End of week head-clearance

And breathe out… I’m taking a bit of time to reflect while I munch on some pasta. This past week has been hectic and brilliant for several reasons:

  • I’ve been invited to a recruitment day for MediaSnackers.
  • I’ve been hired by BCU to blog on their New Generation Arts Festival, covering the ‘online interactive’ aspects of the work being presented.
  • The Fierce Festival stuff I’m working is amazing
  • I picked up my new bike
  • I fixed my broadband connection, which had gone a little wonky

Music-wise I was less hectic than the previous week, only seeing Duffy and Foals.  Duffy was ok – very talented but a little bland.  Foals were fantastic though, despite being fashionista magnets the atmosphere at the gig was great.  I’m off to see Infadels tonight and then that’ll be it for a week and a half.  I’ll be posting up the reviews from the past couple of weeks soonish, so you’ve been warned.

Tomorrow I’m off to the Punch Records music marketing course. We’ll be covering radio promotion in the morning and partners &  sponsorship in the afternoon. It’s the last one I’ll be able to make it to because unfortunately it’s going to clash with some frenetic Fierce-related activity – the website goes live on Thursday.

On Tuesday I’m off to Alton Towers for a conference called ‘Using Digital Media in Marketing and Communications’ which is being organised by the folks at ideasforlife.tv.  Speakers include Dr Adam Rutherford (science journalist), Anthony Lilley (from Magic Lantern) and Dr Jon Salkeld (from QinetiQ).  There seems to be quite a strong corporate slant to the programme so it’ll be interesting to see where they take things.  Plus they’ve left time for rollercoasters afterwards.  If it’s worth blogging my notes I’ll do so.

At some point I need to fit in some presentation planning, content writing for my new website and my birthday.  One thing at a time though – I’ve got a gig to get to.

Punch Records – Music Marketing day 2

Unfortunately I could only make it to the morning session in week 2 so I missed an afternoon learning about street teams and fan based activity. I hesitate to say “meh, nevermind, it’s not too relevant to Culturedeluxe” because there’s every chance that it was very relevant.  I’ll have to ask around in the next session.

The day’s talks were delivered by Reggie Styles who works closely with Sony/BMG in a marketing capacity. He’s taken an interesting route to his current position, starting as a work experience kid in a record shop and working up from there via pirate radio stations, his own companies and in-house.  There’s a vid here of him DJing behind Lemar on GMTV.

It was his experience with radio & TV plugging that he was passing on in the morning. The general upshot was that if you’ve got a record/act you want on radio or TV then you need to employ a plugger with an extensive list of contacts to make it happen for you, and that can get very expensive indeed. In fact the kinds of figures mentioned meant that although much of the information we were getting was interesting, it wasn’t really relevant to us at this stage – none us on the course are anywhere near that kind of level yet.

Reggie’s recommendation that the producers in the room incorporate some pop hooks into their work if they ever want to sell anything were received coolly. Also, although no-one challenged his idealistic view of the 360 degree music contracts (recording, distribution, touring, merchandise… everything) major record labels are currently keen on it doesn’t take a genius to see that putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t a great idea.

Reggie, then, was a corporate record label guy and clearly very money-motivated. That’s not to say he’s not a good guy though. After all, he was spending the day giving us his valuable time and experience. Not only that but he took the time to ring round and find the name of Steve Lamacq’s producer for me, the reason being that Lammo recently played the Young*Husband single that CDX released on his R2 show and, with the next release being prepared, we need to follow that up. Reggie had a few bits of advice on how we could do that.

The next session is tomorrow. In the morning we’re covering online, digital and mobile media marketing; the afternoon is on developing and managing media relations. It sounds absolutely relevant to how we’re planning to push Culturedeluxe and it should have an impact on some other projects I’ve got on at the moment so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be reporting back here with the good stuff.

Looking forward on a Sunday night

I’ve just got back from seeing the oh-so-lovely Tina Dico at the Glee Club.  I’ll get the review for that up tomorrow but for now, suffice to say that she’s much better live than on record.  And very beautiful.

Tomorrow I’ve got the second day of the music marketing course.  Unfortunately I can only make the morning session but as that’s on plugging tracks to TV, clubs, colleges and universities I’ll live with it.  The afternoon will focus on guerilla marketing which will be a little less relevant for me (I think/hope).  I’ll definitely be posting about that.

In the evening I’m seeing MGMT who I’ve been hearing lots of good things about.  On Tuesday I’ve got a break from live music but from Wednesday I’ll be seeing Laura Marling, The Levellers and perhaps Envy & Other Sins on consecutive days.  Phew!  I’m not complaining though.

Before seeing Tina Dico I went along to the first Birmingham Live meet-up.  It was good to meet Steve Gerrard and Dave Allen again and to meet some others, including Bianca Barrett whose work I like.  There seems to be a good flush of enthusiasm about the project, I guess it’s just a question of trying to keep that up.

Excitingly I’ve just heard a couple of new tracks from Culturedeluxe signing Young*Husband and they’re better than the last single we put out.  The next release will be something to look forward to, especially as Steve Lamacq played the last one on R2 the other week.

Another busy week then.  However, right now it’s almost midnight and in all my comings and goings this evening I’ve not yet eaten.  I’d best go rustle something up.