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Location: It’s not just for Foursquare fiends anymore. As bands become more and more adventurous when it comes to integrating tech into their artform, we’re seeing mobile- and location-based technology making an entree into the music world, enhancing the experience for both bands and fans alike.
“I think it’s an interesting way to tap into the trend of broadcasting your location,” says Shannon Connolly, VP of digital music strategy at MTV. “There’s two buckets that it can go into: What’s the story behind the songwriting or the recording process — what story can the artist tell around where this went down and how do you do that using new technology? And then the other way is: How can I delight the audience while they’re listening to it?”
Over the past year or so, we’ve been seeing more and more drops in both of those buckets — innovations from the likes of OK Go, Arcade Fire and Panic at the Disco.
“Personally, I’ve always tied certain music with certain locations,” says music video director Chris Milk. “I don’t know why. I’m sure somewhere there’s some deep biological cognitive connection. Old Cure albums sound better walking through Paris in the rain. Radiohead Kid A and Amnesiac work really well walking around London.”
Many projects that we have seen strived to mirror the experience that Milk describes — a kind of digital synesthesia. Check out five examples below:
1. Personalizing Fan Experience
Last summer, the band Arcade Fire partnered with music video director Chris Milk, Google and @radical.media to create “The Wilderness Downtown,” a stunning HTML5 multi-browser experience. The “video” — if one could call it that — was for the band’s song “We Used to Wait,” off of their Grammy-winning album, The Suburbs, and the aim was to bring users into the song via a very clever Google Maps integration.
When you surf on to video’s dedicated site (preferably using Google Chrome), you’re prompted to type in the address of your childhood home. If Google Maps manages to locate your former abode, you’ll be pulled into a multi-browser movie that includes footage of your very own suburbs.
As you race backwards in time, trees shoot up out of nowhere on your old street, culminating in an opportunity to write a letter to a younger you. Those letters later made an appearance during the Arcade Fire’s stage shows, spitting out of a contraption called the “Wilderness Machine” into the audience.
With this video, Milk and Co. weren’t overshadowing the song or relying on gimmicks for buzz, but enhancing the meaning and mood of the tune by playing on its themes.
“You want people to be able to find themselves in the work,” says Milk. “For it to resonate on a deeper level. It’s easier to do that with universal themes than it is with the look of concrete physical things or spaces. Because we all grow up and live in different looking places, but we all have many very similar experiences in those places.”
2. Blurring The Line Between Real World and Digital
OK Go is known for their whacked-out music videos, but they took the video for “Back From Kathmandu,” off of the album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky even further with a shot of GPS technology.
In November, the band teamed up with Range Rover in the Evoque Pulse of the City project, in which they set out to create a huge “OK Go” sign, written via GPS across their hometown city of L.A. They used the Range Rover Pulse of the City app [iTunes link] to do the scrawling.
“OK Go are well-known for their innovative approach to music videos and we wanted to see what ideas our app would spark,” says Fiona Pargeter, global PR director for Land Rover. “We also love coming up with ideas that have been inspired by different things coming together, in this case music and technology. And we loved working with OK Go on this project because they wanted to push the idea of the music video and see what was possible when you mix music, technology and fans together.”
At the time, OK Go also asked fans to create their own GPS-etched journeys, which were compiled and edited into a whole other video, expanding the band’s city-specific journey into a worldwide affair.
Not only did the band host a live event — the actual L.A. parade — that got their local fans involved, they widened the experience so that folks in far-flung lands could create their own journeys and, as a result, interact with the music on a much more personal level.
“These days our community is as much online as is it in our neighborhoods, so we wanted some way of extending this feeling out into digital space — that’s where the GPS art idea came in,” says an OK Go rep. “We needed an overarching goal for the whole parade that could provide a jumping off point for other people in our digital world to share in the same experience in their own towns … so we started cobbling together the footage we’d shot of our parade, and hunted for one of our songs that felt like it captured the right hopeful, romantic spirit,” which was “Back From Kathmandu.”
3. Make Your Fans Your Cameramen
Location: It’s not just for Foursquare fiends anymore. As bands become more and more adventurous when it comes to integrating tech into their artform, we’re seeing mobile- and location-based technology making an entree into the music world, enhancing the experience for both bands and fans alike.
“I think it’s an interesting way to tap into the trend of broadcasting your location,” says Shannon Connolly, VP of digital music strategy at MTV. “There’s two buckets that it can go into: What’s the story behind the songwriting or the recording process — what story can the artist tell around where this went down and how do you do that using new technology? And then the other way is: How can I delight the audience while they’re listening to it?”
Over the past year or so, we’ve been seeing more and more drops in both of those buckets — innovations from the likes of OK Go, Arcade Fire and Panic at the Disco.
“Personally, I’ve always tied certain music with certain locations,” says music video director Chris Milk. “I don’t know why. I’m sure somewhere there’s some deep biological cognitive connection. Old Cure albums sound better walking through Paris in the rain. Radiohead Kid A and Amnesiac work really well walking around London.”
Many projects that we have seen strived to mirror the experience that Milk describes — a kind of digital synesthesia. Check out five examples below:
1. Personalizing Fan Experience
Last summer, the band Arcade Fire partnered with music video director Chris Milk, Google and @radical.media to create “The Wilderness Downtown,” a stunning HTML5 multi-browser experience. The “video” — if one could call it that — was for the band’s song “We Used to Wait,” off of their Grammy-winning album, The Suburbs, and the aim was to bring users into the song via a very clever Google Maps integration.
When you surf on to video’s dedicated site (preferably using Google Chrome), you’re prompted to type in the address of your childhood home. If Google Maps manages to locate your former abode, you’ll be pulled into a multi-browser movie that includes footage of your very own suburbs.
As you race backwards in time, trees shoot up out of nowhere on your old street, culminating in an opportunity to write a letter to a younger you. Those letters later made an appearance during the Arcade Fire’s stage shows, spitting out of a contraption called the “Wilderness Machine” into the audience.
With this video, Milk and Co. weren’t overshadowing the song or relying on gimmicks for buzz, but enhancing the meaning and mood of the tune by playing on its themes.
“You want people to be able to find themselves in the work,” says Milk. “For it to resonate on a deeper level. It’s easier to do that with universal themes than it is with the look of concrete physical things or spaces. Because we all grow up and live in different looking places, but we all have many very similar experiences in those places.”
2. Blurring The Line Between Real World and Digital
OK Go is known for their whacked-out music videos, but they took the video for “Back From Kathmandu,” off of the album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky even further with a shot of GPS technology.
In November, the band teamed up with Range Rover in the Evoque Pulse of the City project, in which they set out to create a huge “OK Go” sign, written via GPS across their hometown city of L.A. They used the Range Rover Pulse of the City app [iTunes link] to do the scrawling.
“OK Go are well-known for their innovative approach to music videos and we wanted to see what ideas our app would spark,” says Fiona Pargeter, global PR director for Land Rover. “We also love coming up with ideas that have been inspired by different things coming together, in this case music and technology. And we loved working with OK Go on this project because they wanted to push the idea of the music video and see what was possible when you mix music, technology and fans together.”
At the time, OK Go also asked fans to create their own GPS-etched journeys, which were compiled and edited into a whole other video, expanding the band’s city-specific journey into a worldwide affair.
Not only did the band host a live event — the actual L.A. parade — that got their local fans involved, they widened the experience so that folks in far-flung lands could create their own journeys and, as a result, interact with the music on a much more personal level.
“These days our community is as much online as is it in our neighborhoods, so we wanted some way of extending this feeling out into digital space — that’s where the GPS art idea came in,” says an OK Go rep. “We needed an overarching goal for the whole parade that could provide a jumping off point for other people in our digital world to share in the same experience in their own towns … so we started cobbling together the footage we’d shot of our parade, and hunted for one of our songs that felt like it captured the right hopeful, romantic spirit,” which was “Back From Kathmandu.”
3. Make Your Fans Your Cameramen