Music Ally

If you’re a modern band with a strong connection to your fans, why not get them to do some free work for you? Like remix your new single, or create a video for it, or provide footage for your website or DVD by filming themselves covering your songs. The user-generated content (UGC) fan contest is increasingly a core part of music marketing campaigns. Here’s some of the ways to do it.

Remixable stems
Forget paying a superstar DJ a fat fee to mess with your masterpieces. Increasingly, artists are making their songs available for fans to remix. Radiohead’s release of individual instrument ‘stems’ for Nude through iTunes is one of the most famous examples, but Franz Ferdinand did it for Ulysses via Beatport, and Erykah Badu and Linkin Park have both done it. A couple of artists – K-OS and Third Eye Blind – have made their tracks available for remixing before the actual albums were out, with K-OS promising to include the best ones on the album itself.

(more…)

Beyonce is the latest star to launch a fan-video contest – in her case, she’s asking fans to “adhere precisely” to the routine from her Single Ladies video. The winner gets $2,500 and their video shown during Beyonce’s upcoming world tour.

However, the contest is strangely old-skool in the manner of entries – they’re asking for submissions on DVD-ROM discs, rather than uploaded to YouTube or any other site.

Naturally, there’s a caveat in the terms & conditions: “All video submissions become the property of Music World Entertainment/Sony Music Entertainment”. So cheap footage for anything else Beyonce’s team wants to do on the video side of things…

Have you been jumping about to Beyonce’s new Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) song? Stop right now. The single may herald another cataclysmic collapse of the world’s financial markets. Maybe.

That’s what New York University professor Phil Maymin has been telling the Guardian, anyway. Apparently, when the top US singles have regular beats, the financial markets go pear-shaped. Or, to use the proper lingo, songs with low beat variance have an inverse correlation with market turbulence. And Single Ladies has a very regular beat, apparently.

“The correlation is pretty strong,” says Maymin, citing A-Ha’s Take On Me as another track that heralded an economic crash. “The turbulence of the music predicts the steadiness of the market.”