‘Daft Punk, the French electronic duo known for making music that scares your cat and using robots for live shows, are being hip again. This time, they’ve decided to promote their new live album, Alive, with an embeddable widget, which allows visitors to listen to previews of new tracks, buy the single, read Daft Punk’s biography, read the newsletter, and see a photo gallery of the band.
The widget below is yet another proof that “standard” promotional tools are giving way to web based promotion and social networking. And, since the creation of such a widget costs next to nothing, we expect to see more and more bands take this route and move much of their marketing activities online.’ (via Mashable)
It’s Friday and normally Friday posts are lite hearted web porn lite, but I uncovered this story from the 2500 posts I’ve yet to read through in my RSS reader. At Fat Man Towers we’ve been binge eating and developing widget concepts as promotional tools so this is sweet electro funk to our ears. The widget sphere is open for innovation and savvy content creators and brands should be looking to provide ‘value’ widgets, micro applications that people can share, or to return to a familiar theme, appvertising made portable.
You gotta be dead drumming genius John Bonham not to have noticed the audible death throws of the the music majors this past week. Radiohead were not the first to release their album in a ‘pay what you think‘ format, The Charlatans got in a week before and no doubt others before that, but it takes a major player to get everyone to sit up and listen. Now it’s reportedOasis and Jamiroquai are to follow suit and Madonna is to expose her disco rear to Warner Brothers and sign a $120m deal for 10 years with concert promoters Live Nation.
The economics of music are shifting. The artefact, ie the vinyl record or CD no longer matter in the digital age. Now the artefact is a loyal fan, a concert ticket, a t-shirt. Given the cost of replication of any MP3 is zero, charging for a single is going to become a very difficult model to sustain, whilst the album can adapt and thrive in the new ‘pay what you think’ format. Read the rest of this entry »
About a year ago I was talking with Anthony Volodkin founder of music blog aggregator Hype Machine about getting involved with the site, building a business strategy and generally humming Arcade Fire whilst getting high on a deservedly hyped start-up. He’s based in New York and I’m in London, it proved impractical.
In that time Anthony has amassed an extraordinary team around him and now re-launched Hype Machine (see Read/Write for comprehensive review). For music discovery there is no better site and if the price of an MP3 single drops to zero, he’ll be in a great position to become the main marketing and distribution channel for music discovery.
Continuing David’s music theme I urge people to read Stephen Dubner’s article for the New York Times: What’s The Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum.
In the article he poses the question: So what really happened to the music industry, and what will it look like in five or ten years? to five people with more up tempo brains than us and it makes for an intriguing thesis, herewith some choice samples:
‘Putting profitability aside for now, what is the explanation for the sales reduction that has occurred? The most obvious culprit is illicit file-sharing on networks such as Napster, KaZaA, eDonkey, and BitTorrent. While linking the two seems tantalizing — file sharing rose to prominence at roughly the same time that record sales started to fall — there is surprisingly little evidence to support the claim that file sharing has significantly hurt record sales.Read the rest of this entry »
What has our world come to when a simple a woman is given the equivalent of a life sentence to satisfy a corporate record industry problem!!!
A court in the US has ordered Jammie Thomas, 32, from Minnesota, to pay $220,000 for offering to share 24 specific songs online, at a cost of $9,250 per song.
(bbc 5/10/07)
Fat Man
is an interactive design and development collective with a reputation for creating beautiful & innovative projects.
We believe that big ideas are worth pursuing.read more...
No Comments » 
