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.

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

Once upon a time, artists struggled with the perfect running order of the songs for the LP (that’s a big round flat bit of plastic that sound came out of when it came in contact with a needle, and often came packaged in hideously/beautifully designed cardboard).

Which songs should be on side 1, which on side 2? What should open, what should close?

Then CDs turned the two-sided experience into one long experience or a hop/skip/jump experience as people decided whether they liked a track after the first few notes…

Now we have an artist like Zero7 (Zer07?) putting their album up on soundcloud to allow the fans to have a good listen to the album before they buy. Can’t argue against that. But what are the fans listening to? Do they listen to the full album all the way through?

Well, initial results shows that fans a little bit lazy or pushed for time.

There is a clear falling off of listening as you head down the tracklisting. So what do you do if you are a band who wants people to listen to all of your tracks (if you didn’t care, then why put them out in the first place?!)

One simple thing really for starters. Mix it up. Flip the running order on soundcloud and other services and see whether that gets more people listening to track 10 vs track 1. Subjectivity suggests that first track isn’t always going to be the one that defines a fan’s relationship to you. Mix up the listing on myspace.

For many artists the running order will continue to be important. However, if you want fans to discover your music, be warned that they might buy into it that readily. Introducing your music to them might need a little flexibility on your part…

…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…

Been around for a while but still the concept of a restaurant that shuts off your ability to view food is a splendid thing.

The Nocti Vagus restaurant in Berlin provides an  experience of food that demands you to depend on your sense of smell, taste, sound and touch. Much like Gordon Ramsay goes on about a chef needing to the food they cook, so we as customers place much emphasis on how food looks rather than how it tastes/smells/sounds/feels.

There is something wonderful about this restaurant that gets people to focus on the importance and joy of food, rather than the superficiality of ‘first appearance’.

There is also much to gain from this restaurant for those marketers who wish to utilise the power of all senses in their engagement with customers.

Mind you, I still hate celery and cherries, blindfold or not…

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…

So I woke up and I am supposed to go and check out the nominees for the Mercury Prize, at The Hospital Club, at 11am..do music industry people even wake up before 11am?

Kasabian played live right in front of me, while I was still trying to have my morning dose of caffeine, then comes Lisa Hannigan with her beautiful voice….Superb.

Then you enter the press room (and this is me with my blackberry) and there are ALL the nominees plus all the media you can think of.

There was my favourite album of 2009 - Speech Debelle’s “Speech Therapy” (here’s a piccie of me with Speech!)…a band whose members had the worst hairdos I’ve ever seen in my life…The Horrors (really? Could never guess), Florence & The Machine (Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) - best video clip ever) she didn’t know how to handle the actual prize for the photo hence the strange position she held it in…Bat for Lashes´ Natasha Khan is the kind of girl I wanna be, cuuute…La Roux wasn´t there ( I believe she is in the US, good for you)…The Invisible band were there, and man they’re not Invisible whatsoever, and as you’ll see from the photos one of them is most definitely NOT INVISIBLE at all. You can check out all my photos from the Mercury launch here

And this years nominees are:

Florence + the Machine ‘Lungs’
Kasabian ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’
Speech Debelle ‘Speech Therapy’
Friendly Fires ‘Friendly Fires’
La Roux ‘La Roux’
Bat for Lashes ‘Two Suns’
The Horrors ‘Primary Colours’
Glasvegas ‘Glasvegas’
Led Bib ‘Sensible Shoes’
Sweet Billy Pilgrim ‘Twice Born Men’
The Invisible ‘The Invisible’
Lisa Hannigan ‘Sea Sew’