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

…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…

It looks like I spoke too soon about the benefits of emusic’s deal with Sony Music for the users. What wasn’t immediately clear was the impact on the price that users would have to pay for their downloads. Some of the most loyal users have seen a 40-50%  increase in the price they are paying. And the response from the users have been staggering. emusic has received well over 1000 complaints in the last four days on their blog and message boards. And for Sony it seems that many of emusic’s most loyal users aren’t that interested in their back catalogue, at least not if it means doubling the cost of their music.

Since launch emusic has played a delicate balancing act between price and choice. They have kept  their prices low, so encouraging users to try lots of new music. This has been great for some artists and labels, but sadly it doesn’t seem to have provided adequate compensation for some of the independent labels who aren’t prepared to sell their music quite so cheaply.

However, it seems that the model simply wasn’t working for either emusic or the labels, and now the users are also up in arms. This whole episode brings up the age old question, what is the value of music, and to whom? Sadly the gap between the fans and the labels seems to be increasing, not getting closer.

Yesterday’s New York Times announced that Sony Music will be making some of their back catalogue available via download store emusic in the US, which up till now has only carried music from independent labels.

Although the major labels have never been keen on emusic’s pricing policy (an average 40 cents per track), the site’s ability to ‘long tail’ music via it’s extensive community has finally proved a big enough attraction for one of the major’s to finally cut a deal.

Although Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ effect has been criticised in some quarters, emusic is a rare example of a download store where the users are as interested in the so-called ‘misses’ as they are in the ‘hits’.

Sony like every other major label has some real treasures hidden away in their back-catalogue, and emusic’s community is one that will delight in discovering these fantastic hidden classics, in a way that iTunes users may not.

What emusic ably demonstrates is the importance that both community and recommendation play in driving music purchase.

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?