Sandbox Issue 191: Ad ons
November 15, 2017
Lead: With so much music now being ostensibly free at the point of consumption, advertising is expected to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the digital content industries. As such, the nature and forms of advertising have...
Sandbox Issue 190: Retarget practice
November 15, 2017
Lead: Have you ever been hounded around the internet by an ad for a gas boiler or cheap flights? Of course you have. It’s 2017, after all. That is, as you’ll know, symptomatic of bad retargeting. But don’t mock too...
Sandbox Issue 189: D2C gets cranked up
November 15, 2017
Lead: D2C started to flex its muscles just as the decline in the traditional CD market began to really bite. Now it is more important that ever as both a revenue driver and a means of ensuring ongoing fan engagement. We look...
Sandbox Issue 188: Wham, Bam, Instagram
September 29, 2017
Lead: Speak to any artist and ask them what social platform they prefer most and chances are they’ll say Instagram. Away from the trolling on Twitter and the sinkhole of posts on Facebook, Instagram offers a calmer place...
Sandbox Issue 187: Live and Direct
September 29, 2017
Our lead feature this week looks at some of the most inventive and successful recent campaigns using live video on Facebook – an increasingly prominent part of the social network’s featureset. Our Tools page looks...
Sandbox 186: Video killed the video star
September 29, 2017
Lead: So long to big-budget videos? Taylor Swift’s new vid may be breaking YouTube records, but many major artists are starting to question the value of traditional music videos. Our lead feature looks at some of the...
Sandbox 185: Simply the worst
August 7, 2017
Lead: History tends to be written by the winners and that is why we almost exclusively hear about campaigns that worked brilliantly and left everyone involved covered in glory – where the marketing team and artist were...
Lead: A decade ago, the focus in album marketing was around the pre-order, using instant grats at the bait to get fans to order albums before they had even come out. Now the emphasis has shifted to the pre-save – primarily...
Lead: Acts outside of the US/UK centre of pop gravity used to be the exception rather than the rule – the true outliers of music. Digital in general and social media in particular have changed that, letting them rewrite...
Sandbox Issue 182: Loose Lips Sync Hits
June 21, 2017
Lead: Musical.ly wasn’t the first lip syncing app, but it is comfortably the biggest. It now claims to have 200m users and offers a direct route to a young audience that sits outside of both traditional media and the...
Sandbox Issue 181: Rise of the Micro Influencers
June 7, 2017
Lead: There was a time when getting someone with a huge social media following to shill your product was all you needed to make a splash. But brands are now starting to question if biggest really is best; and thus we see...
Sandbox Issue 180 – WhatsApp Doc?
May 24, 2017
Lead: WhatsApp has 1.2bn monthly users. Amazing. But the music industry is barely using it as a marketing platform. Not amazing. So why not? There are (still) pragmatic issues such as as a cap on the number of users in a...
