Music Ally

Forget social media and iPhone apps and Flash games and all the other new-fangled digital marketing channels. Katy Perry wants fans to pick up the phone and give her a call.

Promoted via her website, she has local numbers in the US, UK, Spain, Italy, France and Australia. Call them, and a recorded message from the singer gives you her latest news, but also invites you to leave your own message.

And she really does listen to them, according to Hypebot, and even calls some fans back. It’’s using technology from US firm SayNow. We might call up and try to sell her a Music Ally subscription…

We’ve written plenty about iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge in the past, and its publisher Tapulous’ work with labels and artists. But do you sell more music by licensing your song to such a game?

The company has provided an interesting stat relating to its recent offering of Katy Perry’s Hot N Cold track within Tap Tap Revenge. More than 250,000 players downloaded it to play along with, and of those, 56,000 then clicked through to buy the song on the iTunes Store.

The advantage Tap Tap Revenge has over console music games – for now – is that it has these links to the iTunes Store embedded within the game itself, driving players to buy from iTunes on the handset itself. By contrast, although the latest versions of Guitar Hero and Rock Band on console let players download tracks to play in the game, there’s no link to buy pure music downloads.

The question of how labels and artists actually make money from YouTube has been a live issue in recent times, but Google’s video-sharing site has just introduced another option.

It’s inserting click-to-buy links below selected videos, with music one of the first categories to get the treatment. So, if you watch the official video for Katy Perry’s `I Kissed A Girl’, there are buttons to buy the song from iTunes or Amazon.

YouTube is also providing Amazon links for games like Electronic Arts’ `Spore’. Google says “this is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube”. The initiative will apparently also work for user-generated videos – for example, bedroom cover versions of ‘I Kissed A Girl’ – but only if the rightsholder has ‘claimed’ them.

Games publisher Electronic Arts has worked hard to get music artists involved with its The Sims franchise, with several having re-recorded special versions of their hits in ‘Simlish’ (the game’s native language).

Following in the footsteps of Lily Allen, Barenaked Ladies, The Pussycat Dolls and, er, Anthrax now comes Katy Perry. She’s released a Simlish video of her new single Hot’n'Cold.

Not only does it use the Simlish language, but the video is made up entirely from animated scenes in The Sims 2. Geeky? Sure, but the game has a huge global audience, so it’s a pretty good promotional gimmick.