US rapper Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn, also known as Future, has released his new album, High Off Life. It was preceded by a very remarkable promotional campaign organized by MSCHF, a company specializing in so-called viral marketing. On the eve of the album’s release, Future tweeted that one of the tracks had been uploaded to the internet and invited his fans to “hunt” for it.
To take part, fans had to visit a specially created site in the HighOff.Life domain. On the left side of the page, visitors found a list of 149 links to sites, each of which was also named HighOff. Moreover, all the domains were registered in various domain zones, including HighOff.com, HighOff.xyz, HighOff.buzz, HighOff.cloud, HighOff.site, etc. When visitors clicked on each domain name, most of them said “No Music Here,” but one had a Play button on it allowing visitors to play the track from the upcoming album. After streaming for a certain time, the track randomly moved to a different domain name.
Apparently, Future’s fans enjoyed the campaign: in just a few hours, his tweet got about 20,000 “likes.” It is hard to say how much such advertising will contribute to album sales, but Domain Investing notes that it certainly pleased Donuts, which manages the largest number of new gTLDs. The fact is that the domain knowledge of many American users is limited to .COM, .NET and .ORG., and a great deal of Americans are not even aware of the existence of the US ccTLD .US or the new domain zones. Perhaps Future's campaign will show them the variety of the domain space.
