other than Ms. Lauryn Hill.
*Stefon voice*
TeeRico appears to be Lin-Manuel Miranda’s personal e-commerce platform. This specific URL leads to a section of the website with newly released Warriors merch.
Unlike say, the standalone Lauryn Hill track, If You Can Count.
dear david,
another banger of a thoughtful piece!
i always appreciate what you do!
and for people reading this who AREN'T david, i recommend reading david's stuff! AND listening to lin-manuel's new project!
love and thanks,
myq