Music Ally

Artists have always had opinions about what music (other than their own) is great. But in the digital era, there are far more chances to trumpet those tastes to their fans. The idea of ‘artist as curator’ is gaining currency, with a variety of examples.

Usher’s Top 100 iPhone app

R&B star Usher is the star of Melodeo’s latest streaming music iPhone application. It’s a playlist of 100 songs apparently hand-picked by the man himself from his favourite ever tunes. That means Arethra Franklin, James Brown and Michael Jackson among other artists.

The app – powered by Melodeo’s NuTsie service – then streams the songs to users, who’ve paid $3 for the privilege of downloading it. Melodeo has released a number of generic streaming compilation apps like this, but Usher is the first big star to put his name to one.

(more…)

Mobile operator Orange UK has given more details on the “hologram gigs” to be held in the UK to promote its new Monkey music service.

They’ll take place in five shopping centres around the country in September and October, and will feature hologrammatic versions of Pixie Lott, N-Dubz and Tinchy Stryder performing. Free Monkey SIM cards will be available at each event, plus £10-off vouchers for the pay-as-you-go handsets required to use the service.

Monkey launched earlier this year, and is an exclusive partnership between Orange, UMG and Channel 4. “The Orange Monkey Hologram Gigs are an extension of this new music experience giving audiences the chance to see some of the UK’s hottest talent in a fresh and exciting way,” says brand director Spencer McHugh.

(more…)

Island Records artist Tinchy Stryder is getting interactive with his latest video using ”Clickthrough” technology. What’s that? Well, it lets people watching the video online hover their mouse over individual elements in the video for more information, while also clicking through to buy merchandise that’s featured in the video.

It’s like product placement 2.0, points out Music Week. “Consumers are moving away from traditional media – TV, radio and press – and this new Clickthrough technology allows us to provide an attractive, fully integrated promotional and retail experience online, delivering fans what they want while opening up incremental revenue streams for us,” says Island commercial director David Hawkes.

Presumably this requires the label taking a cut of the resulting merch sales.

AQA is one of those SMS Q&A services where you text it questions and it texts you back the answers. But now it’s launched a new service called AQA2U, which lets anyone set up a Twitter-style news feed that sends out your thoughts as texts to subscribers at 25p a time, up to a maximum of £3.50 a month.

That’s right, it’s basically getting people to pay for content they could get for free from a Twitter feed. Or, as AQA puts it, “AQA2U is micro-blogging with a business model”.

Grime star Tinchy Stryder is already using the service. Will consumers really stump up, though? And given that Tinchy tweets lots on Twitter already, what on earth will he save for his AQA2U feed that’ll be worth 25p a pop? In all honesty, we’re profoundly doubtful whether this will prove a lucrative earner for artists.