Multiple Albums, Ingrain Rolling Stones Music

Repeating songs on multiple albums has helped ingrain Rolling Stones music in the minds and hearts of baby boomers across socioeconomic and geographic segments. In addition to the publicity and promotion that accompanies the release of a record, each product introduction gives the band a chance to strengthen the relationship with current fans and creates an opportunity to reach new fans. Creating and releasing albums at such a rapid rate also generates an aura of demand, popularity, and success with which people want to associate. An aggressive product release implies that the previous products are hits and that the band must be hot or it wouldn’t be releasing another album. For new customers, the fact that a song has already appeared on a previous album may go all but unnoticed. Among devoted fans, a song they already know just makes the new material more familiar, an important principle in the theory of how people learn to like something.

Slow Change One of the secrets to the Rolling Stones’ long term success has been the band’s ability to change and evolve at a rate that doesn’t alienate its greatest fans yet keeps the band relevant in the market. How have they done it? With a strategy built upon the psychological theory of generalization and discrimination, which illustrates that the more similar something is to the past, the more likely people are to learn it.

The Rolling Stones practiced the theory of generalization, in the context that the more a new song sounds like one from the past, the more likely people are to learn it, accept it, and like it. But if something is perceived as being the same as something else, it usually doesn’t warrant purchase or adoption. Therefore, marketers must build something new into a product for it to be perceived as different and worth buying. The Rolling Stones could repeat songs on albums because the old songs were surrounded by new ones, making the albums quite different from one another. However, throughout the years, the band didn’t really change its music very much, choosing to stick with the blues roots and overall sound that brought it to the forefront of rock and roll.