Brian Shimkovitz, the person behind Awesome Tapes From Africa, has compiled a mixtape that is sure to prolong your Summer! It consists of musical gems which are hard-to-find for audiences outside of Africa. Enjoy!
Using a hefty stock of cassette tapes acquired while studying hip-hop in Ghana in 2004-2005, Brian Shimkovitz launched Awesome Tapes from Africa (ATFA) in 2006. ATFA is first and foremost a blog devoted to sharing these hard-to-find musical gems with audiences outside of Africa. ATFA has music you won’t easily find anywhere else - except, perhaps in its region of origin.
After five years of spreading world music to the masses, ATFA is launching a label. Starting this October, ATFA will re-issue select recordings. Kicking off with an album from Malian singer Nâ Hawa Doumbia called La Grande Contatrice Malienne Vol 3, ATFA plans to distribute LP, CD, and MP3 formats via SC Distribution - with 50% of profits going to the artists (!!!).
Everyone loves music, but not everyone loves advertising. Faced with increasingly impatient and fickle customers, some of the world’s most famous brands have been turning to music and artists to engage the public in a way they could never do alone. Why? Because music speaks to our emotions, brings people together and starts conversations. If used correctly, it can turn a one-off purchaser into a loyal fan.
“Jakob Lusensky has done a great service to all marketers by writing Sounds Like Branding. Every company should have a music strategy. Some do; most don’t. This book shows you how. It’s a five step programme – a very short stairway to heaven.” - Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (A&C Black Publishers Ltd) will publish the English version of Sounds Like Branding in the UK on the 18th of July.
In a previous post, our friends at Splatter highlighted the benefits of brands involved with music festivals. Here they share some advice on how to make the best use of festival funding.
As Splatter mentioned in their previous post on Sounds Like Branding, brands can gain pretty much from being part of a music festival, e.g. engagement, storytelling, sampling opportunities and so forth. It is however up to the brands and their agencies to make the best use of a sponsorship and turn the fans into customers (or customers into fans, as we say at Heartbeats).
The obvious question for a brand wanting to leverage off the passion created by music is: How do they pick through the options and ensure marketing spend is effectively used?
According to Splatter, you should:
1. Ensure that involvement in a music festival or music festivals is a part of a broader music based strategy. The consumers will smell the lack of authenticity if your presence at a music festival (for cool cred) isn’t backed up by relationships with artists, fans, online leverage, great use of music in retail A-T-L that incorporate music in some creative way.
2. Work with a specialist that understands the market place and actually knows everything about the festivals, the music, the fans and the brands. There is a huge difference between the quality of festivals on offer, and you will save time and money by speaking to people that already know.
3. Work with only established events (or at least credible and authentic ones, according to Heartbeats). If a promoter comes to you with a grand idea to run a festival, but they have no history of doing credible events, then be very cautious.
4. Ensure that you have a plan for your participation involving detailed pre, onsite and post event creative, planning and execution. Leverage every step of the way. Get as much access to artists as possible, ensure you can use the festival in your own brand stories, get involved in the pre-event marketing campaign. Do some marketing of your own. Create content during the festival and spread it afterwards. Look for multi-year relationships, so you can build your brand alongside the festival as it grows.
5. Get creative. If you think that slapping some logos around the festival grounds and having hot girrrrrlls in short skirts handing out samplers is all you have to do once you are at the festival, then think again. Creative and useful experiences allied to pre-event participation and continuous conversations can turn festival sponsorship into something truly valuable.
6. Ensure you have pre-agreed metrics so you can measure your investment ROI.
So, which festival would fit your brand you think?
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.
In this post, our friends at Splatter have taken a look at 2010’s hottest phenomena in China, the Music Festival. Below they touch upon what brands can gain from this phenomena. These benefits aren’t exclusive for the Chinese market though, but apply to many other markets.
Until relatively recently, China’s music festivalers were restricted to one option only, Heavy-metal heavy Midi which has been held in Beijing since 1999 and stood alone as the only regular event in China until, in 2007, two new players strode purposefully into town. Aiming at a more attractive (to marketeers at least) “indie hipster” crowd, Modern Sky Records in Beijing launched their eponymously titled 4 dayer, and Splatter’s sister company Split Works launched the Yue Festival in Shanghai, backed by Bacardi and Converse. Since 2007, Music Festivals have erupted in every corner of China, with (rough estimation) around 60 in 2010 and there is more to come…
Festivals are however an expensive game - creating a temporary village for 1-4 days, paying local and national government licenses and then of course artists fees, both international and domestic (domestic artist demands have tripled in the last couple of years due to the increased popularity and demand) - puts festival investments into the millions of RMB (1 RMB is approximately 0,15 USD). On the other hand, you look at the ticket prices of the average festival (60RMB/day) and the average attendances (2,000 – 8,000 – be wary of anyone who claims more, Splatter attend them all), it becomes clear there is a large financial disparity occurring.
How do the organisers make up this shortfall? In China, there are four ways currently:
A local government offers to underwrite the festival (Suzhou Holisland, Zhangbei Inmusic, Zhenjiang Midi Festival) as a way of promoting the town/ district
Sponsorship fees (Modern Sky, YUE, Nokia’s Strawberry in Xi’an)
Real Estate developers offer to host a music festival on their land to attract people to the area and then to hopefully sell them expensive property (Tianjin Dreamvalley, Great Wall Tanglewood)
Promoter funds the festival personally (at Niu Yu Hui near Guangzhou, the farmer whose land hosted the festival, sold his car and laptop in order to pay the bands due to poor ticket sales)
More often than not, festivals are funded by a combination of the elements above (e.g. Zebra Festival, a festival in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, is a joint venture between Zebra Media and the Chengdu Government/Chengdu Media Group and Suzhou’s Holisland was actualy underwritten by local government to draw attention to a new real estate development).
Because of the need for funding, brands and agencies in China are being approached by most, if not all of these festivals throughout the year. But, why would you want a music festival as a part of your branding strategy? Splatter tell their clients that music festivals scratch at least 4 distinctive itches.
First, brands get a great experiential and engagement opportunity to have a deep and meaningful interaction with their consumers. Going to a festival is the most exciting thing most people ever do; this makes them incredibly open minded to messages from sponsors.
Second, brands can use their participation at the music festival to tell a broader story to the media, by buying media and mobilising online communities. Festivals can deliver huge value in terms of PR and marketing when done well.
Thirdly, your brand benefits from increased awareness as well as a positive and often passionate association and alignment with the festival itself and the artists attending.
Finally, there are enormous sampling opportunities, which your target consumer will often pay for! On site, sales can be leveraged, and most experienced brands report substantial increases in sales post event.
Which music festival would fit your brand?
Splatter is a specialist music communications agency based in China. Split Works, Splatter’s sister company, is a Beijing- and Shanghai-based concert promotion agency. Together they maintain China Music Radar, a blog about the Chinese music industry.
Sounds Like Branding presents Heartbeats In Conversation With, a series of short conversations on relevant topics for marketing and communication. First out is a conversation between Heartbeats’ CEO Jakob Lusensky and Gerd Leonhard, media futurist and CEO of The Futures Agency. Watch them talk about the media of the future and what we can learn from the days of Gutenberg.
Sounds like Branding (How to use the power of music to turn customers into fans) is the forthcoming book by Jakob Lusensky, CEO at Heartbeats. The book takes you on an ear-opening journey through the history of music and marketing, from the humble jingle and Muzak to today’s music which is blurring the line between brands and bands; making brands in to the record labels of tomorrow.
Heartbeats gives you ‘The Manual’ – a manual for bands and artists on how to build a successful strategy to attract brands (or how to sell out without selling out). This material was first presented at MIDEM earlier this year, and due to a big interest from artists, record labels and publishers, in getting access to the material, Heartbeats decided to put together ‘The Manual’.
