The Hype Machine - hypem

Last week I blogged about music blogs in general. This weeks topic is about Hype Machine. If blogs are the source for musics, Hype Machine is the tool to find them.
Actually, this is one of the best music tools I have seen for a long time. Three years ago, I asked my DJ friend how he is getting his music updated and more important: from where. At that time the usual way of getting music involved the kinds of softwares such as: Emule or BitTorrent. But we all know that it was the illegal way of sourcing music and I have heared from some of my friends that they have been receiving fines from the crown prosecuter (up to 5000 €). Therefore it was the "dark path" which we all walked along.

My DJ friend then recommended me to try Hype Machine. Actually it is the Google of music blogs.

According to Wikipedia: "Hype Machine's structure has been described as an "amalgamation of Pandora Radio and Pitchfork Media. It aggregates the most recently posted songs from a selection of music blogs (about 1,500) and lists them on the website's main page".

You have the opportunity to search an artist or song, then listen to the song on Hypem or you can go to the blog directly and download it.
I think to receive and access all functions on the site, you have to sign a membership (which is free).
Apparently the blogs and artists are working well together. The mixture of available free and fee required tracks are still acceptable. Nevertheless I have discovered a decrease of free available music towards - only listen but no download !

I recommend you to have try. Just search any artist you are interested in and have a look if you can find it.

http://hypem.com/

Next weeks topic will be Soundcloud, which is in fact the channel.

Marketing electronic music

As a big fan of electronic music and also enjoying some djing in my spare time, I am going to blog about the current trend of electronic music blogs .

The consumer nowadays is spoilt and greedy. It is so easy for us to get intangible goods such as music (mp3s) or even whole movies for free from the world wide web. Therefore musicians partly resignated and are providing single songs, short previews or even whole DJ mixes for free on popular music blogs such as Earmilk and Fix up. But in fact it is only clever marketing

Earmilk.com for example, is providing nicely designed and written articles about the song releases and remixes. Furthermore they have a weekly chartlist of electronic, independent and house music. All songs can be downloaded for free.

With this kind of product offering and marketing the musicians only offer a part of their music for free and letting customer generated content doing the rest. In addition the customer gets an added value.
If the customer likes what she/he listened to, she/he might buy the whole EP/LP or in the best case, visit the live show.

For those who are interested:

http://www.earmilk.com/

Weekly chartlist of Earmilk:
http://www.earmilk.com/tag/suicide-sundaes/

http://www.djungeltrumman.se/fixup

For the next two posts, I am planning to blog about hypem and soundcloud. Both are very crucial social media markting tools for the music/electronic industry.

Pickle Club on Facebook

Hello everyone, guess I am the last one jumping onto the blogger train.

As a big fan of fast food, I want to relate my first post to Chun's (http://thesocialmedialab.blogspot.com/ -"FB!" A good Marketing tool?) and Chri's (http://i-love-chickenwings.blogspot.com/2011/07/food-and-facebook.html . - Food and Facebook ) posts.

Has everyone heard of Pickle Club ?
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pickle-Club/147689095242742

Actually they are having a collaboration with McDonalds Malvern East (its just across the street from Monash Caulfield Campus) and recently started a further cooperation with McDonalds Holmesglen.
Everything you have to do, is to "like" their page on Facebook and you will receive daily updates of special offers at those two McDonalds.

The questions I want to discuss are, whether it is an effective marketing tool in terms of customer generation and furthermore what it means for McDonalds.

From my personal perspective, I really like their offers, it is really cheap and easy to acces. Sometimes I just jump on facebook when I am on campus and check their offers within one minute.
But the effects on McDonalds as a brand itself are very difficult to measure. In my opinion this marketing tool is only effetctive for a local customer base and therefore will not significantly benefit to the McDonalds brand.

What do you guys think ?
Todays offer is an $2 Double Quarter Pounder. Codeword: "HAPPY BIRTHDAY MCDONALD'S MALVERN EAST". Enjoy !