Madonna’s On Grindr, And She Wants To Chat

It’s no news to music fans on the internet that artists are using increasingly elaborate ways to promote themselves and their work. With the rapid development in social tech and networking, they’re getting more creative every time.

Over the weekend, Madonna officially jumped on the guerrilla tactics bandwagon.

Madge, who recently premiered a video clip on the new ‘discover’ section of Snapchat, last week ran a contest for fans on popular gay dating app, Grindr: All users had to do was recreate the album cover on their profiles by the end of Valentines Day. Five of the winners get a private chat with Madonna, and the runners up get copies of her latest album Rebel Heart.

There’s no news yet as to who get to send Madonna suggestive emojis over the app, or when the chat will take place.

It’s been a big week for music fans. On February 13, Drake dropped a 17-track release with no warning — breaking the internet, and leaving fans squabbling over whether it was an official album or a mixtape. Beyoncé, of course, indulged in the same mic-drop-style release with her self-titled album of 2013; she followed it up last year with her unexpected self-produced clip of ‘7/11’.

But the best guerrilla campaigns are the more creative ones. Over the years, bands have taken their fans on scavenger hunts to treat the most loyal with unreleased music, rare memorabilia, and secret gigs. Like Coldplay, who put lyric sheets in ghost novels in libraries all over the world last year, with one book holding a golden ticket to a show in London. In the same year, U2 shoved their album Songs Of Innocence down everyone’s throats by uploading it to every Apple product, enraging pretty much everyone and resulting in an apology from Bono.

Nine Inch Nails sent fans on a mission too — but theirs was digital. In 2007, they created an entire alternate reality game to go along with their LP, Year Zero. Fans could visually explore the dystopia that pervaded the album, with an interactive branch that had NIN embedding music into websites and phone numbers, and putting rare tracks on USBs and hiding them across the world.

One hunt that made people question why the band went to so much trouble was the Clandestine Mystery by AFI. It began in 2002 when the band released the 336 EP, and users began to talk on the band’s official message boards about weird things they were noticing on the band’s website. The mystery sent die-hard fans wildly researching numerology, morse code, calling secret phone numbers, chasing down hidden websites and deciphering alphanumeric codes, to eventually lead a small group of fans to a park and a strange girl — who gave them passes to an intimate gig in Hollywood in 2006. That’s four years after the goose chase started. Talk about dedication.

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Feature image via YouTube