Influx Insights Tag Feed: music

looking in new and different places- dj frank

Influx Insights — 2008-08-04T03:18:09Z

DJ Frank is a New York-based DJ and like any good DJ, he is on a constant quest to discover new sounds.

The difference is that he's not content with digging in old record stores and flea markets in the US, instead he travels to West Africa to find records, before they get destroyed.

This new documentary chronicles his journey.

Posted by Ed Cotton

strange headline of the day: procter & gamble, def jam launch hip-hop record label

Influx Insights — 2008-04-11T23:11:26Z

More here..

Posted by Ed Cotton

can the crowd replace the expert?

Influx Insights — 2008-01-22T14:47:49Z

Researchers at UCLA appear to have come up with an interesting cure to the problem iPod created by turning everyone a DJ.

It’s a become a common issue at parties, the musical taste of the host is not shared by the party goers, this leads to angst and ends up with guests connecting their own iPods to try and take musical control, chaos ensues and the party rapidly turns into a disaster.

UCLA’s Smart Party uses Wi-Fi to poll the tastes of the people attending the party and creates a play list based on those tastes.

It’s an example of a solution to the emerging challenge to encourage and facilitate crowd collaboration in appropriate situations.

The party example is good because there is no often no talent gap between the host and party attendees concerning music. The iPod hasn’t put expert DJs out of business, but in situations where they aren’t around, it has made everyone believe they are one.

Smart Party facilitates democracy, it allows everyone’s tastes to be considered, but it doesn’t take it to the next level and make the experience exponentially better by for example using algorithms to recreate a brilliant DJ set out of the music that comes from the crowd.

What if the system allowed you to select a “virtual” version of your favorite DJ to play the crowd’s music in his or her style?

Could this be how Zune beats iPod?

Companies are already tapping into the wisdom of their crowds of employees and consumers hoping for gems that challenge the experts.

However, it’s one thing to facilitate and collect all the input and its quite another to make that input great.

Collection alone is not enough, there needs to be another level added to the process.

This could happen if small teams cross-collaborate to make the initial ideas better, or if real experts are brought in and thrown into the crowd to extract and facilitate.

This challenge is the same for ad agencies, as they demand creative thinking from every employee, rather than just those with the word creative in their job title.

The old-fashioned brainstorming session might not be long for this world, real collaboration requires new processes, new skills and new tools and technology.

Posted by Ed Cotton

radiohead's carbon footprint

Influx Insights — 2007-12-28T20:00:37Z

There seem to be no limits to Radiohead's cultural impact; all the headlines for the name your own price album, the upcoming New Year's concert on Current TV and Johnny Greenwood getting critical aclaim for his soundtrack to the movie of the moment, PT Anderson's "There Will Be Blood".

In additon, to all this the band has recently undertaken an audit of its touring practices with the objective of reducing the band's carbon footprint.(the audit can be downloaded here)

Here's what they found.

Fan travel and consumption made up 86% of the Theatre tour and 97% of the Amphitheatre tour.
Of the band’s touring impact – Travel and energy use accounted for 60% (Theatre tour) and ~40% (Amphitheatre tour)
International travel accounted for a further 34 – 40% of impacts.

Short of no-one coming to see us, we’d like to share with our fans some ways of reducing this – our early research suggests that how you come to our shows can significantly reduce the tour’s carbon output. To help achieve better results, we’re trying to play as many shows as possible in city centres because of their better transport links. From the Best Foot Forward report, the rough figures below give you an example of how much of a difference you can make.

It's a good example of the environment playing an important role as a cultural issue. Clearly, the band isn't going to stop touring, but they are looking at ways of reducing their impact. This makes sense if you are Radiohead or even a brand on the grocery shelves. There can be no harm in taking a look at working out your impact, the challenge is once you've measured it, to work out what you are going to do about it.

In 2008, environmental statements from brands are going to come under increasing scrutiny.

Many brands are hoping that consumer fatigue will give them the chance to do nothing, others will take the opposite view and focus on real actions as a way to demonstrate their sense of responsibility.

Measuring your carbon footprint is a good start.

Posted by Ed Cotton

sigur ros show us the importance and power of local

Influx Insights — 2007-12-26T21:51:41Z

One of the most important trends to look for in 08 is the continuing battle between nationalization and globalization.

It will impact everything from politics to branding.

The power and importance of national tradition is nicely represented in a new film by the Icelandic band Sigur Ros.

Sigur Ros are one of the most interesting and enigmatic bands around; despite signing in their native Icelandic, they still manage to have garnered a massive worldwide following. Their music is a cacophony of pure emotion and atmospherics that renders the meaning of the lyrics un-important.

In 2006, after months on the road, the band decided to return to Iceland and tour the country appearing at surprise free concerts across the island.

It was a return to the brands roots and a thank you to the country that made them. The result of the tour can be seen in the documentary Heima.

The film is a stunning exploration of the band, its music and the country of Iceland as told through a series of incredible performances that take place in the most unlikely surroundings; the bottom of a fish oil tank in a deserted fish factory, outside a village church, inside a village hall, in the middle of a beautiful valley and somewhat more expected in front of 25,000 fans in Rekyivaik.

In a way, the film is a tribute to the strength, importance and resilience of local roots and tradition.

It shows the band collaborating will local musicians, brass bands and artists.

All the shows are wonderfully shot and edited in a way that seamlessly blends, band, crowd and country. It gives you an understanding of what the band is made of and the atmosphere and surroundings that have played a role in shaping the bands’ unique soundprint. At the island concerts, instead of the expected crowds of hip Icelandic youth, those attending are multi-generational with equal numbers of starry-eyed grandparents and grandchildren.

Heima shows a Sigur Ros keen to resist the commercialism at all costs approach and remain firmly attached, committed and passionate about the island they come from.

Posted by Ed Cotton

first radiohead, now nin

Influx Insights — 2007-10-09T20:20:21Z

Record companies helped establish and grow bands, they help build them into brands big enough to do away with the middleman and connect directly to their audience.

Posted by Ed Cotton

radiohead lets the fans decide

Influx Insights — 2007-10-01T05:56:22Z

Radiohead's new album release is a few days away and for a band without a record label, they are out of contract with EMI, so they have to take matters into their own hands.

Firstly, there's been no pre-publicity for the album, most fans were expecting it to be released next year and secondly the band are making the album available in various formats including internet download.

The most curious thing about the download is that the band are letting the fans decide how much they want to pay.

How is that for brand trust?

Posted by Ed Cotton

the new marketing geniuses- community managers

Influx Insights — 2007-09-03T14:46:27Z

The rise of social networks has now become important enough for companies to create positions for people to manage them.

Warner Brothers is looking to hire someone to do this for its bands. Someone who has a strong understanding of running or fostering community.

Here are the job specs.

Main goals will be to improve, nurture and grow artist communities on the website, message board, or other area depending on the artist. You will have a lot of interaction with fans and must be able to identify influencers and trends within these communities. This is a new and exciting role within the music industry that holds the opportunity for a lot of creativity and growth.

Responsibilities/Duties:

    Manage a roster of artist communities, evaluating and improving upon community activities to build and grow traffic and quality of the community
    Be a “face” within the communities, participating in site activity, communicating with members, and occasionally in person at events.
    Manage reporting throughout your artist communities and collect and analyze data like traffic, registrations and conversion rates.
    Identify influencers and trends within the communities and come up with creative ideas around these trends.
    Understand each artist and read trends within communities to lend to the marketing of an album or single.
    Manage an in-house team to carry out community initiatives and manage community moderators and specialists.
    Manage relationships with community based partner sites.

Job Requirements:

    Familiarity with social networking and user generated content sites and message boards.
    Strong understanding of running or fostering community.
    Some understanding of the music industry.
    Highly motivated team player able to multi-task and work in a fast paced environment.
    Self-starter who needs minimal management.
    Creative, innovative, highly organized, detailed oriented.
    Must have excellent communication skills (both oral and written)
    Computer knowledge of various applications and excellent knowledge of the Internet
    New Media and music industry experience a plus

Via

Posted by Ed Cotton

brian eno and music for airports- the inspiration

Influx Insights — 2007-07-28T04:13:16Z

Brian Eno talks about what inspired him to create Music for Airports, the album that gave birth to the ambient movement

Posted by Ed Cotton

spinal tap and the power of spectacle

Influx Insights — 2007-07-10T14:54:40Z

Sometimes you need to go to eleven.

Posted by Ed Cotton

apple builds its itunes brand

Influx Insights — 2007-07-15T20:41:48Z

There’s no doubting the functional power of iTunes software, but it plays second fiddle to the more powerful and dominant iPod.

Now it looks as if Apple would like to beef up the iTunes brand a little more.

No 9 on Influx's prediction list for 2007 is happening

In the UK, Apple worked with the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) to create the iTunes Music Festival. The festival takes place during the month of July at the ICA where bands and artists will play to an intimate crowd of 350 people. Acts lined up for this include; Ash, Athlete, Groove Armada, Imogen Heap.

Not surprisingly, there’s some nice integration with the iTunes brand, as all the concerts will be recorded and be available for sale on the site.

You can’t buy tickets, you can only win them in a prize draw, so Apple gets to capture lots of nice data.

Posted by Ed Cotton

abbey road, the brand

Influx Insights — 2007-06-07T12:09:37Z

The Beatles are inescapable; Paul McCartney just released a new album almost to the day of the 40th Anniversary of the release of Sgt Pepper’s and in Las Vegas, Nevada, Cirque du Soleil’s “Love”; an interpretation of The Beatles music, has been playing to sell out crowds.

Now, Abbey Road, the studio responsible for creating The Beatles sound and inextricably linked to them, is embarking on a brand-building mission of its own.

Together with Freemantle Media it created “Live from Abbey Road”, a TV series being sold to networks around the world. The concept is simple- “capture great live musical performances and place musicians in the world’s most inspiring and creative environment in which to do so, Abbey Road."The show has attracted dozens of musicians and bands including; Norah Jones, Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Kasbian and Paul Simon.

For those unqualified to make it onto the show, there’s still hope. Propellerhead, the makers of the famed music software package, Reason, have just created an Abbey Road keyboard module. This allows bedroom musicians everywhere to access the famed Abbey Road sound.

Here are photographs of the Abbey Road keyboards the software samples.

Here’s the microphone set-up for one of the pianos

For those looking to re-create the original Abbey Road, as used by The Beatles, there’s always the definitive 500-page guide “Recording The Beatles”. The book goes into painstaking detail on every piece of recording equipment and the production process for every track.

In an age when the average musician has recording on their laptop, Abbey Road is finding ways to remain relevant culturally relevant by extending its brand through technology and media.

brand voice 2.0- ambitious and humble

Influx Insights — 2007-06-03T01:00:18Z

Ambition and humbleness sound like opposites, but in this new world of brand 2.0, anything is possible.

Last FM just got taken over by CBS and they wrote about it on their blog last week.

Here's the last paragraph of the post that shows, or is designed to show (?), that despite being taken over by a multi billion media corporation, they are still human.

"There is quite a sense of achievement at Last.fm HQ today, we see this is as a huge boost for Last.fm and we are confident that together with CBS we have the wherewithall to change the music industry, and way people interact with music for good. Now we are all going for a slap up vietnamese lunch at the Viet Hoa. We’ll be back in an hour to finish off our facebook app :)"

Most of the comments from users to this post were positive.

influx interview- dr. alex bentley- random copying and culture

Influx Insights — 2007-06-07T17:56:28Z

Dr. Alex Bentley is a lecturer at Durham University’s Department of Anthropology. Alex’s recent research has explored what drives change in children’s names and in the Top 100 music charts. His research shows that people “randomly copying” one another is one the key drivers for change.

1. Can you tell us your background?

I majored in physics at Bowdoin College, and later got my Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, after an M.Sc. at Cornell. What led me into this study was attending the Santa Fe Institute's Complex Systems Summer School in 2002, where I met Dr. Matt Hahn (Biology/Informatics at Indiana University). Matt showed me how population genetics provides an ideal set of tools for studying culture change.

2. What were the main findings of your research into change in popular culture?

Our first studies, published in 2003-2004 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed how a simple model of random copying, with a small amount (i.e., < 2%) of innovation, can explain many patterns of popular culture change at the national level, including "long-tail" distributions of popularity, discussed by Chris Anderson's book ('The Long Tail', Random House 2006). Our studies suggested that popular success does not necessarily require any inherent qualities -- it can happen just by luck through the process of people randomly copying each other. What was amazing is that such a simple model could work so well -- that at a population level, a model of random copying with occasional innovation can explain the data as well as anything else.

In the random-copying model, predicting which particular innovation will become the next big hit is fundamentally impossible, because we model the copying as random. However, what is very predictable is the fact that new successes will replace old ones at the top of the charts, and they do so at a remarkably consistent rate. To show this, we looked at the Billboard Top 200 chart and found that it turned over at a constant average rate for 30 years, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The number of albums entering and exiting the chart varied from day to day and month to month, but overall the turnover averaged about 6% per month for the full 30-year period. In collaboration with collaboration with Dr Hahn, Dr. Carl Lipo (California State University, Long Beach) and Prof Harold Herzog (Western Carolina University), we discovered a similar consistency in turnover for the top baby names and dog breeds. We showed how this same consistency of turnover resulted from a computer simulation of the random copying model, in which we kept track of the Top 40, Top 100 etc. most popular ‘fashions’ and monitored their turnover.

Particularly surprising was that the rate a list changes depends on the size of the list – a Top 100 changes proportionally faster than a Top 40 – but not the size of the population. So while a larger population means more new ideas, it also means more competition to reach the top, and the two balance each other out: the turnover on bestseller lists remains steady as population size changes.

3. Experts talk about culture speeding up- with new ideas coming at us faster, did you find any evidence of this?

Absolutely - by the 1990s we see an increase in innovation rate in many areas, particularly baby names. A century ago, it was common for girls and especially boys to be named after their parents, whereas nowadays much fewer kids in Western cultures are named after their parents, and many parents strive to come up with unique names. However, even as novelty in and of itself becomes more popular, the result still fits a model of random copying with only a small degree of innovation -- it's very hard to be truly original!

4. You found "innovators" have an important role to play. What are the characteristics of these innovators?

Innovators introduce something new, and that's it. The explanatory insight in our model lies in its simplicity - just a population of copiers with occasional innovation. The innovations are represented by random numbers, i.e., with no inherent "superiority" or desirability over what is already circulating in the population. Nevertheless, every new innovation has a small, but still finite chance of becoming the next big hit, just through the process of random copying. In the model it is absolutely inevitable that what is currently popular now will eventually be replaced by something that began as an obscure innovation.

5. How might your research help those looking to induce positive change amongst consumers? - energy saving for example

For fashions like baby names and pop music, copying is fine, as the inherent content of a baby name or pop song is not what's important. However, for behaviors whose content does matter in society (saving energy, voting, buying responsibly), copying is bad. Copying is what underlies random drift in the market, leading the market to become detached from rational needs. If people think independently about their consumer choices, then it is very likely that the average of all those decisions will converge on something intelligent, and something that does track the situation in the real world. A great book on this phenomenon is James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor, 2005).

6. What does it mean for brands and their new product development efforts?

There should be certain aspects of products that are just subject to random drift in terms of popular choice. There is little value in expending R&D into these aspects, since their popularity is inherently unpredictable. In contrast, other aspects should be subject to independent decisions, i.e., selection, and will be predictable because they track real consumer needs. This may sound obvious -- e.g., consumer preferences for food packaging may drift more than their preferences for the food itself -- but the model provides the potential to resolve this much more finely: what parts that we thought were important actually drift in popularity? What things we thought were just style, are actually important? Instead of surveying customers to find out, you can address these questions more directly by looking at the market data themselves.

counter trends and cultural hubs-rough trade plans a record store

Influx Insights — 2007-06-14T18:09:51Z

It’s sometimes just as important to follow and act on counter-trends, as it is to follow trends.

One great example is the decision by Rough Trade to open a 5,000 sq ft record store in London, just months’ after Tower Records went out of business and the music industry is in a downward spiral.

While many people will buy records online, the more they do, the more they will crave the physical environment of a record store, especially one that celebrates music.

Like going to see a movie in a theater or browsing a bookstore, there is something about buying music in a store, that online just can’t replicate

"We are looking to make an official announcement in the next few weeks. Our aim is to deliver something we feel has been missing in this country for far too long - an environment that celebrates music as an exciting art form, not just another commercial commodity - but on a scale that is a departure from the traditional perception of an independent record shop.

"The music industry seems to have a lot of doom and gloom about it at the moment, despite people's passion for music being as strong as ever. We certainly hope to put some smiles back on faces with something that reflects the true public appetite for exciting new music."

Steven Godfroy-Rough Trade- quoted in The Independent newspaper

Rough Trade intends to combine a performance space with the record store making it more of a cultural hub for the independent music scene. It’s a microcosm of the passion of Indy music and a rallying cry against the commercialization and commoditization of the industry.

Amoeba Music in San Francisco is the model for Rough Trade’s new venture.