Time out from music marketing, sonic branding and looking after…

Always been a big fan of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes.

Teddy Pendergrass at his best…

Been contemplating the sound of bells. Not the whiskey (not a fan) the big things that hang from churches…

Now I am not someone who is a fan of campanology.

I am fascinated by the role that church bells have played within certain communities.

These seems to be three purposes for the bells. A time-keeper, a way of gathering people together and a signal for people to scatter.

The chiming of the bells have shaped many communities’ days. The bells were the community time-keeper.

When not setting time, certain chimes signaled a call to prayer, where the local community would gather.

Other sounds, out of sync with this fixed sonic calendar, would raise the alarm within the community, warning the townspeople or flooding, attack or other such dire situations.

Tip for brands thinking of a sonic identity
When considering the sound of your brand, consider the roles that sound will play. A simple bell has played numerous roles in certain societies for centuries. The danger for brands is that the sound you have presently might be sending out the wrong signal to your community. When you think you are gathering in your potential ‘community of brand fans’, you might actually be getting them to run away as fast as you can. It might be time to listen to your brand more carefully.

So the biggest fake fight for number 1 is thankfully now over. Rage Against the Machine is the Xmas number 1, instead of the X-Factor winner Joe something or other. We can all pat ourselves on the back to show how democracy and the power of crowds can overcome the establishment.

Power to the people? Ummm not quite.

It is all very amusing, but I have to wonder why normally sane people took on the challenge to STOP SIMON COWELL at all costs. The blogosphere was full of indignation (now self-congratulatory), to the point that he was almost blamed for the failure of the supposed leaders of the world achieving anything meaningful at Copenhagen. The indignation was almost worthy of a sequel of The Manchurian Candidate or some new Bond film, with guess who cast as the maniacal leader (called ‘number 1′ no doubt) of the SYCO organisation that plans to take over the world. However, I do wish people were more clear on what they were raging against…

If they wanted to put a decent track to the top, that’s fine. Lots to choose from. Yet that was not what is going on here. It was about STOPPING X-Factor domination of the charts. The guy who started this campaign was fed up with the Cowell dominance, and put forward a personal favourite. In itself, I applaud his actions. What cannot be denied is that he channeled his and other people’s anger at the right time and has proved that people WILL pay for music.

Yet their actions seemed utterly misplaced…

Three observations from me:

1 A return to the 50s.

All we are seeing is a swing back to the 50s in the UK where TV entertainment shows dominated and the sound of ‘popular’ music filled the air. For every person that has discerning music tastes, there are 10 people who quite like a song, but have no idea what it’s called and who it is by. Simon Cowell is aiming at the 10, not the 1. People who impulse buy at Tesco’s the ‘Best of Westlife’ or ‘100 best songs on Valentine’s Day’ are not going to worry about the ‘difficult second album’.

“Yes but” I hear you say, ” we cannot compare to the 50s, as we now have the net and everyone is connected”. True, the channels might be different, but the result is the same. Back in the 50s and 60s, it was the chitlin circuit in the U.S., the car radio and Pirate Radio in the UK that carried the rage. Now we have the net and mobile. Raging against mediocrity will always be around - thank Schlager music on anodyne TV in Germany for NEU, Harmonia and Kraftwerk. Just as in the 50s great music will emerge out of mediocrity.

2 A Generational Thing?

Grans and kids love Joe. He is more Cliff Richard, less Little Richard. It’s the 30/40/50somethings who are appalled. The guys who organised the Facebook campaign is in his 30s. Generations brought up on Protest Music are now protesting about Simon. Meanwhile, the kids love JedWard and the other ‘talents’ of the show. Young teens think that Stacey can actually sing. That’s ok, we all make our mistakes. The first album I ever bought was by Gary Glitter (called ‘Touch Me’ would you believe).

3 Raging Against the Music Machine?

This is the one that gets me. The rage is completely misplaced. For goodness sake, RATM are handled by Sony Music, as is Joe and all the other X-Factor folk. So this whole rage against the ‘music machine’ is just helping the mythical ‘machine’.

If people truly want to rage, then go and buy music of someone who has no label, but is doing it the DIY route. Support a local band. Support a young band who are trying to make fresh music whilst being surrounded by other teens who place more importance on the lives and loves of the X-Factor finalists. Support a band like MISHKIN, a great band from Leeds who are building a fanbase and a reputation for being ultra-positive (More Laugh At The Machine). Support a young singer like MIA ROSE who citizensound looks after. Two weeks up on youtube, and her video has been seen by 1.2m people in 206 countries. No label, no hype, lots of word of mouth.

If like the founders of the RATM campaign, you wanted to get your favourite song to number 1, then cool. But I can’t help feeling that a lot of people who voted for RATM were acting more like a bunch of students demonstrating their revolutionary politics by handing in their term work 2 days late. This was not ’sticking it to the man’.

If I was Sony Music, I would be cracking open the champagne right now. Genius job done. Love X-Factor - Sony wins. Hate X-Factor - Sony wins.

I guess one person who might have reason to rage more than anyone is Guy Hands. All that money spent on EMI thinking his business knowledge can sort out these ‘music folk’. Look where that’s got him. If only he realised that the music business will live and die on one thing and that is that MUSIC IS IMPORTANT TO PEOPLE. Give them music they love in a way that fairly compensates the creator for their efforts, and the world is all good.

Since citizensound set up, we have been providing more and more help to artists: From old school A&R services to fanbase management, from songwriting help to brand sponsorship and revenue generation ideas. Which is why we set up our Artist Development division.

Then we met MIA ROSE, a talented singer/songwriter and a youtube phenomenon. Besides being the most subscribed to musician on youtube in the UK, she also features on the Top 5 all-time list globally on youtube. Since she started 3 years ago, she has had over 100 million views on the net, with each video she puts up gaining well over a 1m views. Her fanbase is 50% teenager, 50% adult. A brand’s dream.

And then we met around 7 weeks ago and hit it off.

So here we are representing her. Paul Martin worked with MIA ROSE in the studio alongside honorary citizen and producer Tyrell to record her Xmas single. The citizen Nick Watt meanwhile got moving on the management of the digital presence and online revenue strategy with the help of new citizen Martim. Our Lisbon based citizen, Mariana Duarte Silva, started handling things in MIA ROSE’s home country Portugal. Meanwhile, Simon and myself got working on the brand opportunities.

citizensound as A&R, executive producer, revenue generator, promotional agent, digital strategist, fanbase co-ordinator and a lot more. Yet critically, it is the energy and ideas of MIA ROSE herself that makes this really work.

Ideas flow from her as easy as popular songs and videos. Plus she is open to ideas fro mus and her fanbase too.

In the last six weeks we have organised:

• A competition for 5 London based fans to join her for a day out in London (Thanks to Visit London, The London Eye, The Original Tour open top bus company, Ripley’s London). A 6th fan turned up all the way from Poland!
• Live video chats, the first of which got 27 countries online (from U.S and Peru through Europe to India, Dubai and Malaysia) and 8,000 messages in 90 minutes.
• Fan competition to design the record sleeve for the Xmas Single.
• MIA ROSE being signed to Models 1, the most respected model agency in the UK under their celebrity division

But to promote the single, we needed a video. Thanks to friends out in Brazil, MIA ROSE headed off to Rio to shoot an atypical Xmas video.

Last night the video went up on MIA ROSE’s youtube channel.

Here is the video:

In the first 12 hours, this video has achieved these stunning stats:

8,372 views

1,513 ratings

In only the first 6 hours, this video achieved:

Number 2 - Top Rated Today - Music GLOBAL

Number 2 - Top Rated This Week - Music UK

Number 8 - Top Rated This Week - Music GLOBAL

Number 3 - Most Discussed (any topic) Today - UK

Top 50  - Most Viewed Today - GLOBAL, UK, Germany, Canada

Top 100 - Most Viewed Today - Brazil, Poland, Czech Republic, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Ireland

Now the trick is to convert online popularity into sales for this hugely popular youtube artist.

No marketing budget, no machine. Just MIA ROSE, us and her fans spreading the word.

Might not involve safety pins and shouting, but still VERY VERY DIY.

DIY culture is throwing up some interested new record labels, that are more than just labels, but are building on the relationship with the visual arts.

Home Tapes, based in Portland, Oregon is home to a group of bands and musicians such as left field Hip-Hop stars CYNE and the excellent Slaraffenland, and a bunch of visual artists including personal favourites Evah Fan and the very excellent Friends With You.

The label was “born to allow musical and visual artists a place to collaborate and experiment without the constraints, pressures, and delays of traditional releases. We want to get back to our roots and make things with our own hands late at night on impossible schedules and all for the fun of just doing it. There are no specific rules or guidelines, and all formats are welcome. Limited edition, by default”.

I also recently came across Uninhabitable Mansions, which is a Brooklyn-based art collective and band. They make music and publish books and do a few other things. The band features Robbie and Tyler of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Annie from Au Revoir Simone.

It’s nice to see that they art of collaboration hasn’t disappeared, and that bands are finding the solutions to getting their art out there.

Robert Wolf, London musician and drumming teacher to my son, is finishing up his album right now. Getting noticed is a big challenge for every musician, but there was something he said to me today that really resonated.

He said is is going to make his music

sound irresistible

How many musicians aim for that?

In fact, how many brands aim to sound irresistible these days?

Well, we at citizensound are on a mission to help brands sound irresistible to their consumers and help musicians sound irresistible to their fans.

So I guess we want to sound irresistible too…

here is our sound by the way…

Citizen Dub by citizensound

Once upon a time, artists struggled with the perfect running order of the songs for the LP (that’s a big round flat bit of plastic that sound came out of when it came in contact with a needle, and often came packaged in hideously/beautifully designed cardboard).

Which songs should be on side 1, which on side 2? What should open, what should close?

Then CDs turned the two-sided experience into one long experience or a hop/skip/jump experience as people decided whether they liked a track after the first few notes…

Now we have an artist like Zero7 (Zer07?) putting their album up on soundcloud to allow the fans to have a good listen to the album before they buy. Can’t argue against that. But what are the fans listening to? Do they listen to the full album all the way through?

Well, initial results shows that fans a little bit lazy or pushed for time.

There is a clear falling off of listening as you head down the tracklisting. So what do you do if you are a band who wants people to listen to all of your tracks (if you didn’t care, then why put them out in the first place?!)

One simple thing really for starters. Mix it up. Flip the running order on soundcloud and other services and see whether that gets more people listening to track 10 vs track 1. Subjectivity suggests that first track isn’t always going to be the one that defines a fan’s relationship to you. Mix up the listing on myspace.

For many artists the running order will continue to be important. However, if you want fans to discover your music, be warned that they might buy into it that readily. Introducing your music to them might need a little flexibility on your part…

…Speech Dabelle.

Wish I’d had the common sense to put a few quid on this, the citizensound favourite  for this year’s Mercury Music Prize. And YES once again we got it right!

Former Mercury Award winner and fellow citizen Paul Martin, who won it with Roni Size Reprazent in ‘97 (famously beating Radiohead’s OK Computer) thought she might win, especially as he’d put on one of her first gigs at the David Simon/Wire event at Book Slam back in May, which he also DJed at. And once he played his fellow citizens her debut single we all feel in love with both Speech and her music.

Fantastic that someone so young, fresh and talented should win. Proves that the Mercury’s are one of the few music awards that genuinely pick the winner based on artistic merit, not the buzz on Hype Machine…

I admit to being a teenage vinyl junkie. The way the sleeves looked and felt, the way the vinyl sounded, and even smelt, made it a truly sensory experience that became almost a life long obsession. But in the late 80’s, like so many, I was lured by the portability and ease of use of the CD.

So why after dedicating some 25 years of my life fetishizing these physical bits of product, did I give them up for a load of zeros and ones that you couldn’t even touch?

Well my love affair with Vinyl was ended by space restraints and it’s lack of portability. But the CD was far easier to give up. Jewel Cases were nasty and plastic, while digipacks weren’t much better. The booklets were small and impossible to read (even with perfect 20/20 vision), and added little to the experience of listening to the music.

Had the art of great sleeve design been lost?

The advent of the download allowed music fans to carry around their entire music collection (or a good chunk of it) in their pocket. OK the MP3’s sound quality wasn’t brilliant, but the ability to have so more songs at our fingertips was just too good to not get hooked.

And it also offered the record industry a new way of packaging music that could be fun, entertaining, interactive, and more enticing than a 3½ inch square CD booklet.

So what did we get? The front sleeve shrunk down to something like the size of a postage stamp, and if you were really lucky a PDF of the crap CD booklet that you never much liked in the first place.

Had the download lost what made owning music special, its physicality?

So it was no surprise to hear last week that the embattled major record companies are about to repackage the humble download with a new format called CMX, that will deliver an enhanced digital experience, or if you must, the 2.0 version of the album sleeve!

But just to make things more complicated Apple have also announced it’s own new packaging format, Project Cocktail; no-doubt in an attempt to stave off competition from Amazon and Spotify, as well proving to the music business that Apple’s (long) tail can still wag the dog.

So why has it taken nine years from the launch of the iTunes store for the industry to put packaging on the agenda?

These new formats may persuade fusty old music fans like me to invest IF what is being offered lives up to the promise. With today’s digital technology this should be easily attainable, and offers a new generation of digital ’sleeve’ designers with a whole new palate to work with.

However, this may just be false dawn for an industry that is no-doubt hoping that this will get us to buy downloads rather than knick them, or as one suspects, get us to pay even more than £7.99 for our digital albums.

So what might stop these new formats being successful?

1. The inevitable format war between Apple and the Majors could once again confuse consumers, hampering any attempt to get us all excited about this new music experience.
2. Are we ready to go out and buy all our music in yet another format? If this new experience is allied with a dramatic increase in sound quality (can we have 320 kbps as standard, please) it may convince a few ardent music fans to invest in their favourite music one more time. But will the mass market really care?
3. These new formats seem to ignore the fact that many consumers (and especially the under 25’s) don’t give two hoots for the album format. The download market is about single tracks not albums. And with so many 80 minute-plus albums being released these days, even potential classics can seem bloated and flabby. So no surprise that today’s music fans either cherry pick the tracks they like from iTunes, or simply illegally download the whole album, and dump the tracks they don’t like.

citizensound says:

Are these new formats too little too late, only persuading the over 30s and music geeks like me to buy into this new format? Or will streaming music services such as Spotify provide to be the mass markets choice for how we consume music? And more importantly does this provide yet another diversion from the real job in hand for the record industry - which is developing what role they play in managing the relationship between the band and their fans, and proving to both artists and their managers that they are the best people to do the job…

Been around for a while but still the concept of a restaurant that shuts off your ability to view food is a splendid thing.

The Nocti Vagus restaurant in Berlin provides an  experience of food that demands you to depend on your sense of smell, taste, sound and touch. Much like Gordon Ramsay goes on about a chef needing to the food they cook, so we as customers place much emphasis on how food looks rather than how it tastes/smells/sounds/feels.

There is something wonderful about this restaurant that gets people to focus on the importance and joy of food, rather than the superficiality of ‘first appearance’.

There is also much to gain from this restaurant for those marketers who wish to utilise the power of all senses in their engagement with customers.

Mind you, I still hate celery and cherries, blindfold or not…