You Are In Control Symposium

At the "You are in Control" Symposium in Iceland, which just ended yesterday, Laura Seach, head of Digital Marketing at the electronic label Ninja Tunes, had a very interesting presentation about digital promotional strategies.
She discussed the specific case study of the band Roots Manuva and the launch of their new album Slime and Reason.
She says that every digital campaign starts with researching the fans base:
"I need to know how they consume digitally, where they consume digitally, which sites they're on, how old they are, if they are streaming or downloading" .
She mentioned widgeting and channeling, using platforms such as Ilike and Kyte, as the main online expansion tools.
According to Seach, and I strongly agree with that, the critical aspect of an online campaign seems to be ability to create a fully interconnected campaign across several platforms, one that can reach a dispersed and floating fan.
She overcame this problem by creating a totally interlinked campaign, including the artist main website, which update every hour using feeds from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogs and other sources.
Other tactics include the use of mobile platforms and a Bluetooh-based content delivery at shows.
You can read more here

Electrofringe Presentation online

For those who didn't make it to the presentation at the Electrofringe, we uploaded our slides on the website.
This is the link:
http://musictwopointzero.net.au/research.php

Lessig in the WSJ

A piece in the Wall Street Journal summarising Lessig's latest thoughts on remix culture. Nice comment in the context of the Prince/Youtube case:

How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old?

"In Rainbows" 1 year anniversary

It was the 10th of October 2007 when Radiohead launched what would have changed the configuration of the free music economy, the beginning of a new way how music can be distributed online.
A year after, what can be concluded in terms of the impact of Radiohead's move in the music distribution industry?
The "chose your own price model" has for sure revolutionized the independent distribution model. However, saying that this is how the future of music distribution will be like it might be too naive.
Radiohead is not the first band on the planet to exploit internet distribution but they probably were the first famous band to do it.
The experiment worked very well for Radiohead especially for the considerable amount of publicity they received but, at the end, it is just one of the thousands ideas bands are trying out to get their slice of attention.
I doubt that an average indie band would have received the same degree of attention.
For sure Radiohead set up an example for other bands to follow but their model can not be considered as a template solution for the struggling music business. It was more of a solution for Radiohead than for the entire music industry.
Probably the real lesson to be learned is that there are as many ways to sell music as musicians.

I also wonder if Radiohead would have planned the launch slightly differently, by providing a streaming version of the album for people to try out before downloading it, things would have evolved in a different way.
By not providing a streaming version, the only way for people to judge how much the album was worth to them was to download it.
And many people probably did it for free since they didn't know if it was worth it more than that.