The extremely popular social media guide Mashable doesn’t post about music too often, so it was quite a surprise to see an article about God Street Wine pop up on that site. Mashable’s post took note of the major role the Bring Back God Street Wine Facebook Group played in the upcoming reunion of the original GSW band members for four July shows.
The article’s author, Josh Sternberg, spoke to the group’s admin – David Katz – as well as GSW drummer Tom Osander about how quickly the Gramercy shows sold out solely through word spreading on the Facebook group…
“I won’t say that we couldn’t have done it without Facebook, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as easy. Facebook and the other networking sites we utilized to promote these shows are still very new in the history of popular music, but they’ve already taken the lead and even replaced much of the traditional devices such as postal mailing lists, print media or radio, and posters used when the band was in its heyday back in the 90s. There is no way we could have reached as many people as quickly, and without spending a fortune on promo were it not for the Internet and Facebook.”
Things have clearly changed as far as bands’ marketing efforts as Tomo described when going over the process GSW used in the early ’90s to communicate with their fans…
“I remember how I used to look after the GSW mailing list back in the early days. Even when there were only a few hundred names, it could take a day or two to design the gig list cards, get them printed, hand stamp each card, print the address labels, re-print the address labels after they jammed in the printer … and so on. Hell, there was a time when each name and address were hand-written each month. You couldn’t have paid me enough to do all that today.”
“With these shows we were able to get the word out to thousands of people across the web (and world), announce on sale dates and sell the shows out all in a very short period of time. Truly night and day compared to our old method.”
If you missed out on tickets to the Gramercy, you can still buy ducats to the God Street Wine shows at Irving Plaza on July 16 and 17 in NYC.
