While Radiohead gets all the love for experimenting with the distribution and business aspect of selling music online, Paul Westerberg has taken the next step and released an album that simply wouldn’t exist without the ability to go directly to his fans. “49″ is an entire album in the form of one-long MP3, a noisy, self-recorded burst of rock n’ roll energy that violates the traditionally accepted structure of the “album,” and you can download the entire thing for $0.49 from Amazon.

Westerberg’s site contains the following message:

WARNING: DO NOT LISTEN WHILE OPERATING A MOTOR VEHICLE

THIS PRODUCT IS NOT FAULTY - ALL SOUNDS ARE INTENTIONAL AND VALID AS A WORK OF ART

There’s no track listing, some parts are snippets of music cut together with other songs, crashing in and out of each other, it’s chaotic and charming, brilliant and maddening all at the same time. Darren Hill, Wetserberg’s manager, was quoted in The Guardian:

“He finished it on Monday, sent it to me on Tuesday and it was out this weekend,” Hill explained. “It’s just wonderful that you can actually do this. The freedom an artist can enjoy these days is fantastic. Can you imagine me pitching this idea to a label?”

The surprise release is grabbing a lot of attention, (see Pitchfork, The Onion AV Club, The LA Times, Wired, Stereogum, and many others), but Jim Connelly over at Medialoper has an interesting take on the release:

Because its not just full songs, it’s also song snippets. Then its two songs playing at the same time, and excerpts from cover versions that fade in and out, and then, suddenly, I’m in love, what’s that song?

No really, what’s that song?!?

It’s all a bit of a mess, really. But that’s OK, because it only costs forty-nine cents. In a strange way, Westerberg has used the internet to bootleg himself.

Because it’s such a mess, you might wonder who is going to listen to it more than once, and then you realize that because it’s a nice big digital file, what will eventually happen is that his fan base will come up with consensus names for all of the songs, and song snippets, and the time codes for everything.

And that’s exactly what’s happening on the discussion boards at PaulWesterberg.com, where the new album is receiving overwhelmingly positive response from his fans, who are dissecting and discussing every minute of it.

Best of all, it’s rumored that Westerberg doesn’t even own a computer.

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I absolutely love pranks and prank-like projects, so I’m sad to report that the Geostationary Banana Over Texas has just been suspended. Over the course of two and a half years, this large scale collaborative project captured attention all over the world. In their most recent email, the organizers state:

We have recorded the GBOT project being discussed in 23 languages. Its concept was the motive for specialized art papers; it was published in children’s books in France, in specialized engineering publications in Russia; it inspired the realization of video games in the UK; it was discussed in local newspapers and community radios, in articles in art and science magazines. It was posted in thousands of blogs. It was broadcasted through mainstream media in many countries (like: Brazil, Hungary, Indonesia, the Philippines, Poland, Finland, Belgium, Rumania, India, Sweden, Iran, Japan, Korea, China, and so on). In two and half years that this project lasted, the website reported 38 million visits.

We still are reviewing the wide implications and impact of this project. At the moment we are compiling all the documentation related to this experience; and we hope to make it available through a publication, website, and public presentations later this year.

In all, this was a successful widespread collaborative project where the contribution of each participant was precious and will be acknowledged in all final publications.

I still believe, and I hope one day to look up and see that giant banana floating high above in the Texas sky.

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Read the BrandWeek article

Read the Portfolio article

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The cool cats over at Media Bullseye do a Roundtable podcast and this week they served up some great kudos for our True Blood campaign. Debbie Weil, author of the Corporate Blogging Book, offers up her insights into what she thinks about the campaign.

Click here to give the podcast a listen. The True Blood spoken word starts in at about the 9 minute mark.

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Twitter as of today, Saturday, 7/19/08 @ 2:00 p.m.

Technorati Tags: Community, Social Networks, Twitter

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Read the whole story

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Subway poster remix via Copyranter

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As Mike teased previously, I’ve been working for the past 6 months on a campaign for the HBO series ‘True Blood.’

I could tell you about the countless hours we’ve spent crafting an online experience that tells the back story of a world where vampires decide to announce themselves….or I could just show you a few of my favorite artifacts we’ve created.

A White House press briefing on the vampires

Global reactions to the announcement that vampires exist.

Real life locals play along in these man on the street interviews.

There’s lots more stuff both already online and coming up. Head over to BloodCopy to watch it unfold.

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And then I catch the Home Run Derby last night. All sizzle and no steak, the marketing equivalent of a :30 spot in the Super Bowl. Sure, it’s fun to laugh at anthropomorphic animals, beer-hungry fools, and women who bathe in peanuts to make men swoon. But I still prefer more compelling entertainment: the complex conversational sell, the pitcher who can induce the double play, the brand story infused with character and nuance, VORP over HRs.

So let’s enjoy Josh Hamilton’s epic performance (he really was mashing the ball!). But let’s also remember that his team, the Texas Rangers, still can’t pitch a lick and haven’t made the playoffs in nearly a decade.

For more interesting baseball content, check out this DIY segment from My Home 2.0. It features Ryan Howard of the Phillies (a monumental slugger) and a bat we hacked to measure his swing speed.

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