the BROADer issue

Gigging around the world in the digital media age

Touring hard and playing at major music events like The V Festival & Glastonbury in the UK, Coachella & Lollopalooza in the US, and countless others around the world is, for many artists, replacing record sales as the focus of attention and a principal source of income.

The rewards are instant and measurable, and the opportunity to influence people by being ever-present and putting on ever more spectacular shows is very attractive.

Money can still be made from sales of CDs, DVDs and even vinyl. iTunes downloads and ad-supported services like Spotify and Blip are starting gain a foothold and the money trickles in. YouTube is obviously important for profile, But how can artists, music companies and the businesses that support them extract the maximum value from playing at live events and generate the ROI they need to make the exercise worthwhile? 

Services based around digital media - from targeted, assignable advertising displayed on screens of all shapes and sizes to mobile music download kiosks for festival goers - are likely to play a big part as events become more sophisticated and commercially-driven.

The relationship between artists, brands, the audience and digital media is a brave new creative and commercial world that we will all be keen to explore and exploit in the future.

Ahead of a new series of podcasts and blog posts on how this new market may shape up, 'All The World's A Staged Payment' is a programme I made a year or so ago about how the technical service providers at these big gigs - who we all take for granted, but without whom the show could not go on - finance their businesses.

'Lights, Camera, Action...Network!' course review

Last week, I spent an enjoyable four days running a course at FDMX (the Film & Digital Media Exchange), part of The University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield (pictured).

'Lights, Camera, Action...Network!' is a practical introduction to social media marketing aimed at filmmakers, producers & distributors:

Day 1: an introduction to the tools, services, language and culture of 'the social web' and how to strategically manage your own online marketing and publicity campaigns.

Day 2: design & build a live online publishing environment, with RSS feeds, embedded Twitter and third-party content, monitoring & measurement etc.

Day 3: begin generating content and populate the site

Day 4: begin publicising the site and attracting visitors

We concentrated on building one site, to help film distributor John Letham of Park Circus publicise his Back In Cinemas campaign to get us of our sofas and watching classic movies on the big screen.

Follow this link to view the Back In Cinemas site, which was built from scratch - with tuition - by three complete newcomers to the world of social media, social networks and 'the social web'. The site will remain active for about another week, before being taken down and re-modelled.

I've been invited back to run the course again in October (dates TBC). If you're interested in knowing more, drop me a line - colin@informedsauce.com

Is this the best Christmas stocking-filler ever?

The Register is upping the Christmas gift idea stakes with yet another news item telling us that pico projectors for - and indeed built into - mobile phones will be commonly available by the end of the year. The image above is of a Texas Instruments-powered Samsung i7410 pico projector phone, gadget freaks!

I was talking to a Soho post house CTO last week, who has already bought a tiny pico projector to accompany his disk-based camcorder, and was raving about it.

Is this set to be a lad's mag fad, or is there genuine interest in being able to watch something using your mobile device without relying on its inadequate screen real estate?