Follow that band! The Radiohead model goes local

During lectures at Nomadic Marketing last week at the UCT Graduate School of Business, one band that almost all the lecturers referred to was Radiohead. This isn’t because they specifically liked the band (although Colin Daniels did confess to being a fan) but more specifically because of the way that the band released their latest album online.

Here’s the short version of what the band did

On 1 October 2007, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood announced in a brief post on Dead Air Space (the band’s blog)  “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days . . . We’ve called it In Rainbows”. Bypassing a traditional physical release in stores, Radiohead released the album as a download available for order from inrainbows.com on 10 October 2007. In a Wired interview, Yorke explained that “every record for the last four—including my solo record—has been leaked. So the idea was like, we’ll leak it, then. Radiohead’

The download, packaged as a ZIP file, included the ten album tracks encoded in 160 kbps DRM-free MP3 format. Upon purchase, the buyer was prompted to type in their desired price. The staggered online release of the album began at about 5:30 GMT on 10 October, but on 10 December 2007, the official digital download was no longer made available. A special made-to-order “discbox”, available for pre-order through inrainbows.com, was released on 3 December 2007.

(source – www.wikipedia.com)

One of the questions that was raised in the lecture was whether this business model was a viable one for bands, or whether it only worked for Radiohead because they were Radiohead. On the other hand, to quote Colin – “if the album was crap, this wouldn’t have worked.” Madonna soon followed suit by making digital downloads of her album available on line to similar success, and in his lecture on New Media Law Paul Jacobson also pointed me to the Nine Inch Nails free download case study which was also a success for the band.

Now it seems that we have the first South African take on this give-your-work-away-for-free model. Jet Black and the Multi Colours have decided to distribute their new seemingly untitles EP for free on the net with their overtone record label. When I first saw the post up on www.muti.co.za, I dismissed it without realising what it actually was –  a record label collaborating with a local band to make their music freely available online. This goes some way to validate something that Rafiq Philips mentioned on the WebAddiCT blog a while back: “We’re seeing the shift from the commoditisation of music to the commoditisation of attention in the music industry (…)”

I for one think that he’s right and will be keeping my eyes on JetBlack to see a) whether their attempt at the new community focussed business model yields positive results and b)whether they will follow Radiohead’s lead a step further and make the album available for purchase as a CD if the download campaign is a success. If this model does yield positive results, I think that we’ll see many more local bands and artists following suit, especially in Cape Town where there’s a wealth of musical talent with no real form of monetizing their gift (anti Joburg flame suit on,lol)

If anyone from the band or from overtone is reading this, drop me a comment and let me know how things are going.

Lester
P.S.  – I’m downloading the EP now and will post a review up here in the next day or two.

Lather, rinse, retweet – how i wound up @ technomadic

All week long i’ve been hearing stories on just how cool Twitter is and about how people have been connecting both locally and internationally, so I thought that I’d tell my own little twitter story.

How i wound up @ technomadic.

It’s all @magictim’s fault, really it is. I got on to twitter about two weeks ago. Sure i’d heard and read about it, but i though ‘what the hell good is a 140 character blog? I talk far too much for that to be of any use to me.’ And oh how I wrong I was.

I met Tim very briefly at Quirk eMarketing‘s staff bash a while back (the promise of free beer and pizza on a Friday night was more than enough to lure me there…) After baffling him about how i knew his name (i saw his pic on facebook) and chatting over a beer, I next met him online in the twittersphere (is that a word yet?). After watching Tim tweet to some of his contacts, I started following @simonebiz. That still sounds weird when I say it out loud. Anyway, I started following simone and one of her tweets read something along the lines of ‘Simone is looking forward to Nomadic Marketing.’ So me being me i busted in and asked about what exactly Nomadic Marketing was all about, since the name sounded really cool. She explained it all to me and then informed that sadly, registrations for the course had closed 2 weeks earlier 😦

Simone then recommended that I follow @daveduarte, who was hosting the course. So i did just that. Dave put me in contact with someone at the GSB and before you could say comfy geek slippers I was registered as a delegate at Nomadic Marketing. I’m sure that if they’d told me they’d be calling me a ‘delegate’ I would have signed up just so I could pretend to be Kofi Anan.

Anyway, I thought that it was really cool that I was able to get a tangible real world benefit from thus ‘new’ social network which is slowly taking a beakhold in South Africa. a clear indication on that power that these networks offer. UCT likes it too, since they now have my money.

As soon as I figure out how to add twitter feeds to wordpress.com‘s widgets, I’ll do just that.

Till then, a little birdie told me that you can follow me @here

@lesterhein

Gorilla Marketing – live from technomadic

Day 3 of Nomadic Marketing at the UCT GSB

Listening to Allan Kent from Saatchi and Saatchi give a talk on youth and mobile in the modern internet. Used this vid to illustrate the way that the line between producer/consumer and critic is blurring and how brands are no longer in control of their brands.

The original Cadbury’s ad

What happened when  the net got hold of it…

More to follow later

Augmented Reality with wine – live from Nomadic Marketing

I hadn’t heard about this concept about 15 minutes ago from Pieter Van Der Lingen, and he just fried my noodle with the possibilities that this tech offers.

About to start wine tasting session with Graham Knox from Stormhoek Wines and listen to him explain the details on the new wine tasting course available at the UCT Graduate School of Business. Full blog post on the day’s activity to follow.

Lester

live.love.create

It’s a big ad – live from technomadic

Dave Duarte will probably beat me to this, but I thought that this was a brilliant ad played for us by Pieter Van Der Lingen (link to follow soon) at today’s Nomadic Marketing Lecture.

Lester

Ola :)

Good afternoon Nomadic peoples

I’ve just noticed the difference between the geeks and the squeeks – all the geeks are rocking MacBooks…I’m sure you’re plannig to get one Tyler. Me too.

Now just waiting for Adii to whip out his multi-colour Mac.

Slip into a nice warm network

* a quick note – this blog was created using wordpress.com, google docs and mspaint 🙂 oh – and my phone

Live and Direct from Nomadic Marketing

I learned some pretty useful things today, and in my books that’s always a good way to end off a day. This is especially true when the knowledge acquired is engaging, exciting and most of all – inspiring. I hope that doesn’t sound too much like a Standard Bank ad…

As marketers we sometimes fall in love with the sound of our own voices, whether it’s a great video campaign, that ‘perfect’ press release or a creative piece that you just can’t stop looking at – it’s all your own voice. This outgoing broadcast which is then shouted at your customers and prospects with the hope of consumption tacked on to the bottom. As today showed us, this old media approach to marketing with its push tactics is no longer relevant (though I’m not really sure it ever was). Consumers are now users; punters become publishers, and communication now flows both ways in the marketing transaction.

As the Clue Train Manifesto highlights in its very first point – “markets are conversations”. Sooner or later your company will come up in the conversation, and if you’re not listening then not only are you not gaining valuable user input on your product (which we pay research firms thousands to get), but you also loose the opportunity to defend any inaccurate or defamatory statements made about you in the conversation. I guess the short version of all of this is that we had better get into the conversation 🙂 Especially when considering the rapid pace at which information is spreading across the glossy plains of web 2.0

These days everyone’s connected. Social networks are springing up all over the place, with different user groups and types flocking around different networks. There’s even a network about a product called Flock.

Mike wobbled my brain with the story about the effect that the Engadget blog post had on Apple‘s share price and the Dell laptop fiasco . I always knew that the blogosphere (lol) had power, but to see it demonstrated on that scale was a real eye opener.His insights into the way that Google works and especially the effect of the long tail also shed some light on a few questions that I was looking to have answered but didn’t know I wanted to ask.

One of the real highlights of today was seeing the pace at which the quantity of information is exponentially amassing and the futility of trying to consume or control it all. As Dave showed with his time versus information graph (i forgot to add the years) there is just too much information out there for one person to realistically consume and compute. The graph is a pretty rough illustration of this overwhelming fact, and for some real perspective, check out the Shift Happens vid.

One of the speakers that I was really stoked to see was Adii. I encountered Adii’s work on the weekend before the course (before I knew that he was a speaker) while I was searching for a template for my personal blog (http://lesterhein.blogspot.com) I wound up using one of Adii’s gorgeous designs so I was thrilled to be able to meet the man in person. I could see from the lightbulbs going on behind some of the eyes in the lecture hall that he had really demystified blogs for many of us and that the ‘iron curtain’ of adoption had been raised when the simplicity of the medium was demonstrated. WordPress was promoted by all to be the most accessible and powerful blogging platform (both in .com and .org guises) and there are a few more converts walking the streets today (@pamsykes). Well done Adii 🙂

On the topic of blogs, special thanks to Dave and Mike for opening my eyes to Afrigator and Amatomu (local blog aggregators). I’ve often felt that my blogs float around in cyberspace without any local audience or connection. This was due to me being under the false assumption that there were only a minute amount of South African bloggers about, and so there was no readership for my blog here. I can honestly say I haven’t been this happy to be proven wrong in a while 🙂

I know that this pilot post didn’t cover all the ground i intended to, but my bed just left a comment on one of my other blogs saying I’d better hurry up.

Before I go though, I thought I’d re-post the inspiration talk given by Sir Ken Robinson at TED I know that Dave thought he’d added it onto the disc, but alas – it isn’t there. Not to worry though, you can watch it below.

See you all in the morning.

Lester

live.love.create

P.S – It was great to use twitter to pass digital notes around the class, and ‘silently’ interact with some of the other delegates in real time about the topics being discussed. If this is all old hat to you, then excsue me, but I’m still relatively knew to twitter (though learning everyday thanks to @simonebiz)