I recently picked up a game for my XBox 360 called Alan Wake. The game featured some really cool music that I just couldn't get out of my head after I finished it (by the way, it was a very cool game).
I set off to google the songs I had heard and it turned out they were assembled for the game and were performed by a Finnish band called Poets Of The Fall. In the game, the Poets lend their voices and music to an original score as well as points in the game where you can access a radio and hear songs from their discography. Their videos on YouTube had hundreds of thousands of views in some cases and included countless comments on how people had discovered their music in Alan Wake.
It doesn't take a genius to guess that this has undoubtedly turned into some major bucks for Poets Of The Fall. These guys not only sang some original music for a video game played by hundreds of thousands of people, they made sure that the game's radio DJ named them, ensuring people knew who these guys were. I don't know the entire back story of the Poets' involvement in this game but it appears to have been an incredibly smart and savvy business move. Now, you have thousands, if not millions of people around the world listening and learning the name of your band because you sang a couple of songs in one video game. How cool is that?
Even Verizon managed to score some ad points with me for managing to get a billboard or two in the game with their logo on it. So now we have a band and a huge corporation thinking outside the box and getting seen by people who might never see them (okay, maybe not Verizon). Companies, bands, nonprofits can all learn a powerful lesson in marketing from this example. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to my new favorite band some more...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f_hewSrAH4
The link above will take you to the official music video for one of the Poets Of The Fall songs featured in Alan Wake
