[ brought to my attention by the ever fabulous meg ]

Web app of the day = the wonderful Muxtape

It’s been doing the rounds over the last couple of days - delivering that most delicious combination of social media with the charm of the mixtape. Simple, beautiful, lots of fun.

So, since there’s nothing like hopping on board, for your listening pleasure - and to get a glimpse into my, er, somewhat eclectic (others may say highly dodgy!) musical taste - check out my contribution

Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails was stumped as to how to create context for his latest album, since mp3s lacked the artwork and liner notes of the 12″ concept albums of the 60s…the solution ended up being the development of a fully immersive ARG (alternate reality game) which involved and was shaped by the fans who partook in it.

Reznor said he wanted to wanted to give his fans a taste of life in a massively dysfunctional theocratic police state - both through his music, and through the ARG which ended up involving millions of players worldwide.

Hints and clues were seeded in t-shirts sold on the band’s tour, in USB flash drives left in the toilets at tour venues, on websites and in phone messages - fragments of which were assembled to form an interactive narrative which told a story to contextualise and complement the story told in the album.

Although Reznor says it wasn’t intended as a form of marketing, there’s no doubt that it created enormous excitement about the album - and in fact helped to create the narrative of the album itself. It’s also another fantastic example of collective intelligence working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts - in this case the audience pieced together the clues to solve the mysteries posed along the way - and in the process told and shaped and reformed the story online.

ARGs aren’t anything new (my friend Dan Hon’s work on Cloudmakers and Perplex City being two shining examples) but the collective intelligence and participation which drives them is now being used more frequently and in more exciting ways - and it’s particularly gratifying to see big brands such as P&G, Dell and Intel are recognising the value of the hive mind in driving innovation - with the minds of the many undoubtedly eliciting far greater results than the minds of the few.

[via Wired ]

There’s a fantastic discussion up at Wired between David Byrne and Thom Yorke where they ruminate on the music industry, distribution and Radiohead’s ground-breaking decision to release their most recent album ‘In Rainbows’ online, asking customers to pay what they thought the album was worth.

I’m a big fan of both artists musically (and can vouch for the fact that the former of these two is an absolutely fantastic bloke, as the other half has been recording with him recently) but it’s a fascinating exploration of the value of music, and a brilliant example of really putting the consumer at the heart.

A brand only exists in the minds of consumers, and is defined by what consumers think about it - consumers are the true brand guardians, no matter what brand values the brand ‘owners’ might set out to communicate. In this case Radiohead have taken a bold step to show that the value of their product doesn’t lie in record industry bumph, or in reviews, but in the substance of what the listener thinks about it, and what they’re willing to pay for it.

A fantastically brave move, but one which has paid off admirably for the band - and yet another example of a distribution model for releasing music which puts the product directly in the hands of consumers. It’s going to be really really interesting to see how alternative models for distribution are explored in 2008, both from the point of view of an interested bystander, and from the point of view of someone who’s other half has made his living to date from the traditional distribution model!

I’d also highly recommend checking out David Byrne’s amazing powerpoint work Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information- ingeniously creative, and a brilliant twist on a tool primarily used for work-related stuff ( and sadly rarely used to create visually fulfilling experiences).

[Photo used © Wired]

Update:
Just spotted on the BBC, an interesting follow-on from above, Thom Yorke has now come out to say whilst the online trust model was a worthwhile one to explore, to have done so without any kind of physical release would have been “stark raving mad”. I don’t think it necessarily undermines the decision to release it online as I can wholly understand the desire to have a physical release…as surely anyone who wanted to get it for free could get it online anyway. I’m pretty old school in my love of album artwork (I still find the CD sleeve a poor cousin to the 12″ LP!), so I can totally relate to his point of view about people wanting a physical product!