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- So hot right now: 2m apply for 60k iTunes Festival tickets
The annual iTunes Festival has turned into something of a beast since its modest launch with a small but powerful line-up at the ICA in 2007.
This year's festival at London's Roundhouse is giving away 60,000 tickets for gigs scattered throughout July - but an astonishing two million people have applied for them.
The iTunes Festival isn't a big money spinner in Apple terms; it's free, for starters. But this is a powerful marketing exercise for Apple, putting the virtual iTunes brand into the real world and reinforcing it with live artists. We also know how powerful live music and events are for driving music sales. I asked Apple for any figures on how influential the iTunes Festival is in that respect, but they couldn't comment.
The festival does generate exclusive content for the iTunes store, however - 60 tracks from the live recordings that go on sale in all 23 iTunes stores. A duet between Florence Welch and Dizzie Rascal at this year's Brit Awards in February was sold exclusively through iTunes five hours after the gig, and generated enough sales to push the track to number one.
Photo by tallkev on Flickr. Some rights reservedThis year's festival includes The XX, Ellie Goulding and Phoenix, along with Tony Bennett and Ozzy Osbourne. We can only hope that latter two decide to do a duet. (*Pretty please*)
What else is Apple brewing in the music space? Apple has already experimented with live music streaming to the iPhone in a low-profile Underworld gig last summer. That used Apple's HTTP streaming protocol, which is designed to make streamed content more reliable even with a patchy or busy network.
We'll probably see streamed gigs through iTunes too. And then there's the streamed music service, based on Apple's acquisition of Lala, widely expected to launch soon. That could blow Spotify out of the water.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - We Are Scientists present … the rules of writing a World Cup anthem
Writing a World Cup anthem? Then read this to avoid making the same mistakes as Bob Dylan (too many lyrics) or Madonna (released at Christmas)
The football anthem occupies a genre all of its own. It must delicately balance patriotic spirit, jovial sportsmanship and a lack of delicacy. Artists including New Order, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles have entered the maze and found their way out the other side. Others – such as Madonna, U2 and the Beatles – have notoriously crashed on the rocks, ending promising careers and spending decades wandering along pop music's abandoned outer banks. The latest big success story is, of course, us. Here's how we did it.
Perfect lyrics
The lyrics to a great football anthem must beg listeners to sing along, which means they need to be catchy and easy to memorise. But that's not enough: they also have to be informative and accurate. We took our starting point from the most basic act of football, kicking the ball. We decided to say most of it a few times: "Kicking the, kicking the, kicking the ball." So far so good – great, even. But where to go from there? Well, what's the best thing you can do with the ball, when you kick it? Our assumption was "get it away from you". But we decided not to rely on our own understanding of the game – this is a song that ideally will represent an entire nation, after all! – and so we asked hundreds of footballers, from amateurs to pros to lifetime fans. The picture that began to emerge was quite a surprise: for the most part they agreed that the best thing you can hope to do when you strike the ball with your foot is to put the ball in the goal. With this more subtle understanding of the game in place, completing the central lyric of our anthem was child's play: "Kicking the, kicking the, kicking the ball. Kicking it, kicking it into the goal."
Already we had taken a powerful idea – kicking the ball into the goal – and made it something people will enjoy chanting. The next challenge, then, was to add some texture. We decided it was worth taking the risk of writing a stanza of lyrics to be sung during the bridge. The danger here, of course, is that presenting an entire stanza of lyrics – in any song, but especially in an anthem – is risky as hell. What do you risk? You risk putting off 90% of listeners with what songwriters call "word harassment". This is why people still, to this day, do not listen to Bob Dylan, despite claiming to really like him. The exception in a catalogue overflowing with word harassment is Dylan's 1974 World Cup anthem, for which he penned his most compelling lyrics – "You score one, I score two, looks like I score more than you; you score three, I score more, least I'll score is surely four" – and let them stand on their own, unadorned, repeated for eight minutes over what sounds like a gong battle.
The good thing about a lengthy lyric is that you're able to express more complicated ideas and stories, which is exactly what we decided to do with our bridge:
England is the team to beat,
and Rooney has got the heat,
and the shoes that are 'pon his feet,
well Andy calls them "football boots" but we call them "cleats"In four short lines, we manage to accomplish quite a bit. First, we throw the home team a compliment: "You are the team to beat, guys." A sentiment any fan will love. Next, we give a shout-out to what our surveys say is probably the most popular player on the team, Wayne Rooney, a footballer who consistently adheres to the principle that guides our anthem: goal kicking. Then, in the latter couplet, we introduce an interesting cultural juxtaposition: the athletic shoes that football players wear are in England called "football boots" (we know this in the anthem because Andy, our British drummer, is said to call them that) but in America (where Chris & Keith are from) they're called "cleats". This is one of those great "look how different we are, yet look how similar" moments, because although Brits and Americans have different names for the footwear worn by players, they all agree that England is the good team which, hopefully, will win.
Solid website
The official website for our song, goalengland.co.uk, is the perfect digital home for a great football anthem. It has English flags all over the place. It has pictures of the three of us in English football jerseys. It has coupons for heavy discounts on beer at your local pub (you just put in your post code), coupons for free flatscreen TVs (again, post code needed), and great travel-booking software that will arrange your trip to Johannesburg, including flights, cars, hotels, and tickets to the matches, for less than what you're used to paying for a bap.
Of course, back when U2 and the Beatles released their anthems, air travel was expensive, and websites were but a dream. Led Zeppelin got around this by drawing a website in pencil on the back of a coaster. It had flags, a timetable for trains, and what it lacked in accessibility it made up with plucky ingenuity. Fans responded, lining up for days to view the paper website in the pub where it was created.
Good timing
Finally, you must release your anthem during a World Cup year, and during football season. Madonna failed to follow this rule, burying her football anthem at the end of a Christmas record released 18 months after the World Cup. Bob Dylan knew this rule all too well, and has ended up letting it control his career, releasing a new album like clockwork every four years immediately prior to the World Cup.
For us, the trick has been finding a healthy middle ground. We don't want to follow Dylan's trail into the wilderness any more than we want to give up a good thing. We've decided, as a compromise between the two sides, to record new anthems for each of the next five World Cups, and then to hang up our songwriting cleats.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Behind the music: Is there any point in 'buying' your fans?
Companies are preying on desperate musicians by selling them Twitter followers, Facebook fans and even download sales. But only a fool would think this is real success ...
One of the most staggering statistics I took from this year's The Great Escape was that analytics company MusicMetric is currently tracking 450,000 artists. As it's not following every artist out there, we can safely say there are more than half a million competing for your attention. So how are they supposed to get heard?
Unsurprisingly, new companies have emerged that are intent on profiting from the increasing desperation of artists and start-up record labels, in the same way that modelling agencies prey on young, naïve hopefuls.
Last year, I questioned if internet radio stations like Jango and Last.fm's Powerplay – which charged $30 and $200, respectively, for 1000 plays – were actually giving value for money. Now, with social media becoming increasingly important in marketing, some companies are selling "fans" and "followers".
On Usocial.net you can buy 1,000 Twitter followers for $87, 1,000 Facebook friends for $197, and 5,000 YouTube views for $97. There's an annoying woman who pops up on each of their pages, saying things like: "We know the secrets to making an overnight rockstar on Twitter ... without any effort."
It's unclear from Usocial's website how they go about getting you these followers and views, but maybe Subvertandprofit.com provides a clue. Subvert and Profit (even the name makes me queasy) charges a $0.40 "base price" per Facebook and Twitter follower and $0.75 per YouTube vote. They also have a Social Media User page, which describes how you can earn money from performing tasks on social media sites. You earn a "base price" of $0.20 (a maximum of $0.50) per task performed on Facebook and Twitter ($0.30 on YouTube). They even have a pyramid scheme where, if you refer a friend, you earn $0.05 every time they perform a task.
As anyone with any sense knows, thousands of Twitter followers do not a rock star make. It's a warped system when the marketing company and the "music fan" makes money out of the artist, with little – if any – gain for the artist. What's to stop someone signing up for a Twitter and Facebook account that they never look at, just to make money from "performing tasks"?
One of the worst examples of a company taking advantage of desperate artists is a new Australian venture called Chartfixer (the clue is in the name). For $6,000, Chartfixer will crowd-source 1,000 downloaders to each buy a digital copy of an artist's track from iTunes. After purchasing the track, the downloader can claim the cost back and obtain a reward of one dollar. In Australia, 1,000 sales can get you into the top 80, whereas 5,000 sales (which would cost $25,000) can buy you a potential top 20 hit.
They're hoping to launch in the UK – where you'd need a lot more sales to get into the charts – but since the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) says that sales for any release found to be using the service would be disqualified, they may find it difficult to find customers here.
My advice for artists fighting to get heard is to build their fanbase organically. It takes time, but that's how you develop a loyal fanbase. If you find it difficult attracting fans, try spending more time practising and developing your songwriting skills than on social media (that doesn't mean you shouldn't use social media, but get the music right first). Try to be distinctive – you're competing with half a million artists.
Whatever you do, do not be lured into paying for the "shortcuts" these companies are selling. After all, it's difficult enough these days getting people to pay for the music they like.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Tracklists of my tears
Richard Ashcroft's new album has a tracklist that's funnier than anything pop satirists could come up with. But which other running orders out-spoof the spoofs?
Ten years ago, my colleague on the soon-to-be-defunct Select magazine, Steve Lowe, had a good line in inventing fake song titles, spoofing the faux-profound contradictions of Oasis (Money Makes You Poor), the twee archaisms of Belle and Sebastian (Take Your Coat Off or You Won't Feel the Benefit) and the parenthesis-loving rock cliches of Richard Ashcroft (Standing Out from Everyone Else (Sure Is Hard)).
Like the Onion writer who comes across a real headline that defies parody, he must be rubbing his hands over the tracklist for Ashcroft's new LP, the fabulously named RPA and the United Nations of Sound. The band's July debut will feature such winners as This Thing Called Life, Life Can Be So Beautiful, Good Loving and, best of all, How Deep Is Your Man. There's also one called America, which I hope is a sequel to 2000's New York, in which Ashcroft astutely observed that Manhattan is both a "big city of dreams" and "the city that never sleeps". They call pavements sidewalks over there, you know. It's a crazy place (man).
One of the side effects of our feverish, rumour-crazed pre-release culture is the proliferation of fake tracklists, some of which are drolly credible. One rumoured version of Jay-Z's The Blueprint 3 included such convincing titles as Wake Up New York, Hades (Lucifer Pt II) and Eternal Jewels. Within hours of Arcade Fire announcing their new album would be called The Suburbs one wag posted a running order featuring La Maison Dieu and In Iowa, overplaying the joke only slightly with Neighbourhood #5 (Hockey).
A dead-on parody can be a compliment if a songwriter has a distinctive voice, such as Mark E Smith or Richey Edwards. On a half-true tracklist that appeared in advance of Manic Street Preachers' Journal for Plague Lovers, the real titles (Virginia State Epileptic Colony, Jackie Collins Existential Question Time) were more outlandish than the impostors (Library of Disorder, Tomorrow Is a Degraded Expanse). And an online game to invent names for Stereolab songs (Semi-Colon Fantasmas, Accelerated Cloudy Bebop, Helicoptic Orthodoxy) met its match in the group's own Chemical Chords album (Cellulose Sunshine, Vortical Phonotheque, Daisy Click-Clack).
The comedy takes off only when an artist displays zero self-awareness. I'd like to think Primal Scream were sending themselves up on 2006's Riot City Blues with titles such as Suicide Sally and Johnny Guitar or We're Gonna Boogie, but I fear not. Equally, Christina Aguilera's Sex for Breakfast was probably conceived in the spirit of Sex and the City 2 rather than Flight of the Conchords. And Oasis's Don't Believe the Truth is every bit as stupid-clever as Money Makes You Poor.
Songwriters have good reason to complain when po-faced journalists miss the joke, but misreading their intentions in the opposite direction can be more perilous. I once made the mistake of telling Morrissey how much I liked the witty self-parody of How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel and was rewarded with a withering glare. "It's amusing when you say it," he said unsmilingly. "I don't know why. Isn't it something we all feel at some stage?" The shrivelling of Morrissey's spirit since the Smiths can be measured by the fact that Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now is funny and How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel is not.
So I'm loath to jump to conclusions. It's possible that Ashcroft was having a high old time making up these daft song titles, and we all are invited to share the joke. Or possibly not. Only hearing the album will tell us either way. Such is the beauty of this thing called life (yeah).
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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