Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Lilly Allen pulling an Arctic Monkey?

I wrote this post initially just for my personal blog, but I thought that this might be interesting for the ccMixter people as well....

I just discovered Lilly Allen (via Bler) and I like here songs a lot. Too bad she's using the awful MySpace (see also 'Simuze at myspace and I got scared..').

Anyway, she manages to combine hiphop, ska and - I guess - dancehall in an interesting mix. Seems to me she could be the female version of the Streets. The way she seems to become more popular would hint at the something like the Arctic Monkeys did (read more about that at Wired), but this site claims that she's already part of the music industry:

"You’d expect that (Arctic Monkeys) mp3s would have leaked all over the net, by now, for your iPodding pleasure. Not the case. Perhaps because she already has a major label deal – she’s with EMI’s Parlophone, and recently spent some time in the States recording her album (she stopped by East Village Radio to guest-DJ “Authentic Shit”) – they’re not looking for that kind of (Arctic Monkeys) exposure."

So it looks to me that some record companies are getting 'it'. Almost, that is. They understand that using the Net for promotion and causing a buzz can help them selling it to the masses, but they are releasing just some mp3's for a limited time period and than remove them. Kinda silly if you consider the fact that you can't remove anything after it has been published on the Net. Also it seems Lilly (and her producers) seem not to care about remixing, which is a shame because Lilly's songs are defined by samples and can be considered as remixes themselves. I wonder what would happened if Lilly (and her record company) would allow and actively promote remixing and sharing?

Interesting developments nonetheless and I'm curious to see what happens next..

4 comments:

Marco Raaphorst said...

The whole story about the Arctic Monkeys sounds like a great marketing concept. Major exposure for MySpace.

Let's say you have just signed a contract with Sony. Sony opens a MySpace account for this band. Sony adds a lot of virtual friends. 'Thanks for the add' comments. Lots of them! Sony doesn't state that the band has already signed. No, they are just playing live trying to get signed by a cool record company.

The band starts blogging about their work. The band and Sony employeers are trying to add more and more friends everyday, 'virtual' friends and real fans. Then one day: Here's the news 'We got signed by Sony!'. And the whole world will shake. Wow, can MySpace really do that? I want to be on it now!

Is this already happening?

Eric Kleptone said...

The answer to your question is "yes".

Another (very well researched) article to add to your debate:

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1781879,00.html

Particularly good in the Arctics research.

All that can be concluded from this safely is that PR companies are finally getting some hits from their online promotion efforts. How "dirty" these promotion tactics are is open to debate and has been a hot topic online for the last few weeks, but, as someone I forget pointed out, the loudest denouncers of the tactics are not the people that are going to end up buying the records, therefore no-one, especially the artists or the labels involved, is that bothered.

Remember, there's still no such thing as bad publicity, even in a web-savvy world full of critics and pundits.

Great blog by the way folks - always enjoy your opinions and recommendations - thanks :)

Marco Raaphorst said...

thanks Eric, also for the link!

BjornW said...

Thanks Eric!

Interesting article!