What’s A Dead Drop & How Musicians Can Do This Themselves

By NewRockstarPhilosophy • November 6, 2010 • Marketing

You may have been hearing about dead drops.

A dead drop is a location used to secretly pass items between two people, without requiring them to meet. Spies used them to exchange spyware. But now Adam Bartholl has modified this concept for a digital age.

No, he hasn’t made his Dropbox folder open to the public, he’s “‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space.” In the hopes of starting an “anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space.”

Awesome I say. I’m a big fan of when digital and real life collide. Like when Twitter friends meet. That’s kinda weird.

Any way you can do this too. You can bridge online and offline to your bands favour and your fans will love you for it.

How To Make Your Own DIY Dead Drops:

-The Real Part-

Using analytics (Google, Facebook, Next Big Sound Premier) figure out which cities around the world have the largest number of fans.
Go buy an appropriate number of USB sticks, 1 for each city. 10 or so seems reasonable to me for a test run.
Get the USBs filled with songs, rarities, photos, recipes, and any other stuff you think your fans will want.
Track down friends and family, or contact your number one fan in the cities that you’ve chosen and get them involved.

-The Theoretically Possible Part-

Mark the exact locations where you put the sticks using GPS co-ordinates (because its cool).
Double check that the location can be found with the coordinates you will be providing fans.
Then tell your fans. Offer them another incentive to get involved in your bands personal sharing experiment.
Oh and ACTUALLY DO IT

Questions?

‘How many fans do you need for this to be effective? If you’re a fresh band and don’t have a global base yet is this Do-able?‘

Good question. I agree, you do need a fanbase but it doesn’t need to be massive. The fans need to be real fans, instead of fairweather Facebook fans. But with that said, you could even mount this in your own city. A usb stick for the North End, One for the West Side, etc.

Also the novelty is still fresh for something like this. It’s not another “vote for me on this website, blah blah” (which work by the way!). But this sort of online, offline blending hasn’t been done by many yet.

What if I spent my last cheque on a terrifc bag of chips and do not have access to a GPS?

Well, you could do this sort of file trading even cheaper. How about, street directions, descriptions of the environment, and/or trippy photos? Leave the USB in a secret location that only your fans know about, provide some fun details and watch the wild times happen.