Street team

A street team is a term used in marketing to describe a group of people who 'hit the streets' promoting an event or a product. 'Street Teams' are promotional tools that have been adopted industry-wide as a standard line item in marketing budgets by entertainment companies, record labels, the tech industry, corporate brand marketers, new media companies and direct marketers worldwide. The music industry is now seeing a boom in the use of large street teams to reach out to fans and improve sales in the smaller hard to reach fans internationally.

The now ubiquitous "street team" model was originally developed by urban record labels, such as: Loud Records, Jive, Bad Boy Records, Roc-A-Fella Records, Priority Records, and Ruthless Records. Rap labels found it affordable and highly effective bridge to their target audience that did not require the traditional outlets found in print, radio, television mediums and elusive large scale record distribution deals. One of the first independent rock bands to introduce a version of the street team was Chicago folk-rockers the Drovers, who launched a "campus rep" initiative in 1991 for the college rock club circuit, copying practices used by the Mondale presidential campaign to activate registration and turnout at universities.

It was and still a modern version of a credible field of marketer working for brands or bands/artists with the ability of creating hype for them through credible peer-to-peer interactions and viral word-of-mouth influence marketing.

This grassroots tactic was partly born in the mid-1990s from the larger monopolistic record distributors trying to shut out rap and smaller music labels of the day from radio and mass distribution due to the early stigma of gangsta rap and "punk" on those genres as a whole.

Street Teams were used by smaller independent record labels as a tool to circumvent the larger out-of-reach distributors and corporate owned record labels. Other independent label owners used street teams as a way to build equity in their stable of artists for the benefit of gaining a courtship by a larger music label or record distributor to merge or sell part or all the company. (see Loud Records sale late 1990s)

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