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.

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UK newspaper The Times has signed a deal with iTunes and Big Brother Recordings to give away a bunch of live tracks recorded at Noel Gallagher’s Teenage Cancer Trust Royal Albert Hall gig in 2007, initially as downloads, then with a free cover CD on the newspaper itself.

Here’s how it’ll work: from Tuesday 10th March for five days, The Times will print a link in the paper taking readers to a dedicated page on the iTunes Store where they can download that day’s track. The five tracks are:

March 10th – (It’s Good) To Be Free
March 11th – Talk Tonight
March 12th – Cast No Shadow
March 13th – The Importance Of Being Idle
March 14th – Don’t Look Back In Anger

But then an 11-track CD will be given away with the paper on Sunday 15th March…

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Simply beautiful. Although they could do with putting a donk on it, really…

By way of an update to our earlier hands-on, we’ve been digging around Nokia’s Comes With Music service, and have found some rather big bands aren’t on there. To name but three: Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys and Oasis have no albums available to download at all. Oh, and while Radiohead’s EMI back catalogue IS there, ‘In Rainbows’ isn’t.

Given Nokia’s promise that it’s focusing strongly on local bands, this isn’t great. It doesn’t appear to be the result of just focusing on major label albums though – a quick search turned up albums by independent artists like the White Stripes, Mr Scruff, Roots Manuva, British Sea Power and Nightmares On Wax. Archive stuff is patchy though – you can get every White Stripes album from Comes With Music, but only the last two from Roots Manuva.

Nokia will presumably be filling out the Comes With Music catalogue in the coming weeks and months, and we stand by our earlier assertion that the service is slick and easy to use. But the fairly sizeable Franz, Oasis and Monkey-shaped holes may not be what consumers were hoping for.