You are here: Home / Archives for Music

Quick Notes – Music Based Dating Site

December 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

What do your musical tastes say about the rest of your personality? Can musical tastes be a good basis for a relationship?

Enter http://tastebuds.fm/

This is a dating/matchmaking site based on music. Users enter their favourite bands or artists and the site will find you matches in your area. As a cool bonus, if you are a Last.fm user (the online streaming music site) you can import all your musical tastes directly.

This is a great, and very simple idea!

The site is just getting off the ground (currently, from India, there are 16 men and 1 woman who have registered).

According to Mashable, the online dating industry is worth over $1 billion per year and is bigger then porn. India, with around 15 million users, is the 3rd biggest market for this service, after China and the US. In western countries these services try to match people on the basis of personality, discovered through lengthy (400 question??) forms. In India, the main filter is community/caste (leaving out the regular stuff such as geographical region).

I suspect that in India, for the coming generations, caste/community will decrease in importance, if not for marriage then certainly for dating. Sites like Tastebuds which offer a different method of matchmaking will become very helpful!!

What else could you use? film/TV tastes? literary taste? food preferences?

Outside of matchmaking, how can you use music to create bonds within your community or workplace? At Zappos (the online shoe retailer) when an employee logs into their computer they are shown a photo of another employee and asked to rate how well they know the person. Imagine if it also showed their musical preferences? Over time you could build networks within the company based on these tastes….

Just a thought :-)

Filed Under: Marketing, Music Tagged With: , , ,

Music Themed Hotel–Escaping Blah!

December 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I travel a lot for work, and stay in plenty of very blah hotels, so any cool hotel concept catches my eye.

Obviously concept isn’t everything. The hotel has to be good at the basics. A great mattress and bedding. A soft fluffy towel. A good desk with enough power points. Good food. Quick service etc. But after that, you can layer on a concept to make the hotel unique.

India is years behind developed countries when it comes to hotels. Until a few years ago, the only choice was between great (lovely 5 star hotels) and crappy (old, run-down, usually overpriced).

A new generation of hotels is popping up. The 3 trends are:

  • Cheap ‘business’ hotels. The leading chain in this is the Ginger group. Rs.1000-3000 per night for a basic, but new/clean room with a proper mattress, 24hr hot water, self service pretty much everything, small gym, Wi-Fi etc. It’s a great vision for how to run a hotel – strip out all the non-essentials, make whatever is left work really well. These hotels are aimed at domestic business travellers.
  • Cheaper luxury brand hotels. This are things like Marriott ‘Courtyard’ hotels. They just leave off some of the higher end luxury features, and drop the room rates by about 20-40%
  • Boutique hotels. These are small, luxury, stand-alone hotels, usually opened by someone who has always wanted to run a hotel (or has a great building and doesn’t know what else to do with it :-) these might have 4-12 rooms and offer personalised service. Often the owner lives on-site.
    This first category is the one with the most potential. Ginger is building some pretty big hotels, but some of them are getting 100% occupancy, booked over a week in advance. To be clear, 100% occupancy is not the best thing for a hotel. It means the rooms have no natural down-time for maintenance, so the management has to refuse revenue in order to work on the rooms. That’s turning down short-term profit for long-term value, a trait for which Indian businesses are not famous.

It also means that demand outweighs supply. More people can build similar hotels, and there are enough guests for everyone.

The one thing that I don’t like about these hotels, is that they are bland. There is nothing distinctive or memorable. In these cases that is what they are aiming for, but once the basics are in place, there is plenty of scope for concept to be layered on top.

A great example of a concept hotel is the new Nhow Hotel, in Berlin, Germany.

The theme is music, here’s how they have created it:

  • All rooms with IPod connections and vast entertainment options
  • Guitar hire through room service
  • Top DJs playing in the bar
  • Live music in the hotel’s open spaces
  • 2 professional music studios,
  • Hotel staff include a full-time music manager, and many ex-students of local music colleges
  • Filling out the ‘Lifestyle” offerings are clothing sales from local designers, a headphone and streetwear store, and an art space.
  • The architecture and interior design are both striking and were created by star designers.

This is the sort of place that you could stay in, and would still be telling people about a decade later!

Other than the recording studios, guitar hire, and musical staff, most of this stuff is not uncommon at good hotels around the world. What these guys have done differently is grouped everything together into a THEME. Creating a narrative that weaves around their offerings helps to market the property and help to guide future business decisions regarding services and expansions.

Filed Under: Management, Marketing, Music Tagged With: , , , ,

Website Review: Hard Kaur World

December 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

 

7d0c24ec-c15d-45f4-add0-41b09fdee6a7The first thing that strikes you about HardKaurWorld is that this website is unbelievably heavy. The load times are huge, both initially, and when changing sections.

I suspect anyone with a slower internet connection than me would quickly give up. Viewing the site over a mobile device would probably be impossible. A site like this might be feasible in countries with fast broadband, but it feels a little disrespectful of the viewer’s time to use this layout in India, especially when it doesn’t add that much to the information.

Navigation is awkward. There is a school of thought that people ‘want to explore’ a website and ‘discover’ things. I disagree. The purpose of a website is to communicate information. This can be one-way (simply broadcasting the same information to everyone), or two-way (with some level of interaction that either provides feedback, or modifies the information being broadcast according to the viewer’s interests/location etc).

Fulfilling one of these options should be easy – the viewer shouldn’t have to search the screen for different elements, and then figure out what each element means in the navigational system.

This isn’t to say that the navigation system has to be boring or basic. A better example of a ‘fun’ website is www.mtvplay.in

Some of the social media links at the bottom of the page – linkedin, myspace etc just point back to the homepage.

There is a link to a blog page which is completely unfinished – the sample wordpress Blogpost, Comment, and About text are all still there and the sidebar hasn’t been setup with widgets yet

The link to the Hard Kaur Shop (to buy her merchandise) leads to a coming soon page

There s a Downloads page which has a few options on it (wallpapers in different sizes etc) but some sections such as ringtones and itunes, are “coming soon”.

The Bio page is truly awful. Its sad, because I really admire the work that Hard Kaur has put in to drive her career to this point, and she clearly has some serious life experience from which to draw inspiration and strength. This bio, however, is just blah blah blah. It lacks the two things that make for a great bio: a narrative and informative data. This section should have started in narrative form with her back story and finished with filmography, discography etc in a simple table format. She should really get a professional to write this.

There are a few other bits and pieces – some photos and videos. There are lots of spelling mistakes and typos scattered around.

I think the overall feeling you probably get from all this is: the website obviously isn’t finished – why is Chris complaining?

Because I was sent a paid promotional email for this website. So there are two possibilities:

  1. There was a mistake in sending the email. Someone scheduled it for the wrong date and it sent a couple of weeks early. Or,
  2. Someone thought that the website was ready to start promoting, which is a little bit scary.
    The other thing that struck me was – I don’t understand the point of this website. What is it for? Who is it targeting? That is completely unclear. As an informative site, it is too much work to find information. As a fansite, it is too static – no one is going to keep coming back and searching the site to see if anything changed. The feel of the site is too ME! ME! ME! (as if a design agency pitched “why don’t we make a site all about you”.

What would I have done?

  • Personally, I would have made the homepage dynamic – built around a blog – so that every time someone visits there is new information. The blog could be a daily update of: Hard Kaur’s own thoughts, news about her work and performances, links to other media articles. By pushing out lots of interesting updates you encourage repeat visits and can drive email subscriptions. This makes it less mememememe and a bit more youyouyouyou.
  • I don’t see the need to host photo galleries and videos on the site – all these things can be hosted more effectively on youtube, flickr etc etc with connecting links.
  • All the dead links and “coming soon” pages need to go. Including these on a live website is very lazy design and drives away readers.
  • Much lighter/faster design. Minimal or no flash. 953d8848-bc84-4027-ae1d-b6e48e08f503

Anyway, that’s just my thoughts. Would love to hear other people’s opinions?

http://www.hardkaurworld.com/

Filed Under: Marketing, Music, Online Tagged With: ,

Playbutton: Fashion Meets Digital Music

November 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Here is a neat little gadget for delivering digital music:pb5

The Playbutton is a little pin-on badge that come pre-loaded with music. It has a headphone jack, which is also used for charging the device. The graphic on the badge could be any image associated with the music.

What sets this little widget apart from other mp3 players is that the track play order is fixed, much like a cd. Additionally, you can’t take the tracks off, or put anything else on there, as there is no way to connect the badge to a computer etc.

This gives the provider far more control over the delivery of audio content. If you were giving some sample songs, or a commentary on something, you can ensure that it is played in order, and can’t be arbitrarily re-sorted (something I do by mistake on my IPod all the time)

The small graphic space also forces the producer to come up with something both memorable, and connective, so that you know what is on the badge, without filling the space with titles and words.

These will be going into production soon. It will be interesting to see how content creators put them to use.

Their super cool website is here: http://www.playbutton.co/

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , ,

Music Videos to Promote New TV Shows

November 14, 2010 By 1 Comment

I know this all happened a month back, but I have been busy moving house, so there have been a couple of posts stuck in my drafts folder, screaming to be unleashed Smile.

Two big, new, celebrity-driven TV shows – Masterchef India, and Bigg Boss (Indian Big Brother) – each created music videos as part of their promotional efforts. These videos built lots of buzz, were linked to all over the net, and ran on multiple TV channels.

I’m really curious about whether these types of shows actually need the big celebrity talent behind them. There is a common understanding in India that promoting anything is difficult unless celebrity names are attached. Book publishers often won’t organise launch events for their authors, unless the author can rope in a few Bollywood celebrities, regardless of whether they have anything to do with the book. All these TV shows worked internationally because of the interesting premise, setup, execution, and the naturally unfolding narrative and characterisation that hooked viewers. Anyway, I digress.

The videos are very different.

The  Masterchef one is instrumental, with a big kitchen filled with frantic cooks and Akshay zooming around as a conductor of sorts. The music is primarily rhythm based, drawing on the sounds of a kitchen such as pots banging and knives chopping. It is a very fresh treatment.

The Bigg Boss video plays like a very standard Bollywood ‘nightclub’ video. Cheesy rap and singing, nonsense lyrics, background dancers, and Salman Khan looking ‘cool’ in a thousand costume changes.

I tried to figure out viewing stats, but they are both running on so many websites that the numbers would never have been accurate. Anyway, here they are:

Masterchef India Music Video

 

Bigg Boss Music Video
Filed Under: Music, Television Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Music Cross Promotion – Radio + CD + Live

October 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

“Kal Bhi Aaj Bhi” is a popular radio show on Radio City playing older Hindi film songs (they call it retro music).

The radio station has collaborated with Saregama, a music company with the rights to many of these old songs to release an album – “Kal Bhi Aaj Bhi Classics”

To launch the CD, they held a live concert. The performers were top musicians, along with both new and established singers.

They invited 400 people to the concert – business partners, advertisers, agencies, press etc, and gave each of them a copy of the album.

Everyone benefits from a partnered-event like this. The radio station strengthens the industry view that they have “The Show” for this type of music. The music company gets a platform to launch a new album. Musicians, including newcomers, get a chance to perform live to an influential audience. Celebrity presenters and attendees ensure press coverage that hopefully will flow into album sales.

There are so many ways to build momentum for your product though cross-promotional partnerships, rather than just buying advertising.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: ,

BLAKC Just Found a New Fan… Me!

October 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

blakc pic Over the last 5 years or so my taste in music has really evolved from how it stood for the 10 years before that. Most electronic dance music is now out, heavy rock is out, ‘stupid’ hip hop is out unless it is really catchy, although intelligent hip hop is still loved, overall ‘thoughtful’ music is in. I’ve started listening to a fair bit of US country music and stuff from smaller singer/songwriters around the world.

I wish I could listen to more Indian music. I get tired of the film music that fills the radio station playlists. It can be great sometimes, but so much of it is, well, the same. Also my gym plays it all the time so I don’t need to make any effort to keep up with it myself.

I would really like to follow more Indian bands. The problem though is that most of the live music scene is based around heavy rock. It might be nice to drive to, but I can’t work while I listen to it, and that is most of my listening time. BLAKC is one of the bands that seems to be gaining traction. I’ve heard bits of their stuff before but found it too heavy. Imagine my happiness then when they perform a live set acoustically, at Blue Frog. I love acoustic music because it puts more emphasis on the lyrics and melody and less on ‘noise’.

But wait there’s more. They recorded the set, compiled it as a digital album, and put it online for free download. Then they promoted the download options through social media.

So from receiving a Facebook message, I was listening to the music less than 5 minutes later. Not streaming, but real, take-anywhere, mp3-on-my-Ipod music, Its light enough to work to, and after a few listens, l’ll probably like it enough to want to catch them live sometime.

Bands like BLAKC typically face a positioning problem. They already have a niche audience who loves them, their challenge is to gain exposure to a broader audience who might love them , if they get a chance to hear them. In India it is almost impossible to get good radio play, and there are so few venues that support live music. Its great to see them utilizing social media to develop their fan base, especially though showing off the variety in their music.

Great work BLAKC!

You can get their album here

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , ,

New Strategies for Performing Musicians

July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Poor music industry. Things really just keep getting harder and harder for them. Part of the problem now is that, for a while, the industry went through a bit of a ‘golden age’ that will probably never be repeated again but is still longed for by artists and executives. The public was happy to spend lots of money on plastic disks (and tapes before that) that cost nothing to make and were difficult to reproduce. Then everything changed. The industry just watched and kept trying to sell their plastic disks, even as everyone else started moving to MP3 files and sharing. Imagine how different the music industry might be today, if the record labels themselves had pushed for individual song downloads at low prices? They could even have developed mp3 players, much as the online bookstores are doing today with eReaders.

For smaller (but still known) artists, there was still the opportunity to make money through concerts. These were fairly easy to promote across the small and focused band of music media – channels such as MTV, magazines such as Rolling Stone.

These days, however, music media has splintered. Fragmented. MTV now has more reality shows than music. The few music magazines have turned into dozens of websites, blogs, radio shows, podcasts etc. For a small artist, it is very difficult to purchase enough ad space across all these networks to connect with the target audience.

This is forcing artists to look for innovate ways to further their careers.

A great example is Tom Petty, an American singer/songwriter, via KCRW’s On The Beat. He is currently launching a new album and accompanying concert tour. Here is the deal he is offering his fans:

  • Buy a concert ticket at a slightly higher price
  • Get a free digital copy of the new album
  • At the end of the tour, get 8 exclusive live tracks

This is an awesome idea, check out how everyone benefits:

1. The record label should be making some money from the ticket sales, in exchange for giving away the album.

2. The record label gets the contact details of fans, who are willing to buy concert tickets. This gives them perfectly targeted data for future sales efforts for either this artist, or similar ones.

3. The concert ticketing company gets good marketing support to help them promote the tour. Rather than just a ticket, it is now ticket + album.

4. For the performer, it means that the fans are already familiar with the album when they come for the concert, which creates a much better atmosphere at the event.

The only people who don’t benefit are the retail stores that would be selling the album, but since that is a rapidly fading market anyway, its hard to justify supporting something that needs to change its sales model. In India, most of the music stores are transforming to music/film/mobile/gaming.

The structure of this entire industry is quite different in India for a number of reasons:

1. Almost all popular music is from films. The music supports the film marketing and the film supports the music.

2. The audience is often unaware of who wrote or performed individual tracks. For live performances, the audience often prefers to see an actor from the film lip synching on stage, rather than the actual singer singing.

3. Because of the sheer amount of film music produced, it is difficult to get airplay for or promote independent, non-film music.

4. India doesn’t have a strong industry for paid performances. Despite the massive population, the big Indian cities have less than a 10th of the number of live shows each week that you would find in any large developed city. Further, only a tiny percentage of the Indian shows are paid. Most are free. This makes it very difficult for musicians to earn a living.

5. The few venues that actively promote live music are highly selective in their programming, allowing perhaps only English language music, or reserving most slots for international groups.

Things are slowly changing. As the middle class grows, interests in music will mature and diversify, and people will be more willing to pay for performances. It will be interesting to see how the media develops to support this.

Filed Under: Marketing, Music Tagged With: