brand-e

Social savvy. So, just how important is social media to bands? “It’s the fans who are driving the distribution of music,” Susie Moore from BrandRock said at yesterday’s Music 4.5 event in London. … We should embrace it.
“The band will be a total business of people, with maybe a few people working on that band’s music, what that band believes in, its identity and values. It’s like any brand marketing exercise.”

Rocking brand. T-Mobile has signed on as launch partner of the Rock Band Network to develop an Artist Of The Month feature, starting next month, to help fans identify and connect with new talent in the Rock Band Network.
Harmonix and MTV Games have just opened the Rock Band Network Music Store to give Rock Band [...]

Bar IKEA. We bring you a pop-up bar in Portugal. Made from 420 bits of IKEA. Not just any old IKEA, mind you. We’re talking storage boxes, which two students from Porto University put together
for a competition aimed at getting entrants to build a bar that demonstrated what a cool school
the uni is. One nice [...]

Says Natasha Kizzie*. Formula One – the world’s most expensive sport – has long forged commercial relationships with those wanting some of the glitz and glamour that Grands Prix attract. Over the decades races set in increasingly far-flung and exotic locations have attracted the biggest and brightest stars of sports and entertainment as VIP spectators.
But only now is it really hooking into such off-the-track offerings, with a series of F1 Rocks music and lifestyle events planned in 2010. It follows the staggering success of a pilot F1 Rocks concert held in Singapore in September, together with Universal Music Group subsidiary All The Worlds, which saw 27,000 flock to the event itself, and a further TV audience of 26 million globally.

Making metal. ESPN and Wieden+Kennedy created what they are claiming is the first and only football-inspired heavy metal band, Group of Death, to promo the sports network’s 2010 World Cup coverage.
The band bowed on Facebook, YouTube and MySpace on 4 December last year  – the day of the World Cup draw – and also played [...]

By Steve Mullins. Branded radio. Pandora Media keeps racking up impressive metrics for its Internet radio service, delivering numbers that can only be good news for brands.
Recently, Pandora announced that it had racked up 40 million users across all platforms, including mobile, in early December, and that it was now signing up new listeners at a rate of 300k a week. In addition, the company says it accounted for 44% of all Net radio listening hours in the US in October, with total average daily users running to 3 million.
Wait, there’s more.

Party plays. Heineken rolled out its Playlist Challenge game over the festive period to keep the US partying. The idea of the app is to get players mixing the perfect menu of songs from indie artists to keep the on-screen video crowd stepping along. ‘The crowd will react either positively or negatively to each track selection and the party will either go off, or be a dud. It’s all up to the consumer,’ the brand says.
“With the Heineken Playlist Challenge, we’re excited to give consumers a one-of-a-kind digital game that mixes high quality interactive video with hot tracks from up-and-coming artists,” said Filip Wouters, vp of marketing, Heineken.

On track. Heineken has rolled out its Playlist Challenge game to keep the US partying over the festive period. The idea of the app is to get players mixing the perfect menu of songs from indie artists to keep the on-screen video crowd stepping along. ‘The crowd will react either positively or negatively to each track selection and the party will either go off, or be a dud. It’s all up to the consumer,’ the brand says.
“With the Heineken Playlist Challenge, we’re excited to give consumers a one-of-a-kind digital game that mixes high quality interactive video with hot tracks from up-and-coming artists,” said Filip Wouters, vp of marketing, Heineken.