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.

Be it Dubai or Mumbai, London or Lisbon, citizensound is excited to find that more and more brands are investing in the power of the senses as part of the consumer experience. The old one dimensional approach to sensory marketing is moving out of the mainstream into the background, being replaced by strategies that consider a multitude of senses.

For most musicians it is their SOUND that is the core of their communication, though for a few ‘musicians’ it might be more about how they look rather than how they sound!

The VISUAL has always gone hand in hand with sound. From the astonishing performances of Mozart to the Sgt Peppers album cover, from MTV to recent mashups.

An example of this came to me at our NOTWORK night last week. I met Rob, otherwise known as O Yuki Conjugate. He shared this with me…

This was beautiful to look at. But it didn’t stop there.

When you TOUCH the CD, you realise that this is art, not a CD. The tiled front cover is a wonderful tactile experience.

The album is called The Euphoria of Disobedience.

I showed it to people at NOTWORK and in Lisbon last week, and after the initial positive comments, the inevitable question got asked…

Great, but how does it sound?

This is where TASTE comes in. I leave it to you to listen to and decide for yourselves. However, I think it lives up to the rest of the experience. Wonderful.

Why do I share this with you?

Three things for Brands and musicians to consider:

1. If you want people to sample your wares, then work hard to draw people in - Don’t expect people to come to you.
2. Get noticed by exploring ALL of the senses, not just one.
3. Make sure you deliver on the promise.

Minimalist American artist Georgia O’Keeffe painted “Blue and Green Music” in 1919. We should have got her in to do our branding…

“Making your unknown known

is the important thing”

I came across a great blog called Little Hits last night. Each week or so they post up a favourite track from often long forgotten records, the majority being from the punk and post punk era. As the site’s owners are based in the US it’s quite amazing how many obscure British punk and indie records they managed to get their hands on! You can listen to all the tracks they write about on the site, and if like me you are of a certain age, listened to Peel nightly in the late 1970s and early 80s, and bought lots of obscure 7 inch singles, this will be a great trip down memory lane.

One of the featured tracks on the site is by the wonderful Desperate Bicycles. I can still remember hearing the band on John Peel’s Radio 1 show. Their first session consisted of four tracks, one a version of their début single Smokescreen which lasted all of 50 seconds (the single version was padded out to a progtastic 2 minutes). The band managed to press up 1500 copies of the single, with money from the first 500 records being used to press up and distribute the next 1000. Fortunately I’m a proud owner of said single, bought back in the day from the New Record Inn in Sunderland.

One of my favourite singles by the band was their sophomore effort The Medium Was Tedium. The playing on the record makes many of their punk contemporaries sound like ELP, even the mighty Fall sound competent in comparison. But the brilliance of song was its hook, which extolled “It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it”. And it was. And we did. This was the DIY punk ethic in action. The sleeve detailed the cost to record, press and distribute Smokescreen was a massive £153, (probably a few grand in today’s money). It’s amazing to think that 30 years later the total cost to make, distribute and market your own DIY release can be virtually zero! Sadly Desperate Bicycles founder Danny Wigley has resisted the reissue of any of the bands music, but if you fancy taking a trip down memory lane, or want to hear what all the fuss was about back in 1977, you can hear much of the bands recorded output here.

Let's face it; few music fans have ever preferred the CD booklet to the album sleeve. With CD sales continuing to drop, and downloads nowhere near replacing the shortfall in sales and revenues, could making the downloads more attractive to music fans help boost sales?

Fans have always wanted something special. Limited edition sleeves, picture discs, posters or a free 7" single have all been used by label marketers in the past to boost sales. So why is nobody trying the same tricks in the download space? In an increasingly crowded market could packaging be used to give your new release increased stand out? Would a more attractively packaged download encourage P2P downloaders to buy the real thing? After all, most download releases come with nothing more than a copy of the albums front cover. And as there's plenty of widgets that can get the cover art for you, hardly a problem. Wouldn't you think that someone would have looked at how to package a download, and to see if that was one way of making them more attractive?

Well, some labels think they may have the answer by producing a 'physical' product in the shape of a USB memory stick. Some of these little critters are really attractive (see these White Stripes examples, above). But what about the rest of the packaging? Is all we really want a flashy outer-casing? And once you have a few hundred of these pesky USB keys, how will fans use or display them? And importantly in this day and age, is it a particularly green way to release your music?

The second options to provide something for free with the download.

I finally got around to downloading LCD Soundsystem's excellent album of music to exercise to. Nike commissioned the piece entitled 45:33, which was initially only available to download from iTunes via the Nike+ website. And as with an increasing number of album releases on iTunes, it comes with a downloadable booklet. But that's where the problems start! The booklet is simply a PDF facsimile of the CD booklet. Fine you may think but, this has got to be be the most uninspiring piece of packaging I've ever seen. And it's not just this particular release. I've yet to see any digital booklet that looks like it has been designed for the computer rather than for a physical CD. And worst of all these booklets won't work on you iPod or MP3 player, which makes them virtually useless! 

citizensound says: 

It makes us wonder if labels still employed their own art departments, would download packaging have moved on? Would a new breed of digital artists and designers have been employed to develop exciting and innovative interactive packaging that added some real value to the listening experience?

Would something as simple as a karaoke functionality on the lyrics or an interactive gaming facility encourage younger music fans to pay for downloads, rather than bluetooth them from their mates in the playground?

And what do older fans like me want from this sort of packaging? In-the-studio footage of the album being recorded? Or access to technology (like U-MYX) that allows me to make my own mixes of my favourite tracks.

Let us know how what sort of packaging you would like to see attached to a music download…

Here is Meek Warrior the album from Akron/Family. Great visual.

Those people at young gods records sure know something about strong visuals in their album covers. Have a look here

More over at Type Records…

Just another excuse to show the great artwork of equally great music from Type records…

So I have been chatting with my online friends about great album covers. We were thinking of the ones where the visual impact of the album cover fused closely with the sound inside the album. Integrated Communication if you wish…

Here are one example:

Bim Sherman - Miracle. A legendary reggae singer. This album fused his great voice with the sound of the indian tabla…Serene, Calm, spiritual music. Now look at the cover. It gives that sense too…