Comments on: Learning from labels

By: Ashish Banerjee

Ashish Banerjee — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 11:38:54 +0000

Grant, as usual, you’re on the money.

If I may piggyback a bit and submit that in addition to the label, DJs are also brands now, and serve as filters for music across bands.

In our youth, we thought of Floyd, Tull, CSNY, the Stones, the Dead etc. as bands-as-brands. In today’s mix ‘n’ match world of club/dance music, the individual artist or band has ceded prominence to the Oakenfolds, van Dyks, Martinezes, etc. Dmitri from Paris was possibly the first of the lot.

And before that, Weather Report and Steely Dan pioneered the concept of changing the mix of musicians around a core duo, to create a distinctive “branded” sound (as opposed to a constant 4-some/5-some of a band as it was widely understood).

Thoughts?

By: user

user — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 13:48:02 +0000

yeah, matt is right… for me, it’s the opposite- the world of books is a massive, daunting juggernaut that i couldn’t hope to parse on my own. so, i turn to other sources for recommendations (in my case, the Claremont Review of Books). on the other hand, music is a world that seems small and easily digested- i have no problem finding the latest and greatest.

so, for other brands, the question is what world can we parse on behalf of our consumer? how can we be the “reader’s digest” of, for example, the peanut butter market?

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 04:19:30 +0000

That’s because you choose to focus your energy on books more than the typical BoMC member naturally would. If you ignored books and focused all that time and headspace on tracking the music world, you’d be just as well-informed there.

Not that I would ever _suggest_ such a course…but it remains _possible_.

By: Grant

Grant — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 09:36:58 +0000

Peter, thanks! I don’t know it seems to be Book of the Month club is different from Kill Rock Stars. I think I might use the former for convenience and some selection, but really I believe I can do this sort of thing myself. In the case of KRS, I understand that there is no hope that I could survey the possibilities in the new music witihout quitting my job and taking up that task full time. Thanks for the Pandora ref. Best, Grant

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 06:00:13 +0000

I have used this method for world music (eg, the Luaka Bop label), and, of course, small book publishers have been understood this way by book buyers for a century or more. It’s how the Book-of-the-Month club and Oprah both work.

For music, can I recommend Pandora (www.pandora.com), a music referral service, which uses the audio characteristics of songs (tone, pitch, speed, rhythm, instrumentation, etc) to link songs and artists to one another. I’ve only tried it for jazz, but it was very good there, indeed much better than listener-referrals (as in Amazon).