brand-e

By Hugh Jordan. Underground is an overused term in music today, usually applied to some tanned hipsters, and once also labelled ‘the next big thing’. But Red Bull’s upcoming music festival Sounderground aims to celebrate those pallid performers who really do sacrifice the sunlight for the chance to perform. We’re talking buskers.
Brazilian Marcelo Beraldo is the founder of the inaugural Sounderground festival, scheduled to take place in Sao Paulo this November. His inspiration came from a four-month trip taking in 17 cities – New York, London and Paris among them – where he filmed underground buskers entertaining en route passengers.

Wallpaper* has joined forces with Ridley Scott Associates to produce a short film, Quatre, launched as part of the mag’s September issue.
The three-minute movie is ‘a complex tale of mistaken identities, passions reignited, the latest Lanvin. and good old girl-on-girl action’, according to publisher IPC Media.
“When Wallpaper* does film, we do it properly – Quatre is an elegant and erotically charged must-see piece of cinema,” says Tony Chambers, editor-in-chief, Wallpaper*

By Simon Fuller. Facebook users engaged in ‘ceaseless activity’? Coca-Cola residing in an ‘abode of angels’? Just a few snippets from a rather novel book on branding from London-based graphic designer Daniela Meloni which takes modern day brands and drops them into the middle of Dante’s vision of Hell, in a work entitled The Branding Comedy.
So where Divine Comedy found Dante encountering the inhabitants of each stage of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, here God has been replaced by the all-powerful consumer, with brands littering each level of existence as they try to get closer to this omnipresent being.

Fiat and Faithless have set the brand standard with their partnership for the single Feelin’ Good, says Forrester Research analyst Mark Mulligan. “Brands – Converse, Bacardi, etc – commissioning artists to record tracks for ad campaigns is a growing trend, but what Faithless have done here is different,” he points out. “No money actually changed hands, and no Fiat slogans or messaging appear on the video. So how does it work?

Going to music events is the top live leisure activity among 16-to-34 year-old men in the UK, according to IPC’s Today’s Man: Live! research.
Almost two thirds of males surveyed said they attended a live music event in the last year, compared to just 55% who’d gone to a football match. Going to gigs was the most popular of live music experience, ahead of festivals.
The survey also showed that music is hugely important to young men, with 69% saying that it is part of their identity and defines who they are.

By Simon Fuller. Crowdsourcing community Threadless has been churning out some funky Tee shirt designs for a while now, with the site printing the most popular submissions from its collective of artists in Tee form. But recently Threadless traded apparel for microchips, teaming up with computer brand Dell and its Dell Design studio to get creative with laptop lids.
Dell Design Studio already had 200-plus laptop covers to choose from before the Threadless community got involved this summer, adding 11 new lids with the promise of more to come.

Katy Perry has joined forces with Deutsche Telekom in an eight-market campaign to recruit fans to participate in the artist’s official music video for the upcoming release of the single Firework.
Each Telekom country – in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Macedonia and Montenegro – will have a different way of garnering participants, either by asking fans to complete a task, submit a video entry of their singing and dancing talents, or simply by entering a sweepstakes.

By Simon Fuller. The increased take-up of smartphones is resulting in a slew of services utilising a user’s location to provide info or make recommendations. It’s no surprise that brands are interested in how these location-based gizmos can help them, and with plenty of seemingly similar services out there – Foursquare, Gowalla, etc – there’s a lot of choice.