This is what happens when you put your old family photos on Flickr.
11 months ago
The Office Music Democratizer
“You’re in a good groove at work, feeling focused. Then all of a sudden….WHAM! Literally. As in George Michael screaming his heart out at top volume through the office speakers. There have been many attempts at trying to make office music a democracy, but most involve a complex system that people ignore, or people taking turns running the jukebox. LastFM and Pandora are great solutions (they learn from what you like/hate), but they both lack an easy and public way for everyone to have their say. Our solution? Love it, Hate it, just hit the pretty button on the wall.”
Play Me, I’m Yours (New York)
An artwork by British artist Luke Jerram who has been touring the project globally since 2008.
From 9am-10pm each day, 60 pianos will be available to playacross New York City. They are located in public parks, streets and plazas.
A website has been made to post and share films, photos and stories about the pianos. While documenting each piano’s journey, the website will connect the pianos with their individual communities across the city. Following the artwork, the pianos will be donated to local schools and community groups.
Play Me, I’m Yours is being presented simultaneously in London and New York. Connect here with the street pianos in the UK.
Rdio - Social Music
This week I was invited to take part in the beta of Rdio, a new online music service from the creators of Skype. Unfortunately the site is currently US only so I’ll have to hold out for a while.
For us Europeans the site will appear a lot like Spotify, an unlimited online streaming service we’ve had access to for over a year. What Rdio trys to add to the mix is a wider integration of social features to help users share and discover new content. Spotify has a range of shared playlist options but the Skype team are adding a range of ways of exploring musical tastes and seeing what your friends are playing.
Microsoft has tried to play on the social aspect of music through it’s Zune mp3 player but options to share and lend songs direct from the device have failed to capture the public’s imagination.
Whilst iTunes has the beginnings of social interaction, Apple’s trump card may well be its recent acquisition of online music site LaLa - rumours of an online streaming service have persisted since and should it come its competitors will need to innovate fast to stay ahead!
Coca-Cola are the masters of sponsorship, putting their name to almost every major global event, and are leading the field in showing off how a strong digital presence can help brands fully capitalise on their investment.
Their impressive Youtube channel, which is so well implemented it’s almost unrecogniseable as one, focuses on goal celebrations with a video montage called ‘The Longest Celebration’. Fans who upload their own clips have a chance of winning tickets to the World Cup itself.
The campaign is backed by a TV/cinema advert extolling the joys of celebration, a key Coke brand value, on pack promotions and soundtracked by the official Coca-Cola FIFA Anthem ‘Waving Flag’, a song which itself has conquered charts the World over.
Elsewhere Coke’s international sites all have a heavy football focus offering a range of prizes, interactive content and highlighting their sponsorship of the recent World Cup Trophy Tour. Putting a more social edge on it they’re also calling on people to support ‘Rain’, their new African water project.
Despite not having paid for the World Cup sponsorship rights Pepsi is making sure it’s still associated with “this year’s summer of football” and features content from eight football stars including Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry and Andrei Arshavin and is hosted on a dedicated Pepsi website.
It’s a slick looking presence but their Akon-sung anthem is relatively unheard of and at last count their humorous Meerkat Vs Pepsi Max tie in had less than 300 hits on Youtube.
Marketing Magazine has a good article on Pepsi’s attempted spolier tactics here.
Everything Lady Gaga touches seems to turn to gold and, love it or hate it, her new video for ‘Alejandro’ (NSFW) hit YouTube today and is likely to rack up the huge numbers her previous videos have done (Bad Romance is the most watched video, ever).
In an age when television’s losing its way Lady Gaga has mastered YouTube like no other, putting her videos straight up on official musical channel ‘Vevo’ rather than relying on fans grabbing them off the air.
Social Media - The Future of Music
At WWDC tomorrow Steve Jobs will unveil a new ‘HD’ iPhone that we’ve already seen quite a lot of. It’s also rumored, but less guaranteed, that he’ll show off a new web-based iTunes store, potentially with a range of social media integrations (the result of it’s recent acquisition of LaLa).
You’d be forgiven then for expecting this to be a serious post looking at how viral social media tools might redefine the music industry and shift the power further away from established major record labels. Unfortunately for you then it’s actually just an anecdotal look at how music is rubber stamping social media’s mainstream status.
Though YouTube has hosted fan songs dedicated to social sites for years the first blatant mainstream mention I was aware of came from UK based rap collective N-Dubz in their 2009 song “I Need You” - “I been searching all over Facebook, but I can’t seem to find you”.
In his song ‘Candy’ Agros Santos actively recommends his fans check him out online, a great piece of integrated marketing, practically spelling out the web address. Chris Brown meanwhile, who famously quit the service after some rather public altercations, has reactivated his account and written a song named after the service: “I be pullin’ all the chicks, they follow me like twitter (twitter)”
Clearly then there’s still an opening for someone to write an actual good song about social media but it’s only a matter of time as the services become an even more central part of our lives. Watch this space for “Lady Gaga - Foursquare Funk” then ;)
