Been contemplating the sound of bells. Not the whiskey (not a fan) the big things that hang from churches…

Now I am not someone who is a fan of campanology.

I am fascinated by the role that church bells have played within certain communities.

These seems to be three purposes for the bells. A time-keeper, a way of gathering people together and a signal for people to scatter.

The chiming of the bells have shaped many communities’ days. The bells were the community time-keeper.

When not setting time, certain chimes signaled a call to prayer, where the local community would gather.

Other sounds, out of sync with this fixed sonic calendar, would raise the alarm within the community, warning the townspeople or flooding, attack or other such dire situations.

Tip for brands thinking of a sonic identity
When considering the sound of your brand, consider the roles that sound will play. A simple bell has played numerous roles in certain societies for centuries. The danger for brands is that the sound you have presently might be sending out the wrong signal to your community. When you think you are gathering in your potential ‘community of brand fans’, you might actually be getting them to run away as fast as you can. It might be time to listen to your brand more carefully.

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

Spending some time in Lisbon recently. A city that could be defined sonically by the cars rumbling over the bridge, the sound of the Tram bell, or this, the sound of a man calling out for people to buy the lottery ticket near to the fantastic Santa Justa lift…

I have been experiencing the highs and lows of easyjet recently.

The Easyjet Low:

A 1950 flight from Madrid to London Gatwick gets delayed for 70 minutes because the guys checking the tickets at the Gate let on a passenger who was heading to Luton, not Gatwick. It took a while for the ‘extra’ passenger to be tracked down and taken off the flight. We get to Gatwick as the thunderstorm hits the airport, so we get redirected to Stanstead! There, the pilot parks up then offers the passengers two choices:

Option 1: We fuel up and take off immediately for Gatwick (the weather had cleared by this time)

Option 2: We get off at Stanstead then take coaches back to Gatwick.

As all hell breaks loose on the plane, with people at the front dictating terms to the pilot, whilst we sit at the back, the pilot then announces that three people want to get off the plane (Probably live in North London and couldn’t believe their luck!) He says he cannot force them to sit on the plane, so therefore EVERYONE has to disembark. So we then face another long wait for a bus to take us to the terminal, then a longer queue to get through Passport control (well it was around 2a.m. by now). Oh and no bus waiting for us. Given I had my car at Gatwick, i had no choice but to get in a cab firm who thought Xmas had come early (Yeah mate, that will be £128 to Gatwick…). Shared the cab with three others, got my car and got home around 4:45a.m.

The EasyJet high
This week I flew from Lisbon to Paris with Easyjet. As we were taxiing towards the terminal, Easyjet put on this music

The Sound of Easyjet
Now this is clearly the Sound of EASYJET that the company wants to leave with us. Uptempo, positive, fun. This would have worked for me but for two things…
First, it conflicts with other sounds of easyjet I head on their planes (so no consistency)
Second, I still hear that crazy pilot in my head offering passengers that choice…

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…

Probably the best known example of the music to an ad being turned into big hit is the Coca Cola ‘Hilltop’ ad of 1971. The jingle ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke’ became the global hit ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’.

However, one I came across recently is this.

Is seems that Richard Carpenter saw this ad and thought it could be turned into a song. With sister Karen singing, it turned into a massive hit a year before Coca Cola did the same thing with The New Seekers…

Slight problem though, who remembers Crocker Bank?

So how do you make FMCG brands interesting in the digital space? What is the reason to go to newtoothpaste.com?

We all buy fizzy drinks, baked beans, toothpaste and washing powder, but they aren’t necessarily the kind of products you’d think about googling to find out more.

Beinggirl.com, which is aimed at a young teen audience, gets around this problem by keeping Proctor and Gamble’s female sanitary products (such as Tampax, Always and Alldays) firmly in the background, but instead provides a forum for teenage girls to find out about and discuss their problems and interests. The site, now available in 21 countries around the world, includes plenty of helpful advice for teenage girls about their bodies, sex and relationships, plus simple beauty tips, fun online games and you guessed it, music.

The music content on the site revolves around providing the latest audio and video clips from the likes of Akon, Lady GaGa, Taylor Swift, Sugababes, Jonas Brothers, Ashlee Simpson and Kate Nash, a pretty good selection of artists for the target audience.

However, there are a number of areas where the site’s music strategy falls down:

(more…)

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. And to prove it, over the last year we’ve had to track down a wide range of music - from a collection of Arabic and Indian music for a series of compilation albums for a client in the Middle East, to finding and licensing an obscure 1920’s recording about Watermelons!

Our latest sampler in the “It All Ads Up”  series will give you an idea of range of music we can deliver - highlighting some of the great new music that is tickling our fancies at the moment, that also brings together of those musical treasures that are hidden at the back of our collective record collections!

This latest podcast includes music from the Superimposers, Fanfarlo, St. Vincent, School Of Seven Bells, Faunts, Fever Ray, Trost, S-Tone Inc, Speech Debelle, Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, El Michels Affair, DJ Sheepdog v The Gossip, The Soaked Lamb, Yael Naïm and the Orchestre National de Jazz, Notty Culture, Quantic Presents and O Yuki Conjugate.

We hope you like the music. If you want more information about soundsearch contact mariana@citizensound.net

To listen now:

To download the podcast:

I was in Lisbon last week speaking at the 11th Festival of the Creative Club of Portugal.

Fantastic venue.

Thanks to Manuel Faria of Indigo and the CCP for inviting citizensound to speak.

After Manuel kindly introduced me, I raised the importance of a clearly defined sonic identity for brands and public environments where people congregate (from the park to a country).

Seemed to go down well with an audience that comprised of marketing folk, creative agency people along with some really fun and smart students.

We had fun with trying to shape the Sound of Lisbon. Will post up a little soundscape that combines all of the sounds that the audience suggested.

I came across this fantastic quote from Charles Dickens last night while watching an interview on BBC2’s Newsnight with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who was talking about the impact that wireless reading device’s such as Amazon’s Kindle might have on what constitutes a book in the future. You only have to look at the humble newspaper to see what impact the internet has had, allowing them to add audio and video, while users can also interact and contribute in a way that would have been impossible twenty years ago. So what opportunities does this open up with the advent of the Wi-Fied digital book?

Certainly adding a musical soundtrack to the latest best-seller could be an interesting way to attract younger readers to books (if like me you have two teenage boys, you’ll know how hard it is to get them to sit down and read). However the ’soundtracks’ appeal could be a lot broader. A recent online survey done by beststuff.com, showed that almost 89% of the people surveyed liked to listened to music while reading, while only 1.3% preferred silence. That seems like an interesting opportunity to me. And with authors such as Jonathan Coe, Alan Rankin and Nick Hornby regularly referencing music in their books, as well as using music as part of the creative process, maybe the book soundtrack could add something totally new to the reading expereince?