The Wilderness Downtown – The Arcade Fire

Flash vs. HTML5 – who will win? If the Arcade Fire promotional website (The Wilderness Downtown) is any indication, HTML5 all the way. Ad Age recently included the Creativity’s best ad “Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown Trailer” in their morning newsletter, and the ad is amazing. It’s essentially a trailer for the music video. The whole concept was designed by Chris Milk from @radical.media and Google’s Aaron Koblin from the Google Creative Lab.

Basically, it’s an interactive music video for the song “We Used to Wait” that utilizes Google’s Chrome Browser and HTML5. You type in the address that you grew up in, and it takes you on a journey incorporating Google Maps. It is way cool and the functionality is amazing. You even get… [Read More]

MySpace launched Music Romeo on August 12, 2010. The application can be described as Pandora for video. Instead of choosing artists or songs, this application goes off of genre and mood. Even better, the algorithm for song selections is supposed to use social media trends to pick what’s new and hot. This could be a potentially great idea.

Although it was featured in a MySpace press release, the application itself wasn’t developed by MySpace and users are warned about its third party status before installing. (We Are Hunted developed the application.) Also, finding the application might not be the easiest task for people hearing about it via word of mouth. Googling “MySpace Romeo” pulls up an artist account, followed by news articles about the application. It seems like the only thing making the application popular is the iPad app.

The… [Read More]

I watched the movie “Kick Ass” the other night, and oddly, it got me thinking about social media (It’s a curse we in the business of sm live with. Be kind.) I came up with a list of how social media gives companies and individuals superpowers:

1. Invisibility: When you monitor and listen to the cloud to find out who is talking about you and your competitors and what they are saying, you are enjoying the benefits of a cloaking ability. They can’t see you, but you’re sizing up who your audience is or could be, as well as finding out exactly what they need from your type of product or service. Invisibility helps you prepare and fill gaps.
2. Empathy: The ability I hope you get from using the first ability. The reason you do all that looking and listening is to understand the audience and to empathize

… [Read More]

The Nashville music scene can appear a bit daunting to enter, especially for new artists and bands. While there are plenty of opportunities to put your music out there, the only problem is connecting with fans. People need an incentive to follow a band’s career as it develops, and — although the music itself is important in achieving that goal — it’s not enough in a town where the advantage lies in the hands of those who are well connected. However, indie artists need not worry; UARadio.net, an online community for indie artists, is aiming to help out in a big way. I caught up with Julian Bankston, founder of the website, and discussed the ideas behind UARadio.

Julian started UARadio after following his own affection of music. “It all comes down to what you know and what you love,” he explained. Utilizing… [Read More]

Once used in the Presidential inauguration and the f8 developer conference, Facebook Live is now available to all Pages. Facebook Live can stream video and chat onto a tab within Facebook. The video technology is partnered with Livestream.com; which allows easy sharing to Twitter and other social networks.

The chat (which ironically works better than the normal Facebook chat) is powered by Livestream, too. It requires the user to enter in a nickname or to login through Livestream. The default view on Facebook live shows status updates about the event, not the actual chat. To view the actual chat, the user has to click on the chat tab at the top. I have a feeling Facebook will switch the default view in the future, as it would allow people to interact while watching the video, not just advertise they’re watching it to their friends who might… [Read More]