Spotify to Stream Jimi Hendrix Video

Spotify, everybody’s favourite music streaming service, is set to stream a video of the new Jimi Hendrix video for Bleeding Heart.

According to a post today on their blog:

The video, which is currently available to view exclusively by users of the Spotify Free service across Europe, kicks off Sony Music’s global promotional campaign for Hendrix’s upcoming album Valleys of Neptune.

The video is being release a few weeks before Jimi’s new album, Valleys of Neptune, which will be available exclusively for Spotify Premium subscribers starting March 4th. Valleys of Neptune features twelve stunning studio recordings tracks, many of which have never been heard before.

This is an exciting development for Spotify and music video streaming.

Of course we can all choose You Tube to find our favourite music videos, but for Spotify to offer exclusive video content, only available to premium members, is a huge step forward for the Swedish company.

It adds another reason to sign up for a premium account and hence make them a little bit more money, but it also begs the question: how soon can they roll out more exclusives, and will this in turn lead to them becoming the main hub for music videos on the net and usurping YouTube in the music space?

What do you think?

Who Is Responsible For Internet Content?

Mashable is reporting today that three Google Executives have been found guilty of privacy violations, giving them a 6 month suspended sentence.

The Google employees were sued after a video was posted (and subsequently removed) to Google’s video sharing site showing a boy with Down syndrome being bullied.

Google responded to the decision with a blog post:

“We are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”

I think this is deeply troubling. Why should three people, with no direct involvement in the recording or posting of the video, find themselves the subject of criminal activity?

I agree with Stan Shroeder’s assessment of this when he says:

[it] at the very least bizarre and shows a blatant misunderstanding of how the Internet and various social content sharing services work.

The way we consume and share content has changed irreversibly, for better or worse, and content ownership rights have to be updated as a result.

Three individuals, with no direct involvement with the video, should not be faced with prosecution, letalone prison. It is up to the police to find the people in the actual video and to bring them to justice.

What do you think?

Detailing Disclosure

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has released it’s preferred method of disclosing whether a tweet features content that is being driven as a result of PR or advertising.

WOMMA has proposed #spon for sponsored tweets, #paid for paid tweets and #samp for when the blogger received a sample.

The move comes following the recent FTC ruling which aims to ensure bloggers are clear when they are posting content as a result of being approached by a marketer – quite how to enforce these guidelines hasn’t been worked out yet however.

I think that this is a step in the right direction for the US, and I’ll be interested to see how the UK blogosphere takes up, or doesn’t, the proposed hashtags.

What I’d like to see is the CIPR come in and offer similar guideline for UK PRs who are tweeting about their clients.

Of course this is essentially very simple with many using a variant on (client), but there are the odd tweets where the disclosure is not given from the PR tweeting about their client. This is not only unethical, but also a bit of a kick in the teeth to your followers, and threatens your integrity as a PR.

What do you think? Should there be an industry code introduced, or should PRs be left to their own discretion?

Ok Go vs. Kasabian

I found myself in a little quandry today after I read this article in the NYT from the singer of Ok Go – Hat Tip to Marshall Manson for sharing.

In it, Damian Kulash Jr. explains how EMI stopped allowing videos by Ok Go from being embedded. Their view is that each viw of that video should be subject to a royalty payment, of which they will be entitled to a hefty chunk.

However, Damian explains that without the viralty of their self-financed video for Here It Goes Again (the one where the band are all on treadmills), they’d have a smaller fanbase and potentially not be where they are today.

You can guess my stance on this. I am fully in favour of Ok Go creating music, videos, imagery etc and giving it away for free, allowing their fans to distribute it on their behalf, without having to pay their record company a penny.

I am of the belief that the actual asset is a means to an end – in a band you want to play music live to people; the more people you can get to turn up at your shows the more money you’ll get paid. Record companies make very little money from each gig a band does, which is why they want to protect their product, the actual recorded artifact, as stringently as possible.

However, an article appeared in the NME last week where an interview with Tom Meighan from Kasabian essentially said that the Internet has killed the mystique of rock and roll.

Tom said:

“I think – especially in the last three or four years – the internet’s taken a stranglehold and killed off the myth of the rock star now. You know when you used to buy the records and there was the myth behind them? There’s too much on blogs now and I think it’s killed it off. Nobody’s surprised by an interview anymore or anything. It’s quite tragic.”

He also said blogging has taken away the spirit of rock ‘n roll’. He told Bang Showbiz: “There are so many rock stars writing these self pitying blogs and it’s not in the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s like ‘Wow, what rubbish’.”

And in parts, I agree with him.

I remember the first time I went to a gig (2000), I had no understanding of these mythical creatures that stood high up on the stage before me – I knew very little of their innermost thoughts other than what I’d read in the newspapers, and I put no consideration into the actual act of putting on the show. It was amazing.

Now I can garner every single piece of information i’ve ever wanted about a band from the Internet, and tied into my knowledge of how the ‘live product’ is delivered, the magic has disappeared and that to me is a great shame.

However, the Internet has changed the way that we consume media, and enabled us to get closer than before to our heroes. Had Noel Gallagher been writing a blog during that hectic 93-97 period, It would have made fascinating reading. We would also have got to see the other side of the tabloid circus that followed Oasis around at the height of Britpop.

It’s a double edged sword – do we want access to these guitar-playing demi-Gods, or do we want to be able to hold them up on an untouchable platform where there is just music and character?

I would rather have access and the ability to help show my support for an artist by sharing their music and videos with my friends who may in turn show up at a gig and soak up the full experience.

What can the record companies do then to stem the revenue flow that is going in the opposite direction?

They need to be savvier about the physical experience of buying a CD or a download, offer individual purchasers more ‘stuff’, be it additional tracks or artwork or exclusive merchandise. Record companies need to engage with fans. Polydor have a pretty good Twitter stream. It’s not great, but it’s a step in the right direction.

So can record companies become more personal?

What about offering their Twitter followers discounted downloads, or what about offering their followers the chance to hang out back stage – that cementation of the band/fan relationship will of course lead to more sales.

Whatever they do, they’ve got to realise that control of music and video is over and in the fans hands, if they don’t more and more artists will simply do it themselves and then the record companies will have no music to sell at all.

Twitter and WordPress #fails

On Thursday, WordPress went down for about 2 hours due to a “core router change at one of its data centre providers which “broke the site”.” according to the BBC.

The company said that the blogosphere lost about 5 and a half million page views as a result.

What’s interesting though, is the reaction of the 10 million blog-strong WordPress community. Far from being enraged or outspoken, they twitched their fingers over the F5 key, waiting for normal service to be resumed.

Some of the big boys like Tech Crunch and GigaOm were down and have been considered in their responses to the outage.

Indeed, WordPress’ quick response and constant updates via Twitter seemed to help stem the flow of any sort of frustration, with many users leaving comments of understanding on Matt Mullenweg’s explanatory blog post.

Compare this to the usual firey reaction to those occassions when Twitter goes down, and I think it shows a real difference in the character of the respective communities.

Twitter users, used to instantaneousness and immediacy, cringe and scratch at the mobile devices when the service outs, impatiently waiting for it to be available again.

WordPress users howver seemed to be accepting and just hopeful that their content wouldn’t be lost.

I wonder if this is down to the nature of bloggers, who tend to be in the game for the long run and willing to wait to post, compared to microbloggers who need that stratight away confirmation of content publication?

What are your thoughts?

Amusity Singing Coffee Table

You want a singing coffee table? Yes, Amusity have made just the thing… (via Music Ally)

Community Engagement

Community engagement is something that PRs and marketers don’t do, in my opinion, very well. I believe that to get the most out of any outreach campaign within a long-term strategy, as a person representing a brand, you need to be aware of how the communities you’re intending to work with operate. With this knowledge you can guide your client as to the most appropriate way to help the guys they’re looking to talk with.

I don’t believe in quick wins as a strategy. It implies you’re only after one thing: coverage.

Of course, clients give us KPIs and metrics to meet, and these are an important element of assessing how successful the work that you, as a marketer, are doing.

However, I would much rather see a time when brands don’t judge the success of an activity by straight forward volume of blog posts or tweets, but by the encouraging of dialogue between a group of people which may eventually lead to sales (the big all important proof point of course).

Now, I am by no means the perfect specimen of course. I fully admit that as much research into a community I do, without being a part of the community you’re looking to speak with, you can’t quite get the right level of credibility.

Jack Ricchiuto recently published a paper on The Practice & Power of Authentic Community Engagement (hat tip to Chris Corrigan) and asks three really key questions that I think every brand should look to answer before setting out on engaging with a community:

✦What would you love to make possible and contribute to in the future of this community?

✦What talents and resources do you have that might help bring these possibilities to reality?

✦What are you committed personally and together to doing to realize these possibilities?

In order to answer these questions, maybe it’s worth taking some time to create a community engagement map which is…

… a way to evaluate and visualize the communities and other social media elements currently in place for a business. It allows you to assess the current channels customers and others in your ecosystem are using to talk about your business and products.

This isn’t a technique i’ve used, but is something I will look to try over the next few months to try and better answer the three key questions mentioned above.

Thinking About Platforms

Taken at Brondesbury Station in NW6.

Vancouver 2010 Mascot is Pedobear?

The Telegraph is reporting this morning that a Polish newspaper has printed an image of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic mascots, unaware that they’ve inadvertently included notorious Internet meme Pedobear as one of the group. (Hat Tip to @vexape who shared!)

This, although highly amusing, highlights two things:

Internet memes can be lost in translation an the propogation of web-based in-jokes into mainstream culture is growing quicker than ever.

Secondly, it’s poor journalism on the Polish newspaper’s behalf, who really should’ve been more thorough when putting the piece together.

The golden rule of journalism still applies it seems: do your research!

Spaced Gunfight Flash Mob

On March 20th, at an as yet unknown London location, there will be a Spaced flashmob, re-enacting that famous scene from the genius British sitcom Spaced.

A major hat tip must go to my friend Duncan Robinson who spotted and shared :)

I’m always a little sceptical of flashmobs – they seem to now inevitably be a typical PR trick to get try and get some quick win coverage, rather than the mass brief outpouring of something or other that they initially started out as.

However, this seems to be a genuine attempt by a bunch of Spaced fans to bring fans of the show together in one mass finger gunfight face off – genius.

The flashmob has even got the attention of Edgar Wright, one of the brains behind the programme, showing its genuine appeal and ‘real’ feel.

The problem with flashmobs is that they were actually a really good idea to start with: a bunch of people meet somewhere random and do something. However, ‘the success’ of the T-Mobile flashmob series ahs seriously devalued their impact and now always makes me wary whenever I hear of one impending.

A PR agency trying to manufacture one just feels wrong – why bother if you don’t know what the community are already upto? They’re going to be three steps ahead of you anyway, and they might be doing something really cool that you can help out with, as opposed to wasting time and resource creating something that is doomed to fail because the real fans of whatever it is you’re trying to promote won’t touch the event with a ten foot pole.

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And, to get you in the mood: