Über High Street retailer of CDs, Kid’s clothing and the mighty pick-n-mix, Woolworths, have launched a new website to sell downloads and the like to those people who used to buy 7″ singles before CD singles and now only buy downloads – although presumably some of them are a lot older now so it’s not the same people we’re talking about – but you never know!

Anyway, the new site is live now it would seem, but there’s one problem…

Are you a Mac user? (Yes!) Are you on Safari? (Never!) well, if you are, you’re out of luck because they don’t like those platforms.

They also seem to want Windows Media Player – which again could be a problem.

Presumably this is all DRM based in some way.

Whatever, if you’ve got a hankering for the latest Girls Aloud best try elsewhere if you’re an Apple Fan Boy

Grabbing hold of current trends in both music sales/distribution and digital advertising/marketing, Trent Reznor’s band the Nine Inch Nails (disclaimer: I am and always have been a very big fan) have launched their new instrumental album, Ghosts I-IV, online in a variety of both digital and physical formats with prices ranging from free for the 9-track DRM-Free sampler album to $300 for the Ultra deluxe package.

With a nod towards Radiohead’s recent launch of In Rainbows, which they offered online for the price the user felt they wanted to pay and was covered alongside the future of the music business as a whole in great detail in an article by David Byrne for Wired Magazine, Reznor has changed tack slightly by providing a large range of options to suit all pockets.

Free music being what it is recently, with a lot of artists testing the water one way or another, such as Prince with his Daily Mail (gah! must clean mouth out after saying that paper’s name) free CD, there are lots of discussions ongoing as to whether this is a solid new approach or simply something already established artists with a loyal fan base are able to exploit at this time.

What really interests me in this instance is what Reznor has done alongside the variable pricing structure for his latest work – which is providing a whole host of other formats to the usual MP3, as well as material specifically designed to act in a marketing context.

When you download the album (I got the $0 version for now, although I will be getting the full thing on pay day!), you get a couple of folders full of wallpaper, the cover art for the album as a JPG, a PDF document which acts like the insert in a CD (some lovely photography contained within) and, most interesting in some ways for us digital marketing types, a whole host of pre-made banner, button and blog header images.

Reznor is doing something very intelligent and interesting here.  Not only is he experimenting with the free music approach, something which in itself will generate a load of PR one way or the other, but he’s giving the music itself away in multi-track formats to encourage people to play with and remix his work (something he did previously on other albums, giving it away in Apple Garage band format at least), and by providing the ready made blog and banner formats, he’s giving people a way to show their loyalty to the band, and in turn generate a viral style effect for the album which he couldn’t possibly hope to achieve on his own or through an agency with a media plan.

By giving away so much stuff, stuff which fans will firstly think is way cool and want to put all over the internet, Reznor’s actually giving the fans control over his marketing campaign, truly putting it right into the hands of the people who know and love the most about the band in the first place.

User generated advertising was a buzz word a short time ago, and perhaps still is in certain bars around Soho on a good night, but handing over the control of the campaign, utilising free media space in highly targetted areas with an applicable audience, is IMHO a master stroke and a perfect example of where marketing is possibly going in terms of control and transparency.

Undoubtedly the freedom NIN and the like are now experiencing in terms of no-label is also extending itself into their thinking for no-agency marketing and no-control PR.

In more ways than just my musical taste alone I have to say right now Trent, I am a big fan.

Howard

It’s no surprise that I’ve been using computers since I was about 9
in one form or another, but in recent years the way in which I use them
has changed significantly, and I know for sure that I’m not the only
person out there who knows this.

The web, and i guess web2.0 in particular, has altered forever our
relationship with these tools that effectively run our careers for us
in many ways today.

So, I decided to put together a list of the tools I use on a daily
basis, and how they’ve evolved from one form into another over time.
Basically, a list of stuff that I simply can’t do without on a daily
basis.  Some of these are web based, some are at a higher level, and
some are even hardware.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s probably the more common things I use in both professional and personal life.

EMAIL – Gmail
My email life started out a long time ago but for
majority of my life i’ve really used outlook for my client.  Since
switching to Mac that’s become entourage and both of these are OK, if a
little bloated at times.  But, and this is a no brainer, all of my
personal email, from five or so accounts, is now handled directly
within Gmail.  For me, Gmail is the ultimate email client.  I use it as
a spam filter, email aggregator, file storage, and on top of all that I
can use it on a PC or mobile phone.  I was lucky to be in on the beta
and to be honest it’s been non stop ever since.  All of my personal
email accounts are redirected to gmail and I never log into the pop3
services any more.  in fact, I hardly ever sync up my email by actually
downloading it onto a computer any more.  All  is done virtually within
gmail itself.  my wife uses gmail.  all my mates are on gmail, and so
is my dad.  quite simply, it’s great.

CONTACTS – Plaxo
For a long time  I didn’t have contact lists.  I
had a little black diary stuffed with peoples names and numbers and
email addresses.  That book travelled everywhere with me around the
world, and I would frequently go into a state of panic if I lost it.
Zip to about 1998(-ish) and i am using outlook for contact gathering.
Tom hedstrom, with whom I used to work at TDPL/Leagas Delaney, handed
me one day a Palm V and I was amazed.  I loved that thing.  All of a
sudden my little black book was redundant.  disregard the PDA for now
(see below) and zip to a few years ago when Jason Smith at EA sends me
a weird email from a company called Plaxo, and in it is all of his new
contact details.  Me being me I sign up for plaxo and, once again, i’ve
not looked back.  Plaxo is amazing IMHO.  All my different machines,
all my different operating systems, phones and other devices (even my
iPod) sync the contact into plaxo.  my mates use plaxo (not enough of
them though!!) and I love it.  God help me if they ever shut down (and
no, i am not a pro member – their price is still too steep – come one
plaxo!  make it a micro payment and you’ll get 1,000’s of us signing up
I am guessing!)  I know Soocial is coming out soon, and I look forward
to that, but it’ll have a tough job to beat plaxo.

MUSIC – iTunes
I discovered MP3s in 1997.  Way before Apple got
into the scene.  Winamp was the app of choice, and MP3s were a rare
beast in the public domain.  I remember a mate of mine, Matt Francis,
telling me how he was testing them out to see how the sound compared
with CDs and how he was amazed by the quality of something that came
out of a computer.  Then Steve Jobs released iTunes and I dropped
Winamp as quick as you could say AAC (although i still use MP3 of
course).  Now, it’s a rare occasion that I buy a CD (linda buys them
all the time, but not me), and all (that’s ALL) of my CDs (and that’s a
LOT) are now encoded into MP3 format and stored on my Media Centre PC
as well as my iPod and a backup HDD. So, iTunes is, for me, the killer
music app.

CALENDAR – iCal & Google Calendar
Once again I’ve used Outlook for a long time.  I could
never get used to Palm’s version – seemed a bit clunky.  But then OSX
came along, and I jumped onto iCal.  It even syncs up both ways with
Entourage, so for work and home I can use it as required.  Google
Calendar is as good as it gets in an online version, and it syncs
one-way into iCal, but not the other – which is a major pain.  Apple -
work out a deal to sync with google both ways please!  So, calendars I
use two – iCal and Google Calendar.

CHAT – Meebo & Skype
OK.  Time to geek out majorly.  I had a 5 digit ICQ number.
yes, I know – how cool is that!  No idea what it is now – I lost the
email address it was on for a long time – so now I am on a 6 digit
one.  829889 if you’re interested.  At the same time as using version 1
of ICQ i was using a MUD called Sleepless Nights as a chat room to talk
with a few people, especially Gash.  Now, I have accounts on all of the
major ones, and I use them all the time to talk to lots of different
people.  But, I use them from one place – Meebo.  Meebo is the best IM
aggregator for me in the same way that Gmail is the best email client -
because it’s web based and you can access it from any computer in the
world.  A phone version in Java would be great, but these things take
time.  The only problem – no Skype Chat support.  So, I still use Skype
as an app.  Meebo is the killer IM app.

OS – MacOSX and Windows
OK.  There’s been a lot of these in my life, so here goes…

1. BBC Basic
2. Sinclair Spectrum
3. Atari ST
4. DOS
5. Windows 3.1
6. Windows 95
7. Windows 98
8. Mac OS 9
9. Windows 2000
10. windows XP
11. Mac OSX

and now?  well, who cares?  MacOSX is great – I love it.  But then,
so is Vista – I love that too, even with it’s faults.  But, to be
honest, I couldn’t give a monkeys.  I use the web for most of my
communication, if not all, and I use web apps to do what I need to do
(and with Adobe soon to release a web based photoshop probably using
Flex and Apollo, I won’t need that either) so the OS, for me, isn’t
highly important.  I’m not sure a web OS is the key – because I think
the web IS an OS. 

RSS – Sage
OK. So RSS doesn’t have a history for me, but it’s a killer
app and I use it all the time.  Sage, for Firefox, is the RSS reader I
like the best.  I’ve tried a lot but this is the one I prefer.  So,
killer app for RSS is sage.

Browsers – Firefox
Firefox 2 – end of.  Need I say more?

Howard
–

This Saturday, 18th November, London hosts the 2nd annual UK Podcast Con at the CCT Smithfield venue in the city.

Speakers include CC Chapman of Managing the Gray, and Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group.

Registration opens at 10am with the final session finishing around 6pm.  A full programme of events can be found here.

I should hopefully be attending so I’ll aim to have a report from it some time early next week.

If you want to go, tickets can be purchased via an eventbrite site here.

Howard
–

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Jonathan

The Madonna website is very professional and well thought out. But looking at her new concert I can’t help feeling that the experience of a live concert is engaging the audience on many difference levels and senses.

Have a look at this concert video and tell me which websites create a new or different type of experience. The first video is from the opening of Madonna’s new concert in NY.

This second video is Sorry

And finally the third video is a video montage

Jonathan