What is Free Love? Well it’s not the 60’s notion far from it! Free Love is the rise of free goods and services for consumers. Its the all-out war for consumers attention. In this section we will bring you as much Free Love as we can…
MUSIC
A prime example of an area of business that has had to embrace Free Love is the music industry as sales were suffering due to the rise in MP3 sharing. Artists and labels now have to concentrate on free downloads, exclusive concerts, tours, festivals and merchandise to bring in revenue to promote album sales.
Albums are even given away inside Sunday newspapers, 2007 saw Planet Earth by Prince given away inside the Mail on Sunday, with almost 3 million people picking up a copy, this was followed by 21 concerts with a week in the O2 Arena London (The Millenium Dome) playing to 20,000 fans with tickets priced at £31.21 (a reference to his album 3121) and other exclusive smaller intermate gigs. This expression of Free Love equates to the money being taken on the door of the venue going to the management or record company instead of to HMV, forcing artists to reconsider there contracts. Madonna is due to link up with Live Nation when her contract with Warner Music is up, the deal will bring album production and distribution, concerts, merchandise and publicity under one company.
Radiohead made people sit up and listen to the state of play in the music industry, alerting the masses to Free Love when they announced that fans would be able to name their own price when purchasing Rainbows. This way they avoided unauthorized piracy, it is reported that Radiohead sold 1.2 million copies compared to there previous album which only sold 300,000 in a similar time frame, with the difference being that all the revenues went to the band as the EMI contract had expired. Even though the album could be download for free it is reported that 240,000 still downloaded it peer to peer on the first day, proving that piracy is a part of music culture that Free Love may never change.
Other artists that have followed suit more recently have been:
The Verve – “The Mover”
Kings Of Leon – “Crawl”
The Streets – “The Escapist”
Nine Inch Nails – “Ghosts I-IV”
Coldplay – “Death Will Never Conquer”
Primal Scream – “Urban Guerrilla”
The Charlatans – “You Cross My Path”
One area that seems to be thriving on Free Love is the Electro, Nu-Rave, Hipster, Indie or Underground scene. This teen driven market seems to be reinventing the music industry through social networking sites and technology, much like Acid House did in the 80’s by replacing flyers with a more advanced communications network – the internet. A good example of this is how the Arctic Monkeys rose to fame with the use of free CD’s at gigs and Myspace. Now the likes of Diplo, Justice, Cobra Snake, Crystal Castles, Simian Mobile Disco, The Teenagers, M.I.A, Pase Rock and Dizzee Rascal release tracks by uploading to sites like Missingtoof, RcrdLbl, PartyCMYK and Hypem were they can be downloaded for free, these are then taken by producers and remixed and uploaded again, with a remix culture that is faster than the old format of White label and Bootleg remixes, this means music can be burnt and played in a club via CD or MP3 based technology…..immediately!
MATTER
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Check out MatterBlog which brings there updates and interesting views on advertising.
