Music

The fine people at Blurb have offered free gorund shipping within the US for our book Good Ideas In 2009. All you have to do is add ‘freeshipping’ in to the promo-code box on the product page here before Dec 9 (and read the small print below*).

Want to know more about the book? Well, at this time of year we’re supposed to produce a trends report for 2009. When we all sat down and chatted about it, we thought such a report would be so gloomy and rather depressing. We didn’t want to write about things like ‘trading down’ or ‘discreet consumption’! We wanted to talk about all the inspirational ideas we read and write about every day, we wanted to spread the positivity, we wanted to encourage you to re-ignite the world. Honestly.

So we created Good Ideas In 2009. The 80 page click-to-print book features nine Good Ideas and manifestations of them. We write about design, mobile, collaboration, digital, social media, the long term and much more. Click through to the Blurb site and you can get a sneak peek.

The books are $50 for the softback and $60 for the beautiful hardback. If you’re considering buying reports for your company or just books for your coffee table, we ask you to consider Good Ideas In 2009. We’re rather proud of it. We hope it inspires you yo make things better.

Good Ideas In 2009

* To qualify for free shipping (up to $10), you must enter the promotion code in the shopping cart at time of purchase and complete your purchase in USD. Offer is good for free shipping up to $10.00 in value. Offer expires 11:59 PM PST December 5, 2008. Limit one-time use per user and cannot be combined with other offers. Not valid towards purchase of gift cards.

Interesting music promo taken with a Canon Mark 3. The video uses a mathematical formulacalled the “Droste Effect”.

[Via Fubiz]

Nothing ruins an outdoor concert or film screening quite like sitting on the grass for hours, hunched over like a barely opened mollusk shell.  But with the GreenSeat, sore backs are now a thing of the past.  Made from corrugated cardboard, the chair is a cheap, recyclable way to alleviate long episodes of sitting.  At this point, it’s been pitched primarily to eco-friendly audiences, but considering that the chair’s construction offers great potential for advertising placement, we can only hope it will be popping up in venues worldwide.  The simple all-in-one design incorporates a seat cover and handle and when not in use, lies completely flat.  It’s one of those ideas that are so innovative it begs the question, why didn’t we think of that?

[via TrendOriginal]

A couple of weeks ago, Anomaly created the My Drive Thru campaign for Converse, where we had Pharrell Williams, Santogold and Julian Casablancas collaborating on a song that was made available for free download. This has now been carried over to the Converse Festivals site, which has considerably expanded the number of music artists represented. Through the site, you can go to the MySpace pages of different artists for details about them, and then create a group of your own where you can share your own experiences of the artist’s music at different festivals and upload pictures - sort of like your personalized music community.

The campaign was handled by Perfect Fools Amsterdam. From Contagious Magazine, which spoke to the agency’s Creative Director Mark Chalmers:

The Converse offer is very clear in both product and lifestyle because they’ve stuck at what they’re best at. They’ve stayed true. The last thing Converse needs is advertising, or a promise re-wrapped. We do know that Converse has fans, we do know that music has fans and we do know that festivals are a great collective experience. Anticipation and planning is huge part of it, so we worked with Converse to create a tool useful to the groups of festivals goers and something that unites the Converse music activity across borders. Not only is it a useful application but it showcases the latest Converse track “My Drive Thru” and the latest talent they’re supporting.

Hear, hear.

[Via Three Billion]

Here’s the latest promo from Santogold. It’s interesting to see stylistic similarities between this video and the one for Ladytron’s runaway that we featured last week.

Santogold

Mike Sharpe & Barney Steele from Found Collective create this striking music video for Ladytron’s Runaway.

Dazed Digital are chronicling the Converse-branded four-week music tour around China that includes the making of a branded documentary. On the details:

The Converse Love Noise tour aims to give Chinese rock a bigger platform and will try to distract attention from the Olympics by taking two Beijing bands, PK-14 and Queen Sea Big Shark on a specially-designed tour bus through six cities, beginning and ending in Beijing. Along the way, the bus will pick up local bands, and documenting the ups and downs of the entire tour and the climactic event in Beijing will be two brave Dazed Digital correspondents.

On filming:

P.K.14 got kitted out in ripped Converse, the sky was dark above a large expanse of concrete, and the graffiti-ed bus squatted behind the band as the equipment van edged in on the stage to point its headlights at the action. Remarkably, a group of service station staff came to watch the band disturb the peace, as did a stray praying mantis. Praying mantises have been known to kill small birds, said Queen Sea Big Shark guitarist Wang Jing Han, as he held one between his fingers. (A brief aside: we asked the Chinese Converse blogger Lua why graffiti in her country often contains numbers. She told us that it’s not graffiti, these numbers are hasty adverts for lines to call if you’re after some sort of forged document.)

Dazed

A piece of inspiration from the Chemical Brothers in their video Midnight Madness. Nice use of parkour and gold lame.

[via Sterogum and Kanye West]

Brands and companies are taking on the role of record label as the old model of music distribution continues to die. Proctor & Gamble, Nike, Red Bull, Unilever, Converse and Bacardi are all forming relationships with artists and providing payment, publicity and distribution for their songs. It becomes a win-win situation as the musicians get paid well to continue their work, and the brands share the limelight generated. The deals are reported to be far better than musicians were getting from traditional record companies. Most artists maintain the rights to their work after a period of time, and the revenue sharing is far more generous.

The New York Times reports:

Procter & Gamble, for example, is joining Island Def Jam in a joint venture called Tag Records, a label that will sign and release albums by new hip-hop acts. It is named after a brand of body spray that P.& G. acquired when it bought Gillette.

And Mr. Dupri, a music-industry veteran and the longtime partner of the singer Janet Jackson, sounds quite pleased with his new gig.

“I’ve never seen someone wanting to devote this much money to breaking new artists,” said Mr. Dupri, who will serve as president of Tag Records while keeping his position at Island Def Jam. “Nobody in the music business has the marketing budget that I have.”

At a time when online file-sharing is rampant, record stores are closing and consumers are buying singles instead of albums, getting into the music business might seem like running into a burning building. But as record labels struggle to adjust to a harsh new digital reality, other companies are stepping up their involvement in music, going far beyond standard endorsement contracts and the use of songs in commercials.

New York Times: “It’s American Brandstand: Marketers Underwrite Performers”