Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category

Novatunes – worth waiting for?

Friday, January 11th, 2008

I have previously blogged about NovaTunesand my frustration at not being able to purchase Simon Lynge’s forthcoming album. Finally, it looks like NovaTunes will launch on Mondayand I can get the new Simon Lynge album. Forgive a dedicated fan’s ramblings.Apparently, the delay has been caused by the development of a new Novatunes platform, and I am getting curious whether this has been worth waiting for. On the description on the website Novatunes write the following:

“The music on NovaTunes is sold in a new digital album format called the ‘DP’, which stands for Download Pack. Each DP comes with high quality DRM-free music tracks playable on any device. The package also contains printable artwork, with a bio, lyrics, credits and liner notes and an iPod-ready video. NovaTunes cuts out the middle man. [...] with the average DP selling for around $7. Additionally NovaTunes gives regular customers an ‘All Access’ status, where they can download albums to listen to on their iPods and decide to pay later. NovaTunes pays 70% of music revenue to the artist at the moment of purchase, thanks to it’s innovative payment solution and transparent accounting system. “


The unique selling point of Novatunes seems to be this new format and for the first platform which allows users to listen to music on their iPods and other devices before they decide to buy. The cynic would probably doubt whether anyone will ever pay for the music and I am not sure whether Radiohead’s esperiment with allowing users to pay what they wanted ever worked, but I certainly welcome this experiment in music distribution, it can only be an improvement from file sharing.

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Snooping for information – is hiding info a marketing trick?

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

It has been very difficult to find any exact information on the release date of Simon Lynge’s debut album “A Beautiful Way to Drown”. I recently saw Danish/Greenlandic singersong writer Simon Lynge at a live gig at CafeKino here in Copenhagen and wanted to hear more.

Karl Long had an interesting post on a hidden Guinness ad which users competed to find. Finding information on Lynge’s forthcoming debut has been almost as much of a hunt as finding the Guinness advert, although I am not sure this has been quite intentional :-)

At the recent gig, I purchased a CD from Simon in the break and was keen to buy his new album when this was due to be released. On the cover notes further information is simonlynge.com Jumping at the chance to find out more, I keyed in the URL but to my surprise this space has been taken over by domain squatters.

However, I quickly find the artists new homepage and his MySpace profile via Google.

On the artist’s homepage the only information, I find is that a debut album is indeed on its way, but no release date or information on how to buy the album.

On Lynge’s Myspace profile there is no immediate information either.

Finally, returning to the original URL from the CD cover and digging in the archives of the internet I managed to make some progress.

On an old version of Simon Lynge’s original web page I finally managed to find his email address and he quite promptly responded to my query.

Simon Lynge has now also posted further information about the release on his MySpace blog:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=24104256&blogID=329579964

Simon, I am still looking forward to buying your album on Wednesday.

Posted in Communication, content, marketing | 1 Comment »