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…

Harrod’s. The Bazaar for the rich and famous.

Harrod’s Sale. Not like any other sale. So true.

I popped in today to have a listen to the shop. Entered through the main entrance and came upon the Sale Room full of Perfumes. It was shock and awe on my sense of smell.

Then the sense of sound kicked in.

As the room was filled with noisy people grabbing D&G Skunk spray and the happy sounds of disco house.

You could almost be at a bad night in Ibiza…Bizarre Bazaar indeed…

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.

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.

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.

Is is just me or has anyone else noticed that out of the 37 categories that you can sort the music in your iTunes library by, not one of them is by the record label.

While at the iTunes store things aren’t much better. At least it does tell you which label any specific track comes from, but when it comes to searching by label, well forget it.

Are Apple trying to tell the music industry that the only brands the fans care about in the digital space are the artists and iTunes itself, or did Apple get it wrong in assuming we that we don’t care much about which labels are responsible for providing the music we love?

For any music fans who grew up in the 60s, 70s or 80s labels were important, providing a stamp of authority, a guarantee of quality or just an easy way to discover new music. But in the new digital age do labels mean anything to the majority of young music fans who get their music via P2P sites, or if you are lucky download the odd tune from the likes of iTunes?

Or maybe the labels themselves are to blame for the demise of these once much loved brand names, by not cherishing their own once great heritage. The merger of once iconic labels such as Island, Virgin, Elektra and Veritgo into the four major labels has slowly destroyed their identity as they became no more than a separate department, or worse just a few lines on the holding companies P&L statement.

It wil be interesting to see how the boutique labels of the future tackle this new identity crisis.

So AC/DC, the scourge of the religious right in the U.S. and conservative parents everywhere, with albums such as Highway to Hell and Back to Black, have struck an exclusive deal with WalMart in the U.S. to distribute their music…and some of their hardcore fans are either furious or in shock. 

The issue of WalMart’s stringent music policy is not a small one, but I will deal with that elsewhere.

Let’s not get all worked up on this one though. AC/DC have never to my belief taken any big moral stand against the corporate establishment. They have sold millions of albums and made themselves and the label rich. To my knowledge, they have not flown to Darfur or spoken out against gun running. I don’t think they are anti-fur. They just want to play rock n roll.

Their lyrics are not a rallying call for revolution either. I am no AC/DC specialist, but a quick read of their lyrics includes one about getting beaten up by the girlfriend, one tying the girlfriend to the railway tracks, one about their girlfriend overdosing. They might say that their songs focuses on the personal relationships between man and woman and ‘good ol Rock n Roll’. Some people might find some of the lyrics offensive or uncomfortable, others just wanna rock and sing along without reading much into the lyrics. Mind you, Walmart might approve of their commitment to monogamy (Girl’s Got Rhythm).

Those fans up in arms about ACDC ’selling out’ is an interesting position for them to take. It seems the fans are ok to sing along with the band to href=”http://members.tripod.com/acdcwillie/highway.htm”>’Go Down‘ and ‘Night Prowler’ but not ok to let AC/DC secure their pension? 

Some bands start as revolutionaries then move to the right. Others flip-flop from one issue to another. Others just play music and keep their views to themselves. Not every artist is a revolutionary, not every artist has a high moral code on everything they do.

Now that artists are looking for new ways to distribute and market their music directly, there is no label to hide behind. They have to show their colours. Their fans will find out where they stand - and if it important to the fans, then they will react, and act, accordingly.

Artists now have to be clear where they draw the line. Radiohead and ACDC draw their own lines. One artist we know turned down a seven figure deal wit a brand, because the holding company is involved in arms trading. That artist draws the line very clearly. It is the artist’s choice. Yet the smart artists are also highly aware of the impact on their fanbase of any decision they take. Whether it is taking music to a new direction (Electric Bob Dylan, Christian Bob Dylan, ‘Before and After Martin Hamnett’ Joy Division) or signing up with WalMart, the artist takes the risk of losing fans. They also take the risk of gaining new ones.

AC/DC have made their choice. Maybe is is only about the money. If their fanbase collapses in the U.S. then they know the risk was too high. Somehow, I get the impression they have done their homework on this one.

However, Bob Lefsetz doesn’t seem to think so. He certainly is not happy. First, he mentions that 3 million copies of the Eagles album were shifted through Wal-Mart with no-one noticing. Three million people bought it, I think someone noticed. He suggests that these purchases were an impulse buy. Proof that it was purely down to impulse? None. I agree that supermarket shoppers make decisions on impulse at times. Supermarkets are experts at getting people to buy stuff they don’t need. Yet, shoppers in supermarkets make decisions for different reasons - their mood, time pressure, impulse, product positioning in aisles, shelf position and state of mind all affect the decision. However, to assume that all 3 million units were down to impulse purchasers is breathtaking in it’s naivety. The Eagles were never a ground-breaking act. They took what was a vibrant west coast sound in the 70s and packaged it up for the mass market. So it could make perfect sense from a consumer targeting perspective for The Eagles. A proportion of shoppers at Wal-Mart could be either those who bought Hotel California first time round or remember their parents singing along to it, or it could have been a gift purchase…or they might have liked the pretty picture on the cover.

On the one hand he seems to throw all Wal-Mart shoppers into the same trolley, then he champions the cause of the young fan who cannot get to the Wal-Mart store or cannot download it. On the first point, won’t the young fan just ask their mum/dad to buy it for them when she/her shops?

He is also stunned that AC/DC do not understand that the world is not about the album CD any more, and that it is about customer sampling digitally. He clearly is a fan of theirs and thinks they are making a big mistake. I agree wholeheartedly with him that musicians have to have a digital platform allow people to sample the music. Just one thing though, digital is global, and WalMart distribution deal is only for the U.S. Unless I am very much mistaken and unless a Chinese government style clampdown by Wal-Mart is underway, won’t the American kids will be able to find it online legally?

Maybe the hardcore AC/DC fans who have problems with this deal, but they could look at it this way: Imagine some soccer mom buying a WalMart AC/DC CD, then later getting into ‘Let There Be Rock’ as she heads off to pick up her 2.2 kids. Wouldn’t that be undermining the very fabric of society in one step?

Couldn’t that be AC/DC’s legacy to the RocknRoll revolution? 

I leave you all with something to cheer you up…Celine Dion and Anastacia doing a cover of AC/DCs All Night Long…

Some might find this joyful, some painful to watch…

Just wait for the moment when Celine says to Anastasia “Come on Girlfriend, shook me…”

First of all, I love FACT magazine. Definitely one of the most interesting magazines in the U.K.

The latest issue is not impressed with the UK clothes retail chain TopShop and NME the (once iconic) music magazine.

Louise Brailey spotted a recent TopMan Window display with three mannequins in the window, each representing a different ‘indie’ style. To help the indie fans chose the right ‘look’, TopShop have also provided three photos of an indie ‘hero’. The three are Pete Doherty, The Kooks and Noel Fielding (a UK comedian it seems). Lots possibly wrong with this (can’t they do better than Pete Doherty or Noel Fielding).

And she is right to draw attention to how brands can get it wrong when they appropriate music for commercial purposes.

However, not everyone has the confidence to chose their own look. Many of us have always wanted help. Once upon a time album covers, Music shows on TV and spectacular imagery in magazines such as NME and Sounds would help give pointers to people in terms of how to create their own look. The fact that some people turn to shop windows for inspiration is not in itself such a bad thing.

Louise is most put out that the NME has put it’s name to this, selling it’s soul in the process. Fair point, if NME is still the great voice of counter-culture music. Yet it is not and hasn’t been for years. Anything more than one paragraph on any chosen topic seems a bit much for the NME these days. Great music journalists of today (and there are some fantastic ones out there) would be unlikely to find comfort in writing for NME. Photos of a night out or pretty people at a festival seems to take priority over decent music journalism.

One note of caution though for FACT.  FACT:25 carries two  Advertisement Features, one on Shoreditch getting free Wi-Fi thanks to BT and FON and the other for the excellent Red Bull Academy. At first, both features come across as a piece of editorial, yet in the top corner of each piece, a very small header ‘advertisement feature’ is written. A little confusing. Let’s hope that things are made a little more clearer to their readers in the future!

One of the big problems we all have when we go into a music store to browse, be it in the high street or online, is what do we want to buy? For many of us it might be what fits with our mood at the time. Music stores are generally rubbish at trying to provide this sort of help, especially traditional high street music retailers. Some stores are racked in broad genres that are so broad they are useless (ABBA next to AC/DC), while others go so niche only trainspotters stand a chance of deciphering what goes where.

Music plays to our emotions, so why do retailers so often ignore them? Especially as music can be really functional; great to drive to, great to dance to, good to have a little cry to, music to lie on a beach to, or possibly provide the perfect background to your next dinner party (that’ll be your chillout compilation then). Maybe retailers could take a leaf out of a certain UK supermarket’s book (who really didn’t like me taking a picture of their display) and suggest products to suit every mood, or as in this case a wine to go with different types of food. Shame they didn’t rack some spicy music to go with the food and wine ideas though…