Music Ally

Last weekend, Music Ally headed for New York to attend an event called GFC Vision. GFC is a group of 10 creatives – DJs, graphic designers, producers, artists and labels – led by Pedro Winter, ex Daft Punk manager, and now manager of Justice and Parisian label Ed Banger Records.

But the driving force behind it is US beer company Miller Genuine Draft, which is trying to associate itself with innovative music thinking. A bit like Bacardi, except instead of ‘signing’ Groove Armada, they’ve gathered this bunch of creative types who are apparently going to meet every six months somewhere in the world, and Discuss Music Stuff.

The panel is suitably cosmopolitan: DJs from the US, Japan and Russia, hip-hop artists from South Africa and South Korea, and so on. It reminds us a bit of that Nokia Music Recommenders project a while back, except instead of compiling music playlists, this panel is compiling and swapping ideas. The inaugural event that we attended featured a guest speaker, former journalist, pirate DJ and now author Matt Mason. Read on for our report.

Actually, the most interesting session was the middle one, where Mason gave a talk based on his book The Pirate’s Dilemma.

To paraphrase and summarise, it boils down to the fact that there have been pirates throughout history, and they’re usually a response to some flaw in the developing systems of the day. You have to recognise what the flaws are, and work out why the pirates are succeeding. Mason gave the example of Radio 1 in the UK setting up and poaching DJs from pirate station Radio Caroline. We think the book is well worth a read.

Pedro Winter certainly has strong views about the way things are going in music now. “The indies have got to have a different approach from the majors,” he said. “The majors have been shooting themselves in the foot, so let them die alone, as they say in France … It’s why Daft Punk quit a major.”

He also thinks the approach of the major labels and authorities towards online piracy is counter-productive (and remember, France is where the three-strikes debate has been raging): “We’ve got to stop talking about kids as thieves. It’s just a new way of consuming music … I’m a hippy at heart. I didn’t have a problem with the kids downloading music.” For what it’s worth, Winter is dismissive of the whole three strikes proposal and believes Sarkozy will ‘put it back into his pocket.’

South Korean hip-hop artist Tablo had some interesting things to say, too, on how he’s been giving stuff away for free and then making money off the back of it.

“We used to sell a lot of CDs but no merchandise, so we set up a website with merchandise, but no one was buying it. So we gave out a few free songs, but also gave out samples like kicks from our tracks. People had to go there [the website] to get the free stuff, and the merchandise sales went up.”

However, Tablo also said that giving music away makes it disposable, pointing out that five or six years ago in Korea, people would listen to a song for four or five months, or even a year. Now, in a few days they’re bored and want more songs from their favourite artists. This, he thinks, can compromise the quality of the music.

All interesting stuff; diluted slightly by the following session on finding ‘the perfect equation for collaboration’, which went a bit moodboard brandspeaky. “The perfect equation for collaboration is passion.” And so on.

In fact as the audience drifted off, it got us thinking: the fact that Miller is doing this event is as interesting as what was actually discussed. We’ve not seen this kind of futuregazing panel played out in public as part of a brand promotion, rather than at an industry conference like MIDEM. Clearly the company was hoping to ‘amplify its brand values’ through the event and to use the assembled journalists to convey the fact that Miller is a brand which helps creative collaboration. Which is kind of what we’ve just done.

It’s early days to judge the success of Miller’s attempt to portray itself as “a beer brand with music at its heart”, but Vision is clearly just one part of its strategy – the company also sponsors a venue called The Mill in Scotland which puts on up-and-coming acts, while also launching the Miller Music Factory in Turkey, and The Miller Foundation in South Korea. All in all, probably more worthy than a public moodboard workshop in New York.

Tags: GFC Vision, miller

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Digital Music Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.