(untitled) digital creative blog | Blog for (untitled) – digital communications specialists – creative, strategic and technical insights.

Despite rising sales of digital music, record sales as a whole have been in decline for sometime. The changing landscape of the digital market has impacted the way we consume music, and how up and coming bands engage with their audience.

The singles market now outweighs album sales with people downloading (and streaming) individual tracks rather than whole albums – 39% of music downloads are now singles. Coldplay recently refused to have their new album, Mylo Xyloto featured on SpotifY for this reason alone. They wanted their fans to listen to it as they intended; as an album. (In its first week the album broke the record with more than 80,000 downloads, so they may have a point.)

While the way we listen to music has shifted from albums to singles, this does not mean that we are listening to less music. The longer tail of our available choice of music unravels by the second, and this cannot be a bad thing. Our tastes have been broadened and there is an ever-growing space for new bands and sounds. This poses a fresh puzzle for new artists. How do new musicians make themselves known in and amongst the galaxies of material out there?

The music industry’s real sticking point about their loss of revenue due to single (rather than album) downloads is that they are losing the money to invest in new acts. It is becoming increasingly difficult for labels to justify spending money on any artist that may not have mass-market appeal. It is not the big stars that are really affected; their main revenue is concerts, with bands returning to the philosophy of making albums to tour, rather than largely living off record sales. More live music is a wonderful thing for everyone, artists and fans alike, however, we are faced with the same problem: Where does that leave the new acts?

The impetus is therefore handed to the artists themselves to discover and develop innovative ways to use digital to get them off the ground, as well as the support of loyal fans and believers. The internet has many times been hailed as a tool of democratization and it seems that in the music industry – where music purports to speak for the people, democratization and support is exactly what the future will rely on.

Social Media has had a profound affect on the promotion and share-ability of music from the (irritating) constant Spotify updates on Facebook to the fickle world of Youtube uploads, but while I’m sure we could all wax lyrical on what this means for music, I thought I’d have a look on some other innovations adopted by musicians and brands that we think are quite cool:

WeFund

http://www.wefund.com/

WeFund is a crowdfunding website for creative projects. The website helps actors, artists, comedians, writers and musicians (and basically any other creative output you can think of) get their projects off the ground with investments from people who are interested in and excited by what they are doing.

It was started in 2010 by lawyer Michael Troughton as a reaction to the lack of arts funding in the UK. The concept allows people to put their money where their mouth is and become patrons of what they really like or believe will be a success.

In terms of music, there is a plethora of styles and projects to choose from, from full chamber orchestras looking to record, to supporting students through their studies at music school, to funding the tours of aspiring bands. Potential ‘WeFunders’ write a short blurb about themselves, what their project is and its time limits. Then they record a video encouraging investment, and wait to see what happens. Patrons watch the videos and pledge whatever they feel they want to invest in the artist.

The whole atmosphere of WeFund and its participants, both the artists and investors, is overwhelmingly positive. Not allowing the doom and gloom of the record companies and dwindling sales to crush their dreams, singers and songwriters are putting their trust in their potential fans, and reaping the rewards.

Patronage is possibly the most traditional method I can think of to ensure the continuation of the arts, but digital has allowed projects like WeFund to bring the idea to a whole new market, and the optimistic atmosphere of WeFund feels like a precursor of exciting things to come.

Band Camp

http://bandcamp.com/

Bandcamp is an online music store that allows (mainly) independent musicians to promote themselves and sell their work and merchandise. It is free to join and artists are given a customizable microsite from which their fans can listen to their tracks for free, but can also download them. Bandcamp takes a cut of the sales, but this feels a small price to pay for the control it allows artists and the opportunity to get themselves heard.

The Bandcamp concept means that it is the responsibly of musicians to promote themselves, (enter on social media) but it also presents them as passionate musicians to real music lovers. It’s like an old record shop for proper ‘musos’, but online. And the passion for proper music, rather than those pop singles that are trawled out on iTunes, is evident in the sales that Bandcamp reports. The website claims that Bandcamp users have rejected the status quo rise of singles; with albums out-selling singles 5 to 1. Maybe Coldplay should get involved.

Banner Concerts

The Belgian bank Axion, a youth branch of Dexia, wanted to show their support for young musicians by creating a campaign that would appeal to their music engaged 12-25 year old market. They recognized the difficulties facing young bands and sought to give them a financial and logistical boost.

Axion introduced ‘Axion Banner Concerts’ by streaming live into the traditional spaces of online banners. 25 bands were selected to take part in the competition playing live on 6 million selected banner spaces. The public was asked to vote on their favorite band, and the selected group played a real gig at Ancienne Belgique, one of the biggest music venues in Belgium with live streaming on Axion’s webtv-channel. The bands were motivated to embed their Banner Concerts in fans social media pages and blogs to raise their profile.

Axion had great success in connecting with their market, and some impressive results:

The campaign website attracted 44,845 unique visitors, with 7,581 voting for their favorite band. The 25 bands themselves got 6,807,442 banner impressions of their live gigs, and added 43,479 impressions through viral embedding – with a 20% click through rate.

The bands and their fans were involved with Axion brand, and rewarded for their engagement in an exciting way that made sense to them. On top of this, Axion made their brand look cool and supportive. Everyone wins.

This article will demonstrate how to get you started with KickApps (now KitDigital) REST API service. This tutorial covers requesting and basic use of the token. Hopefully you can use this project as base for all your KickApps data integration, since most of the calls are pretty much the same, the only change is the url of a particular method and post parameters you are passing to it.

Having recently done quite an interesting project for a client (auto import of news items from kickapps to umbraco including media items download/reupload to umbraco with media files paths auto replaced) I realised that isn’t much struff online on KickApps/C# topic.

Visual Studio Setup

First of all, let’s create a new project in VS 2010. Make sure the project runs on .NET 4. In your visual studio 2010 click File -> New Project and select ASP.NET Empty Web Application. In the project name field enter KickAppsEmptySample. Once you’ve got your solution and project initialised, in Solution Explorer window (View -> Solution Explorer), right click on the project and select Add -> New Folder (we need 2 folders – Model and Provider).

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World’s hardest jigsaw puzzle. Hint: Start with the edge pieces.