Ben’s Big Gig: a recap on a web 2.0 focused concert

Ben Walker is a music 2.0 whiz. He has tried out and experimented with almost every social-media, web 2.0 tool he could find. He has got a website, a wiki, a couple of blogs, a twitter song and account. He’s signed up to countless music social networks and video hubs. He’s done songwriting contests and crowdsourcing events, and I’m most likely missing out stuff. His latest buzz-worthy idea was his Big Gig that we have talked about and tweeted many times before. Ben’s idea was to take the media tools that made him famous online and use them in an offline environment.

His Big Gig went live in Friday (1rst of May) at the North Wall theatre in Oxford, and was streamable online on http://bensbiggig.rezpondr.com (that’s where you can go to see the video recording of the whole event). The gig was planned ina  very professional manner, and its outcome was clearly successful.

I wrote Ben an email on Saturday asking him to do a little recap on his Big Gig. Here’s the lowdown he sent me the day after:

What web 2.0 tools did you use at your Big Gig?

• Twitter, 12seconds, Flickr, Vimeo, Tumblr for promotion
• Bambuser for video streaming
• AudioBoo, 12seconds for interviews and audience reactions
• Twitter for displaying #bensbiggig tweets on the big screen
• Rezpondr for pulling it all together into the bensbiggig live page

How did you make fans online and offline interact?
We delivered a different experience to the online and offline audiences:

• The offline crowd got an evening of great entertainment and saw the Twitter messages etc. happening around them.
• The geeks used the Twitter screen for Heckling 2.0 and general backchannel chat.
• The audience in the venue also got to sing along. ;)
• The online crowd got to watch the video stream (which was generally ok, but a bit choppy in places), see the Flickr photos, 12seconds updates and Twitter stream, and interact using the chat room.

What was the turnout of the event?
I haven’t scoured the log files yet, but at our current estimate we had about 180 in the venue and over 250 watching online.

How did people react
The reactions I’ve seen have all been very positive. The audience in the venue had a great night, and were all smiling on the way out. The Twitter messages were all positive, and even when people had trouble watching the stream they were happy to be involved, Twittering about it and checking out all the secondary content.

Are you satisfied with the outcome of your first Ben’s Big Gig?
Absolutely. We built the idea up from scratch, and intentionally used user-level social media technology (where more pro technology would have delivered a more reliable result) so that Ben’s Big Gig can act as a proof for musicians who are worried that they will have to play smaller and smaller gigs that we can bypass labels, promoters and press and still pack out a theatre gig twice over!

Congratz to Ben on his Big Gig!

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Bandcamp.com: selling and distributing your tracks made super easy

Here’s a quick post to introduce an awesome looking service to help bands promote and sell their music online called Bandcamp. Now for those of you who don’t know the website, let me just warn you that this isn’t your usual social-network / band platform / online store – its falls into those categories but it’s really something else due to its simplicity and soberness.

First off, a band’s page is customizable enough to make it look like it’s really theirs – so no more awful looking ads, and no more implemented website designs you might not like. With Bandcamp you set your banners and art-work as you see fit. The main structures of the page stay the same for all profiles but everything is so sober and nice that I can live with it, as will most bands.

Bands can also easily decide how they want to distribute their songs. They can choose from a multitude of different ways to sell or give away their tracks for free (all sales are managed via PayPal).

Bandcamp understands the importance of sharing your music online, so they came up with very easy ways to let you share your stuff on all major social platforms (blogs, social networks and micro-blogging platforms) in just a few clicks.

And last but not least, your profile comes equipped with some analytic tools. By going to your ‘stats’ section, you can see the total number of plays your songs got, the buzz they generated (showing you all the link-backs to your tracks), and the quantity of downloads and purchases your fans made.

http://bandcamp.mu seems like an awesome place to start distributing your music. What I particularly like about it is that it doesn’t overwhelm users with too many features, and this renders its interface very intuitive. I got a hold of it in a matter of minutes, and not once did I feel I had to dig in deeper to get something done.

I had stumbled upon Bandcamp a couple of times in the past, but only when I saw Ben Walker’s new profile did I choose to do this write-up. Check it out at http://music.ihatemornings.com.

I also encourage you to check out Bandcamp’s very nicely done and comprehensible tutorial video on their home page: http://bandcamp.com

Mruff

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Riseandshine.tv’s daily songwriter / audience music collaboration

Rise and Shine is an internet radio station that has come up with a remarquable concept – hosting a weekly Xmas festival where every morning a songwriter is assisted by hundreds of viewers (via the Mogulus player interface) to compose a track in three hours.

A live show, in which songwriters face the daily challenge of writing a song based on news and current events. The songwriters get to choose what song they are writing – but audience suggestions are always welcome. It’s a tough task, writing an original topical song from scratch in under three hours, and we need all the help we can get.

Rise and Shine’s Xams special started yesterday and will be on all week (so until the 24th) airing from 7pm to 10pm  GMT, and you can watch it here: http://riseandshine.tv/livestream/

I got note of this today so I stall haven’t watched an episode, but I did read this blog post from the Mastering Media Blog that really got me curious. Apparently there is great synergy between the songwriters and his helper audience as everyone contributes their two cents to the making of the song.

Yesterday’s song was orchestrated by the now infamous Ben Walker (music 2.0 activist who wrote the Twitter Song and who hosts ihatemorning.com). It’s called Magma Lady and it’s really good. Check it out.

Magma Lady:

The brilliance of this concept only really becomes apparent when you watch the show itself and start to interact – Ben, admirably simultaneously wielding guitar, keyboard and macbook while fielding comments and writing a song, would pause in mid sentence and mutter something like “a name, he needs a name”, at which point suggestions would come flooding in, (along with links to Wikipedia articles on volcanoes) and you just can’t help chipping in yourself.

This really could lead to new composition methods. There has been tons of online music collaboration websites that have popped out of nowhere this past year. Although we still can’t tell if these startups will be successful on the long haul, the whole tech savvy home-studio generation is ripe for the online experience of music creation.

Rise and Shine’s concept of music collab is ingenious because it doesn’t only focus on musicians – it focuses on a community trying to actively help musicians write music. It’s a musical brainstorm where everybody is invited. It’s a sort of game both parties are happy to play. Ben Walker already has his online fan base so his image is established. Imagining all those people helping him out to write a song reflects the level of validation he’s earned.

Would be very cool to have that concept implemented in a sort of forum-like website where musicians could create their own threads/channels allowing anyone to come in and contribute. Would be a fun solution when you’re in lack of inspiration.

When I first heard of fan-funding sites like Sellaband, I was thinking ‘man, why didn’t I think of that’.Well there are other ways for fans to help bands out other than revenue and promotion-wise, and  Rise and Shine is a perfect example.

(follow them on twitter – @riseandshinetv)

Woof.

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