If you were a tired, old major record label with a monsterous catalog and you were smart, you’d re-brand the entire thing, and expose it to the world in the most convenient way possible, creating licensing opportunities and legitimizing the sale of your digital music.
EMI seems to get this right with their new site.
They don’t currently sell any of their music, they point to Amazon. In fact they call albums “Merchandise”. They are attempting to create a Super-Brand. A searchable, indexed catalog of their music, useful for fans, artists, and potential licensees. In a digital world, there’s more promise in being a publisher than a record company.
The “Package” here, is an entire major label catalog, and they want you to use it. Find great music, play it, experience it, buy it.
P.S.: Cool, but where’s the API?
From the Package Anti-Pattern department:
As “Trusting the Consumer” inches it’s way to becoming The New DRM, many old attempts at DRM via remote control systems are being buried. One nasty effect of pattern failure is dropped support.
WalMart is ditching DRM for the Free World, but all previously bought DRM’s files will no longer work. Yahoo! Music Engine did the same thing last year.
The perfect DRM may indeed be invented some day, but for now, it still sux.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/09/27/walmart-pulling-the-plug-on-their-music-drm-server/
“Stems” are individual tracks of a larger mix, solo’d on their own. Kanye West released stems for his current single, “Love Lockdown” on his blog.
Other artists have been doing this for a while now, and it usually translates into more remixes, more air play, more exposure, and of course more publishing checks, going right back to the artist.
In regards to Digital Packaging, it’s important to take note of the demand for such musical ingredients, and realize that these are simply value added products attached to the overall brand of “The Release”. Even if they are not combined directly with the package, they are indeed associated with the “meme” of the marketing effort.
In this case, each related item has a collectible value, of which it becomes the fan’s responsibility to find, assemble, remix, and reproduce. Encouraging an active involvement in “The Package” only increases brand value and gives the amateur producer, dj, and fan, a role in promoting their favorite music.
Esquire E Ink Cover
The October 2008 issue of Esquire Magazine has “The World’s First E-Ink Cover”. E Ink, created by E Ink Corporation, sends electricity through a LCD-ish liquid, turning the “paper” dark or light. Put the right programming, films and filters on top, and you have a flexible, animated display. The cover of the magazine doubles as a colorful flashing Ford Flex ad on the inside cover.
While this seems more like my 4th grade Casio watch than packaging potential, this material does bend, and will probably be your future newspaper. Somebody forward this to the LA Xpress quick.
If anyone was making any money from physical record sales, they might be able to afford to put this on a CD cover, but maybe a special limited edition poster would be more appropriate. Might eventually be cheaper than fluorescent velvet.
Wait till the Wheat-Pasters get a hold of this.
This is the animation that is embedded on the front cover of the magazine:
Here is the Magazine “unboxing”. You can see a computer chip board, and what appear to be batteries. (Sorry EE students, I don’t know the lingo.) The Metallic sheet that the numbers are on, is the “paper” display.
Atlantic Records launched FANBASE a little over a month ago. Built in Adobe AIR, it integrates an iMeem player and Meebo chat, mixing news, video and music into a rich Desktop experience.
FANBASE apps are currently available for T.I., Shinedown, Simple Plan, Pretty Ricky. Apparently there are more artists available, but we couldn’t find them. One other interesting note, news from other Warner Bros artists is mixed in here for cross-genre exposure. (ie. Metallica news shows up on the T.I. app; bug or feature?)
FANBASE is a “shell app”, meaning that the actual app is just an empty AIR container, and all the content loads from the internet. One drawback of this pattern is that there is no offline experience, a net connection is required. The app takes up about 3/4 of your screen in full mode and can be collapsed to a thinner widget-ish size. A few minor experience bugs when we played with it (like overlapping audio streams when switching from full to collapsed mode), but overall great job.
FANBASE is more of a promotional interactive desktop app, rather than an album package, but appears to be a well thought out platform in development for bigger things down the road.
We at PP love Adobe AIR and feel it will play a large roll in future packaging solutions.
BTW, Atlantic also has a digital store, here.
Ok, sit down first. Then read this.
Yes, Programmable Matter.
Could this allow you to download a package and have it take physical shape later?
Could you then collapse a physical package back into a portable digital one?
Could a hybrid digital/physical package evolve over time?
Timeline for working prototype given in the article: “A couple more years“.
Green Label Sound is Mountain Dew’s record label. The first release is a free download from The Cool Kids. They use banner campaigns to drive traffic to a basic website, which simply has viral Flash widgets which can serve a download.
The fact that the product is free means there’s no messy ecommerce, and the focal point of the widget is to decentralize and replicate the distribution of the file. There are 3 viral features here that seem pretty standard. Email to a Friend, Link, and Re-Embed.
Green Label Sound Download Widget
