Fan power at work. Watch and enjoy the full experience here.
Johnny Cash+ music | in culture+ internet+ signs 
While hopping from excellent music discovery site The Sixty One, I stumbled up Shael Riley's Kikcstarter page. Since I pledged $10, his appeal for cash to fund the mixing and mastering of his new album has exceeded all expectations, closing with $6,176 (minus the 5% rake for Kickstarter). Riley was delighted:
Wow, guys. We made a crazy amount of money. We're going to be able to engineer and master our album, pay for physical production, ASCAP registration fees, iTunes and Amazon stocking fees--the whole shebang; and then we're going to look into hiring a publicist with whatever is leftover. This is all thanks to you.
A heartwarming story, and as I backer of this project, I not only receive a copy of the album when it is made, but also the feeling of having contributed to something that other people agree is worth funding. And if I had stumped up more, I would have received even greater rewards. The 5 people who pledged $250 got the following:
All of the above, plus, we will cover any song of your choosing, and release it in any way you want. Do you want to be the only one with a copy? Cool. Want us to release it as a free download on our website? Fine by us, big spender. Want us to drop it as a cassette tape in a public bathroom? Well, it's your money.
Paying to watch a project grow has got to be better than flushing your cash down the toilet of some faceless record company, while the artists sees but a fraction of your payment.
And it's not just for music projects - in fact we're thinking of testing it out ourselves: watch this space. But first, we'll read this handy guide.
business+ kickstarter+ music | in business+ consumer trends+ internet+ signs We have talked about the significance of Wikileaks before on this site, but never in rap. And this "raportage" is no joke either, there are some serious points raised.
Visit Juice Media for more of the same.
The music industry is a great case study for everything going on in the world of business right now. After all, everyone listens to music - and everyone has pirated music, recently or in the past. The forces effecting the music business are yet to reach many sectors, but they are already effecting the way in which people want to buy and sell their products - and the convenience and ease they increasingly expect from customer service. And when today's consumers buy music, they want to buy it directly from the bands they love - or not at all. But how can bands easily engage with their customers and fans but still make some money?
While we have featured services like Magnatune (an Internet record label) and Jamendo (a streaming site for "copyleft" material) on this site before, Bandcamp.com goes further by providing a platform for musicians to host music on their own website.
What makes Bandcamp great is the fact it is clearly built with bands and users in mind - not the bottom line. It's as easy to use as if you had designed it yourself - or at least it feels that way - and it definitely has wow factor, too. Watching the video above, it just makes perfect sense.
But I would say that having spent ten minutes this morning trying to get to grips with online store 7Digital's clunky and buggy interface. I ended up using BitTorrent to get the track I wanted instead - as things stand, stealing is just easier.
P.S.: Yes, I have heard of iTunes, but I want to buy music on my terms.
There have been many bands that made it big on the Internet before signing with a label, the name Arctic Monkeys springs to mind. But one of many bands riding the sea of change and going the other way is OK Go, who this month are featured on the cover of Billboard magazine. And although their backstory is not one of broken homes and drug addiction, it is interesting nonetheless.
As frontman Damian told The New York Times:
My band is famous for music videos. We direct them ourselves or with the help of friends, we shoot them on shoestring budgets and, like our songs, albums and concerts, we see them as creative works and not as our record company’s marketing tool.
In 2006 we made a video of us dancing on treadmills for our song “Here It Goes Again.” We shot it at my sister’s house without telling EMI, our record company, and posted it on the fledgling YouTube without EMI’s permission. Technically, this put us afoul of our contract, since we need our record company’s approval to distribute copies of the songs that they finance. It also exposed YouTube to all sorts of liability for streaming an EMI recording across the globe. But back then record companies saw videos as advertisements, so if my band wanted to produce them, and if YouTube wanted to help people watch them, EMI wasn’t going to get in the way.
To cut a long story short (definitely follow those links for more info), that quickly changed. EMI eventually blocked embedding of the band's videos on the blogs that had made it such a success. OK Go had no choice but to split from its record company and go it alone - celebrating by sharing this incredible video around the globe.
The video is great and has tremendous feelgood value - would a record company ever commission anything so outrageous? - but the story of OK Go is also a valuable lesson to anyone looking to use the Internet in any way at all. In short, successful promotion is not about spending vast sums on marketing that makes something look better than it is - it's about the product having that unpredictable something that makes users want to share it with their friends. Once you go "viral", the rest takes care of itself.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that social networking is nothing new. The latest issue of The Atlantic (go on, click the link for the full story) reminds us that the Grateful Dead, who provided the soundtrack to the acid tests of the sixties hippie movement along with Bob Dylan, were way ahead of the curve. Essentially, by being totally customer focused - playing 15-hour concerts to teenagers out of their gourds on acid and giving stuff away - they were building a loyal following that made them one of the most profitable bands of all time. An extract:
As the band’s following grew, the notion that it might have something to offer scholars, particularly in the social sciences, became somewhat less far-fetched, though still not without professional risk. In the late 1980s, Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who studies friendships formed across distances, noticed deep bonds between Deadheads. The bonds seemed to belie the idea, then popular among leading social thinkers, that communities based on common interest, whose members do not live near each other, lack emotional and moral depth—that Deadheads might belong to what sociologists call a “lifestyle enclave,” but couldn’t possibly form meaningful relationships. Adams brought a class on tour with the Dead—an opportunity, she thought, to teach classical theory while letting students study a cutting-edge contemporary community.
And another:
The band established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets—and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. Treating customers well may sound like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of many organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.
A sip of electic kool-aid goes to @jo-vanna by way of thanks.
grateful dead+ music+ network marketing | in culture+ marketing 