“I sit and think when I’m in my zone / This life is like a Game of Thrones,” is just one of the lines from the upcoming hip-hop mixtape Catch the Throne commissioned by the musical/marketing geniuses at HBO. The 10-track CD, a promotion for Game of Thrones, features some big names like Common, Big Boi, and Wale, rapping about dragons, swords, and other methods of mythical medieval warfare.
The mixtape is part of an effort, perhaps a heavy-handed one, by the premium cable channel to attract minority viewers. Here’s the Wall Street Journal with more:
“Our multicultural audiences are a very important part of our subscribers, and we don’t want to take them for granted,” said Lucinda Martinez, HBO’s senior vice president for multicultural marketing. …
Over the course of the third season, which aired in 2013, viewers of “Game of Thrones” prime-time telecasts were on average 13.2% black, 9.2% Hispanic and 76.6% white, according to Nielsen.
The Journal notes that the channel’s prime-time black and Hispanic viewership has fallen in the past two years.
