The SXSW (South by South West) festival in Austin, Texas starts tomorrow, running for nine days and encompassing many forms of media making it the festival that leads the way in interaction over many platforms.
SXSW really show others what is possible when it comes to using social media, utilising Facebook and Twitter amongst many other platforms, to bring up-to-date information to delegates and those attending. You can also use your Facebook and Twitter accounts to connect with other services such as the (unofficial) guide to the event on sched.org.
The festival, of course, has an iPhone app and it looks great. With schedule and maps as the more basic functions, it also includes some special features for the badge holders including a card feature that allows you to send your contact details to other delegates and a messaging feature that allows the badge holders to communicate away from the festival’s own social network my.SXSW.
It would be great to see some of the UK festivals embrace these types of technology; fans love to interact and connect in every way possible and we at Poker PR can offer all the services to make this happen.
The International Music Summit 2010 (IMS), which takes over the five-star Ibiza Gran Hotel on the 26-28 May, yesterday announced a new line up of speakers that include Sasha, Heidi (Radio 1), Cassius and Jesse Rose.
They’ll be joining an already star studied line-up including Mark Ronson who’ll be giving a keynote interview, Annie Mac, Erick Morillo, DJ Skream, Pedro Winter/ Busy P, Arthur Baker, Robin Millar, and internationally acclaimed producer David Guetta.
Sasha will host a Pioneer technical demo, explaining his decision to return to using their equipment after years of flying the flag for Ableton. It is said that he made the return to the equipment while his infamous ‘Maven’ controller was being upgraded. Poker PR saw Sasha using the new CDJ2000s at Matter and can confirm he is making the most of this new technology.
Google, T-Mobile, Sprite, Coca-Cola Group, Ministry of Sound, BBC Radio 1, KCRW, MP7, Beatport, and ResidentAdvisor are among some of the companies who will have representatives in attendance, some of whom will be sitting on the event panels. Panels this year include, Big Dog DJs: F*** You We’re Famous, USA Today: Boom Boom Now! and Meet the Future. There will also be a repeat of last year’s Ibiza United panel, featuring the big players in Ibiza clubbing, Amnesia, Eden, Es Paradis, Pacha, Privilege and Space.
Poker PR will make one part of the numerous music industry bodies in attendance for our second year running, and we have to say that the line-up of artists and speakers has us a little excited already.
For further info on the event please visit the IMS website
We at Poker PR have previously blogged about the ‘Album App’ and now US firm Metatron gives us a new digital film format: the ‘appMovie’. It describes a package containing HD video, audio and images.
Available to download from the iTunes app store for £2.99, the first appMovie is a documentary called Bob Marley: Spiritual Journey. It includes 14 rare tracks, and a 30 minute interview, hundreds of images and the one hour documentary, with all video content in HD. Metatron intend to make the app available on Blackberry, Android and HD TV.
The appMovie is based around the movie but at Poker we can see no reason why this could not be switched to music creating an appAlbum, featuring a full album of music, sleeve notes, choices of artwork and videos of the top tracks. This could be a great way to reignite the fans desire to buy artist albums and not just download the odd track.
Yesterday’s Music 4.5 event in London featured many panels covering a wide collection of subjects relevant to the music industry. The aim of the event is to bring together the tech geeks and the music geeks, both innovators and creators, with the aim of inspiring a new creative discussion focusing on innovation, revenue and business model opportunities, disruptive technology and social content.
Panels included the TechCrunch pitches featuring 10 tech start-ups explaining what they do, who they are and why they are the future for music. These included two that Poker PR found very interesting:
Psonar a cloud-based music service that lets artists upload their music to its servers and the music is then accessible from anywhere you can connect to the internet. Other users can listen to 30 second clips of your music and can be sent to Amazon to buy it or can share recommendations over social media.
CloseCall Music ever wanted the track you have just heard live at a gig? Then this excellent bit of tech is for you. CloseCall Music allows fans to purchase music from an event on their mobile phone and collect it on a USB or CD as they leave the event. If some rights issues are addressed it could allow the music to be downloaded direct to your phone.
Both of these solutions have the ability to create revenue for the artists and where applicable, the labels, which we at Poker are sure will be greatly received by both.
Two new additions have been added to the ever-growing line up of this year’s V-Festival. The event takes place on Saturday 21st and 22nd August 2010 at Hylands Park, Chelmsford, Essex and Weston Park, Staffordshire. Calvin Harris and Doves have both been added to the 4Music stage and will be joining headliners The Prodigy and David Guetta, supported by Florence and the Machine.
The main V stage headliners over the two days are Kasabian and Kings of Leon with support from likes of Stereophonics, Faithless, The Kooks, Paul Weller, Paolo Nutini, Pet Shop Boys, Cheryl Cole, Madness, Editors, White Lies, Mika, Groove Armada, The Courteeners, The Charlatans, The Temper Trap, Amy Macdonald, Goldfrapp, Shed Seven, Newton Faulkner, La Roux, Skunk Anansie, Passion Pit, Ellie Goulding, Paloma Faith, Plan B, Sugababes, and Pixie Lott also confirmed with more acts still to be announced.
Tickets go on sale at 9am tomorrow morning so be sure to get in there quick. A list of official ticket outlets is available here. Festival officials are warning that there are a large amount of scam websites out there and also recommending that festival goers do not use secondary ticket sellers to avoid disappointment.
Poker PR has attended V Festival for many years and if this year’s event can come anywhere close to last year’s sun kissed event then we are in for a real treat.
The UK based Spotify rival, We7 has launched a new music streaming mobile app, available as a free download from the iTunes store. The app appears to be working on the We7’s Premium account, although from the 1st March it will only work for those who sign up for the £9.99 a month Premium+ account.
We7’s product allows users to take advantage of an offline mode where in areas of little or no reception, they will still be able to listen to music that has been cached to the handset – a feature similar to that of the Spotify app.
There is a special offer on We7’s current Premium PC based service that is advert free and is available until the 1st May for £3.99 a month (normal price £4.99). The Premium+ service will feature ad free listening on both PC and mobile and will be available on both the iPhone and Android devices. We7 say they will be making the app available to Blackberry devices at some point.
Following Warner Music’s comment that steaming services were “clearly not positive for the industry”, Poker PR believes it will be the premium services that will be used to keep the record companies happy and provide the money to keep the music industry alive.
Kasabian and Muse both picked up two awards at last night’s Shockwave NME awards. The awards – originally started way back in 1953 – were last night held at the O2 Academy Brixton in London where Kasabian, Marina And The Diamonds, Lily Allen, The Big Pink, Hole and The Maccabees all performed live. 3.6 million votes were cast this year, “proving that music fans are as passionate as ever” according to NME editor Krissi Murison.
Kasabian picked up ‘Best Album’ and ‘Best Album Artwork’ for ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’, while Muse scooped the ‘Best British Band’ award, beating Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, Biffy Clyro and Kasabian, as well as receiving the ‘Best Website’ prize.
Oasis walked away empty handed despite being up for three awards including best video, for ‘Falling Down’, while their 90s rivals, Blur pick up a well-deserved award for their reunion gig in Hyde Park last summer.
Other awards included:
Best Solo Artist – Jamie T
Best New Band – Bombay Bicycle Club
Best Live Band – Arctic Monkeys
Best Festival – (shock horror) Glastonbury
Best Dressed – Lady Gaga
Worst Dressed- Lady Gaga
Rage Against The Machine were named the ‘Heroes of the Year’ for keeping X-Factor winner Joe McElderry off the Christmas number one spot.
Social Media was given a positive nod when Lily Allen received the ‘Giving it Back Award’ for her Twitter ticket treasure hunt where fans had the opportunity to find free tickets to her world tour.
Paul Weller was the recipient of the ‘Godlike Genius’ award and closed the event with six songs from his long and productive career.
With social media technology moving at such a rapid rate, November last year may as well have been 5 years ago. It was back then that Microsoft announced that Outlook 2010 was to include the add on, Outlook Social Connector, which at the time would connect with only Linked In. But it has since been announced that it’ll now link with many more platforms including Twitter and Facebook.
We at Poker PR like the fact that Social Connector offers an approach that enables you to quickly and easily view all content related to an Outlook contact, including their tweets, Facebook status updates, or other social networking interactions.
The one stand out point of Microsoft’s offering is that your inbox will not be cluttered with lots of additional messages. The expandable People Pane shows a complete messaging and communication history for the given contacts: emails, attachments, calendar events, activities and status updates.
As Google have continued to tweak Buzz over the last week, addressing the privacy concerns, there is still a question hovering as to whether Buzz is really a Facebook and Twitter beating social network; or just – as Microsoft’s solution is – a way of integrating your current social media into your email platform.
Following Fridays excellent meet up, as part of Social Media Week London, on the subject of Social Media Measurement and Monitoring, the question stands, why is there not a tool to manage multiple social media campaigns that also gives you the ability to run analytics on each of the campaigns at the same time?
Are the vendors and developers missing out here, or are they not listening to what we need? With many clients on the books Poker PR, along with many other, are crying out for a platform that allows the user to not only post content to multiple sites but to track who is commenting on, retweeting or sharing our content and what the sentiment develops around the subject matter.
Social media is still a new and exciting form of media and the tools that exists around it are improving week in week out, it is only a matter of time until a combined management and measuring tool becomes available and when it does we at Poker will be one of the many agencies ready to snap it up.
As Facebook heads towards its sixth birthday next month, The Economist special report takes an in-depth look at social media.
One of the most interesting parts of this excellent article is the section on the future of social media. The future, it would seem, is mobile. Sharing is one of the main draws of current social media and this will continue in the future at every opportunity. We already update our status from our mobiles, but how about letting your friends see a picture of what you are about to buy, letting your sat-nav tell your loved ones you are heading home, or recording the TV program that all your friends have been talking about online?
Apps like Foursquare already allow us to share our favourite places and ideas of what to do in our cities, as we know, things move fast in this day and age so this extending sharing is only just around the corner. Poker is already looking into the upcoming technologies and how we can integrate them into our services.
-
Sound Cloud
-
Just Giving
-
Flickr feed
 |