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.

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

Artists are increasingly embracing Twitter as a great way to connect with their fans. But its not just its simplicity as a communication tool that is attracting ‘celebrity’ users, it can also be a useful tool in helping you grow your fanbase.

US indie band Jimmy Eat World accumulated some 200,000 new Twitter followers in just over 30 days around their recent US tour, by encouraging their fans to use a specially built Twitter site that allows them to chat to other concert-goers at the gig they are attending. To use the system fans simply send a tweet to @jimmyeatworld, followed by the date of the concert they are attending, allowing them to be part of the twittering for that specific show. The band have also recorded one of the recent gigs and are selling it as a souvenir of the tour to its fanbase via it’s twitter site, offering it up as a $8.99 download in a range of formats - MP3, Apple Lossless, FLAC, and WAV.

The band now have almost HALF A MILLION fans following their tweets…

Writing regular blog posts for your fans is not up everyone’s street. But who said you had to write?

Kanye West’s blog is a great example of what you can do by developing a visual approach to blogging. Kanye regularly posts up images and videos that have grabbed his interest - be it some arresting architecture, a You Tube clip of a new track he likes, a cool new pair of trainers…or some bootlicious ladies!

A few months ago we posted up a picture of the anatomy of a modern musician/music manager that showed how complex their role has become. Tom Williams (a New York based online marketer and publicist) has tried to map out the complex role that social media plays in a bands overall business strategy. What is interesting is not just the range of social media tools that you need to able to manage these days (and his diagram is by no means complete), but also how many roles each tool plays in delivering the strategy…

Tom states that the SIX goals of a social media campaign should be:

1. reach more people
2. keep the fans informed
3. allow people to sample the music
4. sell their music and merchandise
5. provide content that people can pass-along to their friends
6. engage the fans to keep them coming back for more

Whether you like it or not fans expectations have changed in terms of the type of relationship they expect to have with their favourite acts these days – many of today’s fans expect Access All Areas from their favourite artists, so the need for Artist Generated Content is key in how you communicate with your fans and build loyalty.

But where do you find the time to keep all of your fans informed on what you are up to? Whether your life is made up of endless recording, touring and promotion work, or you’re trying to fit in your musical career in alongside a day job, connecting regularly with your fans can seem like just another task that can wait till tomorrow, or the day after…

Artists, managers and labels generally buy into the concept of Artist Generated Content, but in practice find it hard to deliver. Now this may be down to how you choose to communicate.

Writing a regular blog post is not for everyone, so what other simple methods can you employ to regularly communicate with your fans and make the whole task a little bit easier?

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.

citizensound went to see Jerry Dammers Spatial AKA at the Barbican this week.

Three reasons to go:

First a chance to listen to Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane tunes

Second, these pieces of music played by some of the best jazz musicians in the UK

Third to see Jerry Dammers do what he does best…be a band leader.

I read a recent article in Word magazine, covering Jerry Dammers point of view of the Specials reunion gigs which will not involve him.What was most interesting was his keenness to create fresh music (led by him of course) rather than just trot out the hits.

There are so many bands reforming to play their back catalogue live and earn a bit of cash from promoters and brands keen to tap into music lovers who want a trip down memory lane. All this makes complete sense. Everyone is happy.

Yet what I witnessed earlier this week at The Barbican was none of this. It was not merely a band doing covers of Sun Ra. This was not just a homage to inspiring figures in music either. This was a night that challenged, befuddled and uplifted many present. Visually and musically it was a spectacle. Sometimes the sound was terrible, sometimes it was perfect. Arguments ensued after about the night. People debated. People hung around and mingled with the musicians. It was a night of achievement for the artists to have been able to play such challenging pieces.

All of this, plus what was a truly magnificent version of Ghost Town that was part other world in its execution. After hearing this, the Specials on tour will just be a disappointment.

Whilst the Brand sponsors might not be wanting to queue up to get behind the Spatial AKA, I know where I will be. Roll on the next one Jerry.

We finally got hold of the recording of our DIY: Do or Die session at this year’s Venice Festival Of Media. You can listen to it here or by downloading it to listen to on your computer, iPod or MP3 player. Again a big thanks to Maarten Steinkamp, Jon Webster, Martin Stiksel and John Ingham for making it a fascinating session…

To listen now:

To download the podcast:

For those of you who are PC users, or are not iTunes users, the MP3 version can be downloaded by right clicking your mouse, here

After digging out my Desperate Bicycles records I decided to hunt out my copy of the first single by Scritti Politti. If that name seem familiar it may be from the hits they had in the mid 80s with singles such as Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) or The Word Girl, or you may even know the blissfull The “Sweetest Girl”, which got to the giddy heights of number 64 in the UK charts back in 1981 (the song was also the opening track on the NME’s C81 cassette which citizen Bay has been digging big time of late). However, before the band became an intellectual pop band much beloved by certain factions of the UK music press, they made a series of independently make scratchy DIY punk records. Scritti founder and current Dalston resident Green Gartside saw the Sex Pistols on the opening night of the Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy’ tour at Leeds University, and decided to form a band.

The band came to London in 1977, moving into a legendary squat in Regent’s Park Road in Camden Town. Scritti Politti were galvanised into actiom the Desperate Bicycles and released their first DIY single, titled ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ on their own St. Pancras label in 1978. The inside of the sleeve included information on the cost to make the single - recording (£98), mastering (£40), pressing (2,500 7 inch singles for £369.36) , Rubber Stamp and labels (£8), plus information on their distributor Rough Trade Records, then still a record shop in Notting Hill. And just in case you didn’t get the idea he first time around, they printed the costs of producing the John Peel sessions EP on that cover as well.

Green notoriously hates the bands early records, which he claimed “sounds like some anti-produced labour of negativity”, but he finally relented and let his label Rough Trade reissue “Skank Bloc Bologna” on the compilation Early, which brings together the bands first four singles and EPs. The album is available for download at emusic, or you can buy the album from the Rough Trade shop here, for the bargain price of only £6.99!