Music

Music marketing: Six iconic album launches filled with marketing lessons

There are a lot of lessons marketers can learn from the music industry, and in particular, how artists release their projects.

Before streaming became the force that it is today, some album releases used to be more like moments in history than just another Friday album drop (sighs).

From surprise releases, to experiential events, there have been a myriad of innovative ways musicians have grabbed their audience’s attention to sell us their latest love ballads, rock anthems, or hip-hop heat-seekers.

Science of sound: How music makes advertising more memorable

Some of the biggest advertisements in recent decades involve music, and not just in the form of jingles.

Take John Lewis, for example, whose Christmas adverts are just as well known for their sentimental song choice as their storylines. There’s also Vodafone which, in the early noughties, catapulted The Dandy Warhol’s ‘Bohemian Like You’ into the UK’s top five (when it had previously failed to chart).

Spotify UX vs. Apple Music UX: How do they compare?

As a music lover in 2018, it is almost impossible to avoid streaming services and their neatly priced subscriptions.

There are two major players that account for 110 million subscribers globally and make up 32% of the US market for music purchases – Apple (15%) and Spotify (17%). As such, it only makes sense to pit the two streaming app giants against one another to see who reigns supreme in terms of having a superior UX.

18 sensational online sound and music experiences

What’s that noise?

When so much attention is paid to the visual art of web design and the wonderful possibilities that HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery affords, often sound design is forgotten or overlooked. 

Then again, there are few more annoying things in the online world than obtrusive sound effects or autoplaying music blaring out when you least expect it, especially when you’re likely to be listening to your own choice of music anyway.

Much like in filmmaking, the mark of good sound or scoring in web design is that you don’t necessarily notice it. The sound should complement or enhance the visual, but never upstage it.

What of those sites that make the sound as integral a part of the experience as the visual? What about the sites that say loudly and proudly “put on your headphones and turn it up loud”? Well they demand your listening pleasure.

Can Bose create a pitch-perfect content experience?

Despite creating fantastic products and winning several Red Dot design awards in the process, BOSE isn’t often seen as a cool company.

Rarely are its designs mentioned in the same breath as Apple, or its headphones alongside young upstarts like beats.  

Despite this slight lack of street cred, Bose remains one of the strongest brands in audio, so I thought I’d check out its content to see how it fares against the competition…

How do we use the internet and mobile devices in 2014?

Ofcom today published The Communications Market Report 2014 in the UK.

There are lots of interesting stats within, across telecoms, audio-visual industries, post and of course the internet.

No doubt we’ll be covering the report fairly heavily, but I thought I’d start by rounding up the bits that caught my eye.

How is device use changing? How are people accessing media? How much are advertisers spending and on what?

Audio stats: streaming and online radio growth in the US

The latest update to our Internet Statistics Compendium collects all the most interesting freely digital data and trends published to the web over the past few months.

Like us, Mary Meeker strives to analyse online digital trends and publishes her own slideshows biannually (hosting them online here).

Amid a wealth of insight, Meeker’s recent stats collection highlights how online technologies are affecting traditional media. Her music consumption stats are particularly intriguing and relate to further research I’ve seen published lately.

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