This month we’ve got 18 tracks of fantastic summer tunes for you to listen to with our latest citizensound “It All Ads Up” podcast.

This is the first time we’ve used the rather excellent SoundCloud service to provide you with our regular podcast of our favourite tunes for all of you in advertising and brand land. If you want to download the podcast simply click on the downward facing arrow on the soundcloud player and your download  of “It All Ads Up” should start.  We hope you enjoy our little summer holiday soundtrack!

When we launched soundsearch, our bespoke music search and licensing facility, just over 12 months ago we wanted to deliver something different to the marketplace. We don’t have a fancy computerised system, but what we do have is over 40 years of music business experience and a huge collection and knowledge of music that can cover almost every base and genre imaginable.

We hope you enjoy this month’s podcast. If you want more information about soundsearch contact mariana@citizensound.net

Here’s our latest sync for Rubicon’s Watermelon ad campaign produced by Ed Chilcott and Tim Clyde at the Minimart. The track ‘Watermelon On The Vine’ is by the Delta Rhythm Boys and dates back to the 1920s. We hope you like it…

Many artists seem to have taken to Twitter like ducks to water. While some musicians found the idea of keeping a blog going too daunting, Twitter provided an easy way to connect with their fans. Even Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor, who recently claimed he was giving up on social media, just couldn’t stay away and is happily tweeting away again.

But Twitter’s staggering success (it grow by a staggering 752% last year) has meant that the marketing world has pricked up it ears and started to work out how to use it market products. But like any form of social media it’s so easy to get it very very wrong. Spam no matter what form it takes is unlikely to gain you friends. And the worst form of spam in the Twitterverse is using #hashtags, which allows you to post to all users who are interested in a specific topic. It may seem to some marketers that this is a great way to get to a large number of people quickly, but it is likely to have the opposite effect.

Before you start using Twitter to promote your latest releases I suggest you check out this case study on what not to do, which highlights how Habitat got it so so wrong with there recent Twitter campaign…

Those in the know have been waiting for new music service Spotify, which went live to a small group of invitees in early December, to finally became freely available to everyone. And yesterday the shout went out to UK web users “come and get it”.

Spotify is an ad-supported streaming music service that lets you listen to as much music as you want, for absolutely no cost as long as you don’t mind hearing the occasional advert. Or, if you’d rather, you can pay a small subscription fee (£9.99 per month) and get the whole service ad-free.

And people are getting very excited about Spotify. I attended Marketing Week’s Interactive Summit two weeks ago, and not only was Rob Wells Universal Music’s Head Of Digital raving about it, so were a good number of the delegates who had already managed to get an invite to use the service. And the plaudits keep on coming…

Top technology site cnet claims that “Spotify is quite simply, in our opinion, the best thing to happen to music since MP3s. All we need now is a mobile phone app for it, and we’re golden.”

While Flo Heiss, Creative Partner at top digital agency Dare was excited enough to claim Amazing. This is where it’s going to go with music. Music will just be there. Whenever, wherever, whatever. No downloading necessary. Just listen.

So why is Spotify so good, after all we’ve seen both subscription services (Napster) and Ad-Funded music services before (WE7)?

Well it may be something to do with the simplicity of use, the quality of the streaming, and the seemingly bottomless collection of music to chose from (all the major labels are on-board, and many of the indies, with the catalogue growing at a fast rate). And as yet I’ve only heard the very occasional advert.

So why would you want to stop using the excellent iTunes service, or get rid of your emusic subscription, and possibly even pay for Spotify? Well I don’t think for real music heads that time is quite here yet. After all the music is not portable, so I can’t use it on the move. However, with ubiquitious mobile internet just around the corner and data charges decreasing, I’d expect to have Spotify on my mobile device in the very near future.

However as blogger Henrik Ahlen points out this sort of service has some real advantages over what is currently available. He gives four reasons why he thinks services like Spotify are the future:

1. I don’t want to own files or CDs, I want to listen to my favorite music and find new music easily.
2. I don’t want to fill up my hard drive with Gigabytes of media files that can vanish in a hard drive crash.
3. I want to listen to my music library on multiple computers and on my iPhone mobile.
4. I want to be able to share my music easily with friends and family.

And Spotify is either delivering all these services now, or will be in the very near future. For someone like me who has been buying and collecting music for nearly 40 years, this seems a rather odd service to get excited about, as after all you own nothing. But actually all I’ve ever wanted is access to all the great music that I can listen to. And it gets over the problem of having a sudden desire to hear an old song again, without having to hunt around for it or buy it anew, to find you only wanted to listen to it a few times for memory’s sake. Only a handful of the 9,500 tracks on my hard drive have been listened to more than a 10 times, I listen to lots of different music, not the same handful records all the time. I still want to hear lots of old music, new music, and even blue music. What I want is to borrow lots of music at a reasonable price, and a service like Spotify offers all that!

And before you go on about it not being perfect (the home page looks awful, not sure about the recommendations, no user generated reviews, no info on individual releases) Spotify is still pretty new out of the box, so I’d be prepared to give it some time to develop. Anyone who used last.fm back in the day will testify that it wasn’t perfect. This is a really neat service that lots and lots of music fans will love. It may not convince all the nerds, but it’s already proved a great way to listen to the stuff I can’t get on emusic.

The business advantage for the music industry of this sort of service is that it could help kill off file sharing (why would you want to use dodgy file-sharing services when you can have this?) and provide a legitimate revenue stream for both artists and record labels. Rob Wells was bullish enough to say he thinks in the next 5 years ‘access’ based services like Spotify will ensure that record labels will be more profitable than they have ever been. You can expect to see a lot more services like this appearing this year, with many of the broadband suppliers, including the likes of Sky come into the market.

As you can probably tell I’m sold on Spotify, if you want to find out what all the fuss is about click here.

Go on… put that marketing brief down for a moment and close your eyes… What can you hear?

What can consumers hear when they come into contact with that brand that is written on the top of that brief on your desk?

Click below and have a look and listen to what we get up to.

Let us know what you think…and what you heard in your office!

This is what Katherine Jones at Albion thought about the lunch we had with her team - I just wanted to say thanks again to you all for coming in yesterday. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the session. 

If you want to know a bit more about how we can help you define the sound of your brands drop us as line.

Drowned In Sound is the UK’s premier online music zine, and also home to the label that has brought you music from Martha Wainwright, Bat For Lashes and the Kaiser Chiefs.  We met up recently with editor and label-founder Sean Adams, who rather kindly asked us to contribute a regular column for the site. In our first posting we decided to ponder the pitfalls of using the original punk rocker, Iggy Pop, to promote car insurance! It is certainly an arresting ad, (my kids wanted to know who the strange man on the telly was), but left us wondering if he is more memorable than the product that he was supposed to be advertising! You can read the article by clicking on the image (above)…

There must be something in the water as another Punk legend and former Sex Pistol  John Lydon, has also been brought into to help a brand to give their product a bit of an advertsing makeover. And the good news is it seems to have worked The Guardian reported today that Lydon’s appearance in a TV ad for Dairy Crest butter had helped lift sales of the brand by 85% in the most recent quarter.

We wondered what other punk legends could be brought out of semi-retirement to help brands increase their sales and give their ads a bit of an attitudinal make-over? Over to you…

The McDonald’s ‘I’m Loving It’ chant is up there with the Intel Inside sonic logo as probably one of the most recognised pieces of sonic marketing. But how do you keep your sonic logo sounding fresh? How do you stop consumers from going “not that again”?

Well how about you get your consumers to reinvent it! McDonalds ran a competition in the US to soundtrack their new ad, and the winner was Jason Harper, a singer from Palm Beach, who apparently received nearly half of the 12,279 votes cast at myspace.com/BigMacChant, where folks voted online in celebration of the Big Mac’s 40th birthday. Here’s the original advert…

…and here’s Jason Harper’s winning entry

.A well-placed TV sync can provide a great deal of exposure for an artist’s music, and they get paid for the privilege! So why do so many of these opportunities go unrealised?

Could it be that brands don’t fully appreciate the impact that music can have on their brands?

Or is it that the labels can’t work out how to sync their short-term priorities with the brand’s longer-term needs?

After all, wouldn’t a hit record benefit both brand and label?

It’s certainly true to say that too few brands realise the importance of music in their brand strategy. In such a cluttered visual environment a sonic strategy would help them differentiate their brands from their competition. However, most advertising is steadfastly visual. Music is too often often seen as adjunct to an ad campaign, rather than a key part of the communication. But brands are learning fast, and are showing an increased willingness to experiment, IF the right opportunities come along.

For the record business, sync deals offer up not only a significant promotional opportunity if worked correctly, it also provides an increasingly important revenue stream for labels, music publishers and artists alike. And a good sync deal can not only help break a new act, it can also revitalise an artist or a labels back catalogue. I’m sure Phil Collins was as surprised as the rest of us to see “In The Air Tonight” go back into the Top 20, some 26 years after its first release. All off the back of a Cadbury’s advert.

Many of the best sync companies have become ‘crate-diggers’, seeking out new artists, independent music and esoteric oldies, rather than pushing household names like Phil. And it’s not just because his music isn’t very cool these days! This trend look sets to continue as brands marketing budgets continue to come under fire. As much as brands would love to have access to household names to promote their products, few have the budgets to compete, especially with procurement folk trying to drive down the cost of everything, including the cost of syncs. And as the music industry continues to favour short term wins over long-term gains, things are unlikely to change. The use of the Rolling Stones “She’s A Rainbow” by Sony Bravia could become an increasingly rare example of a brand spending big bucks on a sync deal, unless it is part of a far broader deal with the brand.

The advent of hundreds of new cable and satellite TV channels had offered up new opportunities for sync, with many small brands (and programme makers) entering the TV advertising marketplace for the first time. And many of them will need music. But these new entrants into the marketplace simply can’t afford top dollar, playing into the hands of anyone that can be more creative than the major labels and their publishers.

citizensound says:

For the music industry to really take advantage of the sync opportunities on offer they need a real shift in their mindset, and find new ways to do business with brands. They need to think more long-term and be more strategic, they need to understand that brands planning cycles are very different from their own, and learn to compensate for that. And they also need to able to turnkey their offerings to deliver real partnerships that work for both themselves and their new brand partners. And as we’ve seen brands will find another way to source music if the big boys wont play ball.

Volkswagen seem to have taken the concept of the ‘sound of their brand’ to heart when it came to their latest ad campaign for the VW Golf. Now cars and music have always gone together, so using great music in a car ad seems an obvious thing to do.

VW’s agency DDB built on the connection between cars and music, and literally connected the sound the car makes with the sync music for the advert, by hooking up with Paul Hartnoll, formerly of ground breaking UK techno duo Orbital, to produce the music for their latest campaign.

The track, entitled Gob Smack, is made up from the sounds recorded in and around the Golf during the shoot. The track has even been released as a digital download, although bizarrely there’s no mention of the connection with VW, and when you go to the VW Golf website there’s equally no mention of the advert or the music. A real missed opportunity.

iTunes certainly understands the importance of syncs on music fans, as they are currently offering a 24 track ‘Music in TV ads’ collection for sale, featuring everything from the the music to the wonderful Drench advert (Brain’s from the Thunderbirds strutting his stuff to Snap!), through to the latest ad for Berocca featuring 80’s synth-pop duo Blancmange (and if you were wondering where they got the idea for this ad from, check out this fantastic homemade video for US band OK Go).

citizensound says:

Both brands and record companies rarely seem to realise the potential of a what is often perceived as just a sync deal. The right music with the right creative work - Jose Gonzalez and Sony Bravia springs to mind - can provide the brand with a sonic logo that reminds consumers of the brand every time they hear the music, even when the ad campaign has long disappeared from our TV and Cinema screens. While the humble sync deal can offer record company and the artist’s the opportunity to build a longer-term relationship with a brand, opening up a whole range of new channels to finance, market or distribute their products. So lets start joining the dots.

Came across this in the NY Post. What seems a growing move towards ad funded models in the music space, Gnarls Barkley label Downtown Records and internet entrepreneur Peter Rojas (cofounder of Engadget.com) are dreaming up a fresh label concept featuring an innovative business model that will be of interest to brands: Dubbed RCRD LBL and targeted for launch this autumn, the venture aims to merge free, exclusive music with niche blog content to offer advertisers highly targeted sponsorship opportunities. Source: Using Ads, New Online Label Offers Music Free [NY Post]