UGC unboxing digipak/special editions videos

This is primarily an audience, UGC activity but as with lyric videos artists themselves, as one means of seeming to put themselves on a level with their fans (uses and gratifications), have engaged in this.

Below: James Hetfield (Lars?) unboxes a deluxe re-release - useful on multiple levels:

• the importance of repackaged re-release sets
• re-mastering
• outtakes, demos, alternative versions
• live recordings
• multi-format: CD, DVD, LP
• vinyl and Record Store Day
• additional media: book and patch
• sold through the band's website
• the normally UGC of unboxing

See Blabbermouth e-zine article.

WEBSITE Doors bundle t-shirts and vinyl with Light My Fire re-release

IN THIS POST: Discussion of a heritage (60s/70s) band's use of merchandise and social media; analysis of their website including detailed denotation of the features, with screenshots, and a look at their social media integration and audience interaction (or lack of...).

This isn't The Doors' main website (though that is linked, and everything here IS featured and sold through their website too), but an online retailer that sells their merchandise, and markets this (I came across this via a Facebook update of the official Doors page, screenshot below the line). 

This is a further sign or evidence of the re-emergence of vinyl, plus the centrality of merchandise (especially when touring isn't an option) to monetise music.

below - analysis on assessing target audience (core/primary and secondary) + more images + detailed analysis of their website...

Anti-X Factor FB Campaign: Nirvana for Xmas no.1

SamB raised this, and I'm sure many of you are aware of the 2009 campaign which successfully propelled the industrial metal group Rage Against the Machine to the no.1 spot instead of whatever dreck won Cowell's show that year. Not just any band, this was one with a distinct history of radical, counter-hegemonic lyrics and actions, including various campaigns
My interest was briefly drawn again last year when it was proposed that the avant-garde composer John Cage's piece which consisted of silence (conductor's baton raised and orchestra putting instruments down the only sound if I remember right) for 4mins be the anti-Xfactor single. Now that would have

Eg of re-[digi]packaging old albums + tour: SUEDE

90s Britpoppers Suede provide a useful eg of bands reissuing repackaged versions of their albums, with bonus DVDs; this is part of the article from pitchfork.com; the full article gives complete CD/DVD listing. Suede are touring to support this release, playing a classic album each night, which links into your digipak ads in most cases...

Suede Reissue Details Revealed

As previously reported, reunited Britpop leading lights Suede will release expanded editions of their five studio albums in May and June, via Demon Records. Each of the records has been remastered and expanded to include B-sides, demos, and previously unreleased songs, as well booklets and bonus DVDs featuring recent interviews with the band members and more. The entire band, including once-estranged original guitarist Bernard Butler, worked on the reissue project.

The expanded edition of the band's 1993 self-titled debut is due May 30, with 1994's Dog Man Star following June 6, 1996's Coming Up out June 13, 1999's Head Music arriving June 20, and 2002's A New Morning due June 22. On Record Store Day, April 16, Suede will release a limited edition single featuring demo versions of their first single, 1992's "The Drowners" b/w "To the Birds". In addition, The Best of Suede, which came out last year in the UK, will be released digitally in the U.S. on March 22.
Over the next few months, the band will also play shows in Europe, North America, and Asia, including a set at Coachella and a couple of three-night stands where they'll play a classic album in full each night. Below, we've got the tracklists for each of the reissues, as well as the band's tour dates and their video for "The Drowners".

There's nothing new in genre-mixing

See also Series: Tom Ewing on music
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/feb/24/genre-mixing-nothing-new-screamadelica
There's nothing new in genre-mixing
Hybridisation is a basic tenet of art-pop and purists lurk at the margins in a strange hothouse full of exotic blooms 

Primal Scream in 1991 … 'Screamadelica joined the dots between types of music in a way that made bleary but beautiful sense.'

  

Primal Scream's Screamadelica is 20 this year, and celebrates with the inevitable doorstop reissue. It ought, perhaps, to be 21 – the album's moment was aptly sprawling and drawn out, from the release of the first single in February 1990 to its winning the inaugural Mercury prize more than two years later. Loaded heralded the high-tide of indie-dance – by the time Screamadelica emerged, that moment had gone. It's testimony to the record's strength that it is remembered as a blissful peak of genre-splicing despite turning up so late to its own party.
What Screamadelica did – join the dots between types of music in a way that made bleary but beautiful sense – feels like a really 90s thing. Certainly the decade was full of music that was sold and praised on the basis that there's something inherently thrilling about genres swapping spit down at the indie disco. Beck finagled an entire career from it, Moby sold the notion to advertisers everywhere, the Prodigy played rave like it was rock, and rap-metal provided an appalling hangover to the whole polystylistic party.
But of course genre-mixing was nothing new. What made rock music so strong during its 60s and 70s heyday wasn't its attitude so much as its adaptability – it constantly, omnivorously renewed itself, drawing from any genre it could. Blues, folk, country, soul, jazz, even classical – rock mated with them all. Purism has always been an exception, delighted borrowing the rule. But those were all musics that predated rock, and lent it authenticity. From the 80s onwards, it was having to accommodate the styles that succeeded it – such as disco, synth-pop, hip-hop and dance music. The results were awkward enough that successes got treated as breakthroughs.
These days, genre-blending is again just part of the landscape. Eleven years ago, Radiohead's two-footed lunge into intelligent dance music on Kid A had critics gasping at their boldness. Now they cross-pollinate their sound with dubstep or Afrobeat and receive a polite nod or a muffled yawn. But that isn't to say critics want purity – far from it. From the xx through Janelle Monáe to Animal Collective, almost every acclaimed act works towards forging a sound by taking cues from a mass of other styles. Hybridisation is a basic tenet of art-pop, and purists lurk at the margins, vainly pointing out that perhaps you might want to listen to R&B rather than, say, the Dirty Projectors's etiolated, angular take on it.
For many of these acts, the moment they perfect their blend is also the moment they break through to a wider critical – and sometimes public – consciousness. So music coverage often feels like a strange hothouse, full of exotic blooms that may never flower so fully again. Refine a sound and it risks becoming predictable; change it and you lose what makes you special.
It's in this overheated context that two of my favourite records this year shine – both of them exercises in deliberate genre-shifts by performers who've been around a while. The artists could hardly be more different: Detroit garage punks the Dirtbombs, whose Party Store is a collection of classic techno covers, and Düsseldorf composer Hauschka, whose forthcoming Salon des Amateurs finds him trying to make a minimal dance record using contemporary classical piano music.
Both these records could have been dreadful: both succeed wildly, as Hauschka and the Dirtbombs each seem enlivened by the challenges they've set themselves, adapting their sounds to the rhythms and structures of techno. On Party Store, rough-cut, spartan riffing turns out to be a great fit for the 25-year-old future dreamed up by Cybotron and Derrick May, bringing out the music's harsher qualities but preserving its drive.
On Salon des Amateurs, meanwhile, Hauschka trades in his usual genteel, prepared piano miniatures for something surprisingly banging. Track titles such as "NoSleep", "TaxiTaxi" and "Girls" set the tone, and sharply plucked strings combine with double bass and piano fragments to create momentum. Like the Kompakt tracks that apparently inspired it, Hauschka's album is good at establishing hooks then subtly shifting their musical setting, letting peaks emerge from repetitive structures. Like the Dirtbombs – and like Screamadelica way back when, for that matter – the record is the sound of people using genre-mixing to stretch their identity, not just create it.

More egs of why MusicGuardian is useful

I'll discuss these in classes today but with Psychology exam many of you will be elsewhere.
Friday is Guardian Film and Music supplement day - for your A2 work, the Music section should be looked at at least once a week for relevant articles. In today's supplement there are 3 features that stand out:

Be grateful to the Grateful Dead

The show must go on: when bands replace their dead stars

The third is the main page of advertising: a quick scan will reveal its mostly ads for bands from the 80s/90s/early 00s. The 1st looks at the trend for repackaging/special editions - precisely what you're all doing; the 2nd is self-explanatory

Vids for older tracks: Beatles

The Beatles have provided the perfect example of how record companies are looking to wring sales out of their back catalogue (cf. the long tail theory). They timed the week the X Factor had a Beatles theme to coincide with their finally allowing iTunes to release their back catalogue - but only at a higher price than anyone else. They've released a series of teaser vids for many of these, one eg below:



See also http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/mojo/14873/beatles-not-for-sale/