Attending a great concert can be a truly moving experience. Attending a great concert in a totally amazing outdoor venue can increase that experience ten fold. I was thinking about how my experience last weekend with the Maryhill Winery venue was brought to new levels based just on the stunning views during the concert. I took a few minutes and compiled a couple photos of my favorite outdoor venues around the country. Do you have any to add? Sound off below in the comments section!
Lady Gaga’s newest music video “Telephone” sets the new standard for music video product placements. It featured several brands, including Virgin Mobile, Heartbeats headphones, and Polaroid.
Word on the street is that while some of the products that Gaga works closely with did not have to pay for participation in the video. Sources say that the nine minute epic video was going to cost so much to produce that Lady Gaga found other brands to pony up the funds. How many different products can you find in the video?
Lady Gaga and Polaroid struck a deal last year, which made the artist the company’s creative director and inventor of specialty products. Some reports even claim that she has an equity stake in the business.
I was having a conversation with my family about the 80’s and the resurgence of popular 80’s music, but then the next day was talking about fashion and how it’s snaking it’s way back into our culture once again. Many people acknowledging these cultural trends raise their eyebrows, throw their hands in the air and say “I don’t get it”. “it was so terrible”. But was it? We are in a time where there is so much transition around economy, negativity, challenge and the younger generations are being immersed in media-centric waves through RockBand, GuitarHero, Sirius/XM Radio where a large portion of the music dominating these channels is 80’s. From Journey to Guns and Roses, to Brian Ferry, Erasure, Judas Priest, Bon Jovi – kids 10 years old are now learning all the words and relating more and more with their parents.
On the fashion front – for me it’s quite simple (hopefully demystifying this for a lot of my friends who laugh at reflecting back on facebook images of me and my mullet/perm/paisley shirts) – is to consider this: in the 80’s, the fashion allowed through vibrant color, scale/fit (both oversized and often times, fitted (and often, unfortunately, too tight) was a vehicle for individuality and a visual voice. It was a much more innocent time in our style, music and culture and in the light of so much question around our future – it’s refreshing, nostalgic, easy to digest and familial between generations.
So in July I had the pleasure of attending the Tori Amosconcert here in Portland. It is always a mystery as to who will open for her during these shows. I am usually pleasantly surprised by the simple, yet talented groups she has tagging along with her on her tours. Through her I was introduced to the Ditty Bops, and this show was no exception.
One Eskimo is a great group with harmonizing melodies that just kind of take you away. I was at Starbucks the other day and picked up one of their free Itunes downloads, and to my surprise One Eskimo was offering not only their song, but an animated video as well. Check it out below!
I think we are rapidly approaching the time when the idea that we ever “downloaded” and “stored” thousands of songs and dvds will be looked at as sooo old school. All of this content is increasingly available in the cloud. I was an early Napster/Kazaa user (shhhh) and compiled the required 10,000 song library. Bittorrent allows for the same approach for video and as a result I have friends with thousands of dvds (shhhh). My father had a discussion with me once about this and remarked that when he was younger they had a couple hundred movies that had been recorded to beta tapes but saw that all this effort was kinda useless as the technology was replaced. . .so what happens when the same thing happens to dvd. . .he asked?
My initial response was to look at mediums like Blue-ray, and the PS3. . .they offer a superior product generation and that is what has gained them traction. But they are also sensitive to backwards compatibility so that dvds still work fine. . .something that the tape to dvd shift could not accommodate easily. But the true solution goes further than that. There will come a time when all music and video is available instantly and everyone will pay a monthly fee to access it and stream it right from the cloud. This is already available to some extent with Netflixx and youtube for video, and a host of great online music services like Pandora and songza.fm.
At the end of the day all this content is overwhelming so the successful applications are the ones that deliver it in easy and fun ways. Songza’s playlist feature allows you to find like minded playlists from other people and it delivers the music AND the music videos for these playlists. Pandorauses complicated music profiles to deliver songs to your preferences and the more you use it and rate what you listen the smarter that system gets. These are the beginnings of the killer media apps of the future. . . .cant wait to ditch all these binders.
All of us at Toast & Jam and Olive Studio, without hesitation are huge supporters of the band The Beastie Boys. Recently, Adam Yauch of the infamous trio has humbly declared he has recently been diagnosed with cancer (near the throat/lymphnode). We just wanted to take a moment to send our best – and we wanted to send out some serious positive energy.
So last night was the two hour finale of American Idol. There are numerous ways we could write about this show here on Branch. . .it really is a TV powerhouse. The ratings for the night before when the two final contestants (Adam Lambert and Kris Allen) duked it out on stage were the lowest in three years, but typical American Idol style a new record was set with over 100 million votes called and texted in, and the finale drew escalating numbers as the night wore on breaking a new ratings record for the show in its final 7 minutes with over 40 million viewers. See the complete breakdown on ratings by the half hour here
I am going to make this post a two part post. Here on Branch I am going to talk about the amazing integration and strategic thought that is the business model of the show. Over on TasteI will continue this post to talk about the Amazing degree of production and thought put into this show and the amazing revenue that flows from that.
This show is incredible to me not so much because of its content (I have issues with the content actually most of the time, especially the first painful weeks of auditions). This show is amazing however for its overall business approach to television. First off, the show was concepted around an easy to produce low cost show that would be positioned in typical reality show format. . .certainly nothing groundbreaking there other than the fact the show was initially MUCH cheaper than scripted shows to produce. This has changed to some degree as people associated with the show now command much higher values, and the production level of the show and its supporting ventures has increased significantly from the first season. What is really amazing though is how every aspect of potential revenue has been folded into the business model.
Product integration is better on this show than any other. Ford is the best example here. As the show progresses the remaining contestants do short music number/skits interacting with various Ford vehicles, these are not weak indeed these are fully produced and have great brand interaction.
The exposure given to these young artists is huge with the number of viewers, and locking them into multiple album production deals is standard. These deals for the most part take most of the profits while the artist is relevant and only the most successful idol contestants tend to have longevity past them (Kelly Clarkson is one example of someone now on their own). The top ten contestants after the show ends are sent on a world tour, bring millions in concert revenu to the show. If you go to their home page you will see numerous places sponsors are integrated and numerous offerings you can buy. Their entire show has become a series of iTunes performances available for download and the revenue generated from these downloads exceeds the production budget for the show by itself. These have become one of the most important aspects of content management for the show as they have huge viral potential but they need to be managed so that the revue potential is greater.
Overall this show is a case study on modern television, and I think in the not too distant future it will be a large successful show like this that makes the leap to an internet only format that will rock the industry to its core.
Spoken Word.
Rock. Hip Hop.
Freak. Color. Noir. Beauty.
Eye Opening and Visually Rich.
His style COMPLETELY surrounds you in his videos, stage presence and voice.
An integral voice to race, gender, humanity, reality and imaginary – explore this amazing, “borderless” interactive world, where you are transported forward and backward sideways and backward. This is experiential and unique. It’s fluid and intuitive. His words are like this, thus making it into my top 5 favorite site designs and music experiences of the year.
It is easy to understand why fans become loyal listeners and followers – with a very tactile and iridescent façade – his social dialogue is communicated - WITH CLARITY.
As a Creative Director, I really can appreciate the multi-world, open space and the layering/abstract/select focus/ambient art direction fused with the motion graphics of the various spatial fields.
So this week marked the culmination of an amazing example of online and offline worlds coming together. Several months ago an ambitious project was put together by the folks at YouTube (full disclosure they are a client). The idea was to use the power of social media to create a virtual orchestra that anyone in the world could audition for and that viewers themselves could pick the members of. Including from instruments not typically associated with an orchestra. Thousands of submissions and 15 million votes later the orchestra was picked, and this week they were flown to Carnegie Hall for the first performance of a piece they had all been rehearsing individually. Really inspiring.
Here is the initial call for entries.
And here is the actual first act posted today on the channel set up to cover this first of a kind event:
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