A recent Nielsen report shows that innovative channels such as mobile music apps and streaming services are very much appreciated by consumers all over the world.
During September 2010, Nielsen conducted a survey of 26,644 online consumers in 53 markets. The survey, done exclusively for Midem, covered questions about music purchasing and listening habits.
The results?
Globally, artist apps, music-discovery apps and streaming apps are doing best. In the US, music apps are the second most popular apps, and the best performing apps in Europe are artist apps.
As for online, the survey shows that free ad-funded and daily or monthly subscription models are the most popular, and more than half of online consumers say they would use a free service in exchange for listening to and watching ads.
So, where do you put your online and app development money?
Walt Disney’s reproduction of legendary TRON features electronic and symphonic elements from the French techno duo Daft Punk, uniquely blended with futuristic sound effects. SoundWorks Collection is a platform and website that takes you behind the scenes, for a look into the audio post-production of films, video game sound design and original soundtrack composition. This video takes you into the sound design and creation of TRON LEGACY.
Being ethical and defining what it means for our business might not be an option anymore, but a necessity to stay relevant in the new, fragmented marketplace.
Heartbeats International gives you a whitepaper on Brand Ethics. This whitepaper is a call for those of us working with branding and marketing, to lift focus from consumer needs for a while and examine our own practice, how our everyday work actively contributes to society.
Footwear company Converse is well-known for its projects focusing on art, music and culture. This time they pay tribute to influential musicians by promoting indie music genres with street art.
Recently Converse partnered with graffiti collective Monorex to paint the city walls of the UK, paying tribute to influential British musicians such as Bernard Sumner and Paloma Faith, amongst others. London, Brighton, Manchester and Glasgow are getting their murals done.
Converse also got indie artists to record four versions of the song Didn’t Know What Love Was. As well as that, they are putting on a series of free parties throughout the UK. The parties take inspiration from iconic genres of British music, from punk to Britpop to dubstep, with support from Vice.
Eric Welles Nyström, who works with artist management and brand consulting for lifestyle companies in NYC, and is a member of Heartbeats Movement, has shared his insights about marketing trends in NYC with us. Read about Eric’s thoughts of shoe brand Keep’s recent marketing campaign, the future of marketing in general and ‘organic’ as a trend, as well as why music is becoming more and more important to reach the target consumer.
Pepsi’s Refresh Project has generated tens of millions of votes and countless tweets and Facebook posts in 2010. Next year, PepsiCo will take it global.
In short: this year Pepsi shunned their US advertising budget for Super-Bowl (of over $20 Million) and decided to put it into social media and the Refresh Project instead. The project has generated tens of million of votes and a countless number of tweets and Facebook posts, and the Pepsi brand itself has reached more than 2.7 million fans on Facebook (a growth of more than one million within in less than two months and still counting).
This fall, marketing director for Pepsi, Ana Maria Irazabal, expressed that “the Refresh Project is helping sales by linking charity in customers’ minds with their feelings about the brand”, and she also expressed that Pepsi will expand the Refresh Project globally in 2011 (The Huffington Post).
The Refresh Project embraces the four Es marketing model and represents a shift away from traditional marketing to marketing with a higher purpose.
When Justin Bieber’s My World Acoustic was released exclusively through Walmart, it was one of many landmarks in his supersonic career that has taken him from webcam sensation on YouTube to one of the biggest pop stars on the planet.
It wasn’t easy though. In spite of a heavyweight co-signer in Usher, the record labels were reluctant to sign an artist without a major platform. In a recent interview with Billboard, Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun explains how the labels told him that Bieber had no way of breaking out through YouTube alone. The common knowledge was that you can’t compete with Disney and Nickelodeon.
In a lot of ways Justin Bieber is a pre-cursor of where we all are heading. Justin Bieber got his break on YouTube, and currently holds the #1 spot on the platform with 400 million views of the music video for Baby. More important than a marquee clip of Baby caliber though, is Bieber’s constant interaction with his fans through lo-fi video messages and tweets.
On a slightly smaller scale the two latest hip hop franchises, Drake and Nicki Minaj, also got their breaks with very little major label backup. Drake’s Best I Ever Had, off his selfreleased mixtape So Far Gone, was an international hit last year. He was the grand prize in a bidding war where Sylvia Rhone and Universal eventually had to back up a very big money truck in order to secure a deal, and he found himself nominated for music awards before he even had an official release out.
Nicki Minaj was featured on pretty much every single remix released for almost a year leading up to her album release. She surpassed 1 million Twitter followers months before her album Pink Friday scored the highest first week sales for a female rapper since Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation of… in 1998.
So do we need to rethink what it takes to break a new franchise artist? What part should the record labels play and is there room for brands to associate with these artists BEFORE they become mainstream? Could Walmart have been an integral part of the Justin Bieber saga in 2008 instead of acting as a mere distribution channel in 2010? If brands are to be a relevant part of music and culture in the future, perhaps they need to step up to the plate and enter the game at an earlier stage?
