David Emery OnlineInterview: David Emery, Head of Digital Marketing, Beggars Group
In his role as head of digital at Beggars, David Emery has worked on digital campaigns for albums such as Radiohead’s In rainbows, Vampire Weekend’s Contra, and most recently the debut album from The xx. Sandbox picked his brains on the full gamut of digital marketing, starting with artist websites.
A brief glimpse into where my head’s at currently with regards to things like artist websites, Facebook, apps et al.
Visit ➔6music and why I don't care
I have never really seen the appeal of radio. I get my news from the internet, the papers, the television. I get my music from any one of the 'cater to your exact needs' online music services like last.fm or spotify or any of the unfairly overlooked podcast and online radio stations. FM/AM radio belongs in cars with tape decks. It does not belong in the age of bluetooth and iPod connectivity as standard.
As previously mentioned I’m a fan of 6music, but I will admit I don’t listen to it very often; occasionally on the weekend at most. I thought it was worth bring attention the other side of the fence – not so much against 6music, but more about the relevancy of radio when we have this whole internet thing.
I don’t agree with this article, but I wonder if many people under the age of 18 actually do.
Visit ➔MTV channel idents
MTV International (ie MTV in every country bar the US) rolled out a new identity and idents created by MTV's world design studio in Milan in collaboration with Universal Everything last year […] More recently (and potentially confusingly) we reported that MTV (in the US) has tweaked the logo in a separate (and for now localised) rebrand - although that logo tweak WILL impact in MTV International (non US) territories by the end of next year. Now MTV International has added to last year's rebranding exercise by rolling out brand new idents designed specifically for its separate, genre-based channels
Nice ‘brand harmonisation’ you’ve got going on there MTV.
I can’t help but feel like this raft of changes-for-changes-sake – most notably, from my point of view, the rebrand of MTV2 to the vomit-inducing MTV Rocks – is a last ditch attempt to become relevant again when it comes to music videos. It’s not going to work though; music video has found its true home on the internet, and it’s not going to be on TV in any meaningful way for much longer…
Visit ➔Music Plus One
Web 2.0.
A phrase I think we’re all quite happy never to hear again, right? Luckily it seems to have died out – of over use, of course – of late, which is handy as no one really knew what it meant anyway.
Similarly – although a while later, encapsulating the relationship the two industries have quite nicely – we have also seen the rise of the term Music 2.0 as well, which has a similar utterly wooly definition.
By ‘utterly wooly’ I mean non-existent. It’s a poor rip-off of meaningless hype-fuel, spouted by people who don’t know what they’re talking about (see also ajax, and now HTML5).
Music 2.0 – definition-less as it is – seems then to be mostly about the Web 2.0-ification of the music industry, so things like Blogs, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, social networking and all that blah blah blah. Digital music, the ramifications of piracy and reduced barriers to entry all could and do get lumped into this vague category which pretty much covers most ‘industry’ discussions of the ‘horrific’ (read: different) future of the music business.
To me though this is all very much a continuation of the state of affairs we’ve had since the outbreak of recorded music;...
Read more ➔Steve Lamacq on 6music
The cultural hole it would leave if scrapped, would have terrible repercussions for everyone from small promoters to indie labels to bands and to music fans of all ages. We’d be denying people the chance to hear music which could – even in just a few cases – alter their life, as listening to John Peel changed mine.
I’ve held back from writing about the proposed closure of BBC 6music as I don’t think I have anything to add to the debate that hasn’t already been said, and by better writers to boot.
Steve hits the nail on the head here, of course. None of the arguments hold any weight when examined with any thoroughness; it’s just politics, plain and simple.
Visit ➔Foals - Spanish Sahara
Enter your email to receive an exclusive remix of 'Spanish Sahara'
Lovely new song from Foals – I’m not quite sure though why they’re only giving away a remix of it; I’m a fan of Foals, not whoever has screwed with a song I don’t really even know yet…
Visit ➔
Scrobbling Timelines
Graphs are clearly Laurie’s raison d‘être, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that a great way of thanking him would be to write some code that does something we’ve been working towards for some time at Last.fm: generating personalized, real-time scrobbling history graphs.
I love graphs, me. Last.fm + graphs is hence a match made in heaven.
I know a lot of people use Last.fm for things like the recommended radio, forums and all that jazz but I use it solely for scrobbling and storing that data – what I played, when and how often. In fact, the more ways I could replicate the idea of scrobbling across other media the better; I’d love to scrobble watching films and TV (which technically could be done by Sky if they wanted), reading books and magazines (maybe on the iPad?) and all sorts of other things; in fact, it’s what interested me in Foursquare, which is pretty much scrobbling of location.
My scrobble graph can be found here.
Visit ➔Zoom With Your Feet
“3 songs, no flash.”
It’s the standard – and also mildly disappointing – phrase you hear more times then not when you pickup your photopass before a gig. I ‘get’ why it’s done – I know if I was a band I’d want fans in front of me rather then photographers, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. If you don’t know the venue there’s always that hope that maybe they don’t have a strict policy, although chances are that if they don’t have limits then they probably don’t have a photo pit either which brings its own set of challenges (mostly surrounding the fact that you’re pretty much rooted to the spot).
I know, I know – never happy, always complaining.
The lack of flash is normally ok – I’ll use flash if I can, but only to boost up the light that’s there already; pretty much all of my favourite photos I’ve taken are made interesting by the stage lights. That being said, every now and then you come across a gig where the lighting guy decides not to put the front lights on and you’re pretty much screwed (see Julian Casablancas at the Forum where I only...
Read more ➔MusicDNA Wants to Compete with Apple's iTunes LP Format - But Will Anybody Care?
MusicDNA, a new file format that looks a lot like Apple's iTunes LP format, wants to bring liner notes to the 21st century. MusicDNA is a new rich-media extension for digital music files that enriches songs and albums with additional data like lyrics,
I’m not super into the idea of these new ‘rich-media’ music formats – does anyone really want them? – but what I really don’t understand about either this or the rival CMX is where the hell people are supposed to buy these things from?
You’re certainly not going to be able to buy these things from iTunes (as they already have a rich-media format and have implemented it in the form of iTunes LP) and is it worth anybody’s time to make one of these things if you can’t sell them on the biggest music store?
Visit ➔