The Oxfam-chic has been abandoned in favour of boiler suits in their latest web outing – a huge Heath Robinson (OK, since they’re from Chicago, Rube Goldberg) contraption to rival the one in Honda’s Cog advert. Ironically, given the fuss they’ve been making about revenues from embedding their previous treadmill viral super-hit, the video wasn’t embeddable, but sponsorship from a certain insurance company means that we can now save you the trouble of clicking all the way over to YouTube for this little beauty:
Can music streaming ever be a viable alternative to hard copy and download music sales? WMG’s Edgar Bronfman has his doubts, and looking at some of the figures being published in the media they might seem reasonable. Increases in the number of users on services that provide on-demand music streaming (where you pick the track you want to hear like MOG, Spotify, and Grooveshark) correspond to decreases in music sales, while increases in use of radio’ streaming services [Last.fm, Pandora] seemed to drive more sales. There doesn’t seem to be any mystery as to why this might be; Spotify’s and MOG’s users no longer have any reason to buy music from other sources once they’re signed up (particularly as they can put their playlists on their iPods and other mobile devices if they buy a premium account), while Pandora and Last.fm’s customers have no guarantee of getting a particular track on their playlist again, so they have to buy it to hear it whenever they want. This might seem to be an open and shut case for the record labels; one service drives sales, while another cuts revenue – but it’s not quite as simple as that. Spotify has massive customer appeal, as the hordes that try and sign up every time they re-open user registration prove, and it also drives a lot of interaction with listeners; according to Spotify’s own figures the average use playlists around 15,000 tracks. The vast majority of Spotify’s users might be on the free-to-listen ad supported plan, with only single figure percentages signed up to their £10 a month premium package, but it’s clear that the proposition is incredibly attractive to consumers. The premium users represent a healthy annual income for the record labels to share with the platform; £120 a year is not an insignificant spend, and the potential for fledgling on demand platforms to increase their advertising revenue so that even the non-paying customers are generating profits for the record labels is proportional to the platforms’ desirability and popularity,
On demand services are what the consumer wants, and are proven to reduce the incidence of file sharing and online music piracy, something that unequivocally costs the music industry. Cutting off support for such services would surely drive a proportion of users back to illegal, non-revenue-generating, methods of consumption. Assessing the profitability of on demand against radio streaming will have to be done over the coming years as the platforms mature and adjust their business models, but it seems unlikely that killing off the most eagerly recieved of the net’s music biz babies just as they’re getting established would be a rational strategy for the industry.
For our part, we’re seeing tangible revenues come back for our artists from on demand services, and we’re happy to be able to help independent artists get music up on Spotify and in other online stores.
Since Damon Albarn and Jamie ‘Tank Girl’ Hewlett’s collaborative cartoon band Gorillaz were nice enough to give YouTube an exclusive on the video for their new track ‘Stylo’, YouTube have let their fictional bassist Murdoc Niccols curate a post on their Celebrity Playlist section. The mask slips a little bit, and Murdoc’s voice betrays him as an excitable 40 year old man, rather than a sharp-toothed ego-bass-maniac. Some of the videos are nice, like the clip from Jacques Cousteau’s ‘Silent World’, and others are revealing, like the dressing room rehearsal of “Hip Hop”, by Mos Def and my favourite colliery band/rap mashup group, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (who you should definitely check out on dino-space here). Anyway, here’s the clip – and no, Charlie Bit Me isn’t on there, odd, considering the teeth thing.
If you haven’t seen the Record Club project that is being run over on Mr. Hansen’s website, it’s worth a look. He’s collecting transient teams of highly talented and professional musicians and jamming out ‘covers’ of classic albums in a day. The tracks thus produced are then breathed on and released weekly in video format through the site. The current slew of tunes is from Skip Spence’s album OAR, and includes some [I think] really interesting stuff. This strange upbeat video is called ‘Lawrence of Euphoria’, reminiscent of some of the punchier stuff from early in Beck’s career, but there are also tracks like “All Come To Meet Her”, which positively reeks of Fleet Foxxes, and “Weighted Down”, which has got Feist’s imprimatur all over it. Lovely stuff.
This collaborative project is bearing fruit from different branches – funk/soul producer Jamie Lidell’s new album will feature both Leslie Feist and Beck, whom he worked with on the Record Club project. Nice to see they’re building stuff together, and that success breeds creativity. All Beck’s videos are available on his Vimeo channel here: http://vimeo.com/videotheque
We blogged about the release of Hot Chip’s new album ‘One Life Stand’, which we thought was pretty cool, and now they’ve been interviewed on London’s X-FM discussing their development of the album and how they work together as a band: you can stream the interviews here, and stream the album here.
The BBC is looking hard at it’s digital radio services, which are costing it a vast amount compared to the audience numbers they attract (£25,000,000 for an audience of some 300,000) – a similar amount to their period drama productions per hour. With that in mind, we’d like to recommend lending an ear to Jarvis Cocker’s new music show on 6 Music, widget below:
Even though we don’t do her digital music distribution, we still love Lady Gaga. She’s every bit as much of a paragon for the new music industry as Radiohead and Trent Reznor, as a long article on the Wall Street Journal, in which they extol her virtuosity at replacing the ‘lost’ revenue from the music she gives away with other sources of income: touring, licensing, make-up endorsement deals…
An interesting point made in the article is that:
…much of Gaga’s audience got her music for free, and legally. They have listened to free streams—by the hundreds of millions—on YouTube and the other online services that Gaga currently leads, according to research firm BigChampagne. On MySpace, Gaga has had 321.5 million plays. By contrast, singer Susan Boyle tallied only 133,000 plays, despite scoring the No. 2 selling album of 2009. A difference (among many) between Gaga and the dowdy Scotswoman discovered on a British talent show: Ms. Boyle’s material, including “Amazing Grace,” was traditional—and so were most of her buyers. Some 97% of her albums were sold on compact disc.
This really underlines the generation gap between Gaga and Boyle, which points at a larger truth – while it is still possible to have enourmous commercial success through the traditional routes, Boyle’s fame being delivered mostly through the TV and her sales being on CD, this market will be dwindling with time. Young consumers are more used to getting their music online and for free.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch sat down for a coffee-table interview with Myspace’s new CEO, Owen Van Natta for this chummy interview:
Myspace will be making an effort to re-enliven its music content, focussing on “discovery, sharing and showcasing” new content, including games and video. Read the full trasncript of the article here on TechCrunch.
We posted a while back about Gil Scott-Heron’s forthcoming album, and it’s proven to be a very interesting piece of work. Utterly heartfelt and honest, you can hear the age and frailty in his voice as he recounts deeply personal experiences. His sense of meter and rhythm are unfaded, and the quality of his writing has lost some of its agression, but none of its fire. Strongly reccomend pouring a long drink and sitting down to listen to this one.
You can listen to the album it right here thanks to the wonders of the internet:
It’s been literally decades since the progenitor of hip-hop released anything, so we’re interested to see how this new work is received.
Hypebot have revealed in a blog post that We7 are set to launch a paid-for premium plus service, over and above their £3.99 ad-free service, that will compete more directly with services like Spotify and Napster. No more information has yet been released either on Hypebot or on We7’s own site, so the rumour that the service will launch on the 1st of Feb may be overstated. We’ll keep an eye out.
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