Wednesday, February 27, 2008
WWE Microsite - Airbourne & Theory of a Deadman
WWE: The Music, Volume 8 microsite is now up and running on WWE.com! The album features the tracks "No Chance in Hell" by Theory of a Deadman as Mr. McMahon's entrance song, as well as "Turn Up the Trouble" by Airbourne as Mr. Kennedy's entrance song. Pre-order the album today and receive a WWE ringtone! Check it out for more details here.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Airbourne Added to AOL Radio: Hard Rock
That's right, our very own Australian rockers are now playing on AOL Radio's Hard Rock station!
Monday, February 11, 2008
Theory of a Deadman: Xbox Live
Started working on the pitch for this and have reached out to my Xbox contacts. More on this soon, but I'd like to get them featured as the Xbox Live Artist of the Month some time after release.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Week of 2/4 Top Ten
10. 3 Inches Of Blood appear on FearNet, Comcast's horror on-demand video channel.
9. TUNE IN TO THE PREMIERE EPISODE OF TALKING METAL.....On Friday, 2/29 at midnight make sure you tune in to FUSE. Interviews we filmed with Killswitch Engage, DevilDriver and Airbourne will all be in the premiere episode of Talking Metal! It will repeat the following Friday @ 12:30am.
8. The artwork for the new Theory of a Deadman album, SCARS & SOUVENIRS, has been posted everywhere online! Check it out here (attached).
7. Airbourne secures new licenses with "Runnin' Wild" to be featured in NASCAR 2009 and "Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast" will be featured in film Lost Boys 2.
6. De Novo Dahl's licensing streak continues with "Shout" being included in the SCI-FI Channel's new commercial for their hot Friday night line-up including Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who and more. The commercial will run for 13 weeks and the song and band name are prominently chyroned throughout the spot as well. Check out the clash of De Novo and Dr. Who here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbkdUfiqmZM&eurl
Don't forget to hear "Shout" in the premiere of VH1's new comedy Free Radio - Friday night at 9:30 PM.
5. Cradle Of Filth's Harder Faster Darker: Thornography Deluxe MVI is in stores this week. Check out a remix that guitarist Paul Allender did of "Under Huntress Moon" using the U-Myx program on the MVI (Music Video Interactive) at Cradleoffilth.com just scroll down and click on the U-Myx logo.
4. The legendary Max and Iggor Cavalera spent the week in NYC doing press and promo for the upcoming Cavalera Conspiracy release. While in town they completed a cover shoot and interview for Metal Edge, photoshoots and interviews for features in Revolver, Metal Maniacs, Hails & Horns, Drum! Magazine and Guitar World, visited Sirius' Hard Attack and recorded video content for Headbangers Ball and Hot Topic as well as RR.com.
3. DragonForce "Through The Fire And Flames" single review in Billboard!
"Imagine a band running a power-prog-themed amusement park with speed metal rollercoasters that do loops and hairpin turns at 150 mph."
2. Roadrunner Records, Nickelback, WEA Corp and Warner Chappell presented almost $600,000 in charitable donations to Amnesty International and International Children's Awareness Canada last Friday February 1, the one year anniversary of the start of the charity campaign. The donation was collected from proceeds of the sale of the smash "If Everyone Cared" digital single and video.
And the #1 HIT for Roadrunner Records for the week ending February 8th, 2008 is....
1. ROADRUNNER HAS THE #1 & #2 RECORDS ON THE BILLBOARD HEATSEEKERS CHART WITH AIRBOURNE DEBUTING AT #1 WITH 7,018 SCANNED AND DRAGONFORCE AT #2 WITH 4,446 SCANNED!
9. TUNE IN TO THE PREMIERE EPISODE OF TALKING METAL.....On Friday, 2/29 at midnight make sure you tune in to FUSE. Interviews we filmed with Killswitch Engage, DevilDriver and Airbourne will all be in the premiere episode of Talking Metal! It will repeat the following Friday @ 12:30am.
8. The artwork for the new Theory of a Deadman album, SCARS & SOUVENIRS, has been posted everywhere online! Check it out here (attached).
7. Airbourne secures new licenses with "Runnin' Wild" to be featured in NASCAR 2009 and "Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast" will be featured in film Lost Boys 2.
6. De Novo Dahl's licensing streak continues with "Shout" being included in the SCI-FI Channel's new commercial for their hot Friday night line-up including Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who and more. The commercial will run for 13 weeks and the song and band name are prominently chyroned throughout the spot as well. Check out the clash of De Novo and Dr. Who here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbkdUfiqmZM&eurl
Don't forget to hear "Shout" in the premiere of VH1's new comedy Free Radio - Friday night at 9:30 PM.
5. Cradle Of Filth's Harder Faster Darker: Thornography Deluxe MVI is in stores this week. Check out a remix that guitarist Paul Allender did of "Under Huntress Moon" using the U-Myx program on the MVI (Music Video Interactive) at Cradleoffilth.com just scroll down and click on the U-Myx logo.
4. The legendary Max and Iggor Cavalera spent the week in NYC doing press and promo for the upcoming Cavalera Conspiracy release. While in town they completed a cover shoot and interview for Metal Edge, photoshoots and interviews for features in Revolver, Metal Maniacs, Hails & Horns, Drum! Magazine and Guitar World, visited Sirius' Hard Attack and recorded video content for Headbangers Ball and Hot Topic as well as RR.com.
3. DragonForce "Through The Fire And Flames" single review in Billboard!
"Imagine a band running a power-prog-themed amusement park with speed metal rollercoasters that do loops and hairpin turns at 150 mph."
2. Roadrunner Records, Nickelback, WEA Corp and Warner Chappell presented almost $600,000 in charitable donations to Amnesty International and International Children's Awareness Canada last Friday February 1, the one year anniversary of the start of the charity campaign. The donation was collected from proceeds of the sale of the smash "If Everyone Cared" digital single and video.
And the #1 HIT for Roadrunner Records for the week ending February 8th, 2008 is....
1. ROADRUNNER HAS THE #1 & #2 RECORDS ON THE BILLBOARD HEATSEEKERS CHART WITH AIRBOURNE DEBUTING AT #1 WITH 7,018 SCANNED AND DRAGONFORCE AT #2 WITH 4,446 SCANNED!
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Grammy.com Pre-Telecast Stream
For the first time in GRAMMY Awards history, the Pre-Telecast awards presentation will be broadcast live online on Sunday February 10. By logging on to GRAMMY.com from 4 - 7:30 p.m. EST, you will be able to view awards given in each category announced during the Pre-Tel.
As a reminder, our nominees are:
NICKELBACK "If Everyone Cared" for Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals
MACHINE HEAD "Aesthetics of Hate" for Best Metal Performance.
Both of these awards are currently scheduled to be announced during the Pre-Tel. Tune in on Grammy.com!
Airbourne, Theory and MLB
I have just pitched a video interview and acoustic performance to Major League Baseball for Theory and Airbourne. These would be featured on MLB.com and possibly in stadium jumbotrons. MLB.com gets roughly like 10MM unique visitors a month and is looking for a lot of musical content as we approach the opening of the 2008 season.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Fuse - Talking (RR) Metal
On Friday, 2/29 @ midnight (ok, technically 3/1) make sure you tune into FUSE (wherever you will be with beverage in hand).
Interviews we filmed with Killswitch Engage, Devildriver and Airbourne will all be in this episode of Talking Metal!
It will repeat the following Friday @ 12:30am.
Airbourne Submitted to NEW!
Airbourne has been submitted to Clearchannel's NEW! program as well as AOL's home page. Will have more info later in the week.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Roadrunner Web Site Upgrades for January
January saw several improvements to the presentation on our artist pages. Some of these you've already seen, some have only been rolled out in the last few days.
Watching Videos and Downloading Music
As I explained in the internal web report last Friday, the music and video changes we introduced created an upsurge in media usage on www.roadrunnerrecords.com. Take a look at the Airbourne page for reference.
The prominent "Download Now" button under Free Music will get you an mp3 right on your desktop. In the Free Video section, we've introduced a scroller. Simply hover over it with your cursor and move the cursor to the right and then the left within the scroller. Clicking on a thumbnail will open the video in its own section right on the page, without ever leaving the artist content.
When there are not enough video thumbnails, the scroller reverts to a "Watch Now" button taking the visitor to the standard video page. (See that in action on the Opeth page before we get a kickass promo video through the door!)
Buzzword Bingo: User-Generated Content
So all has produced great, tangible results so far, but what about making all of that fan energy work for us? I'm glad you asked. Last May Andrew and I created the Within Temptation tour mini-site. I promised at the time that eventually a lot of what you saw there would make it to the Roadrunner web site.
Promise fulfilled.
Take a look at the DragonForce artist page. You probably noticed this at Airbourne, but since DragonForce is smack in the middle of fan interaction on the interwebs, we'll take it from there.
See the sections below Free Music and Free Video with a bunch of little thumbnails? They're labeled Your Photos from Flickr and Your Videos from YouTube. I'm sure everyone is familiar with YouTube by this point. (If not you should probably put the romance novel down and join 2006 at www.youtube.com.)
flickr may be new to you. It's basically a very popular photo site used by professionals and amateurs alike. It's very malleable and a wonderful place to create photo albums, slideshows, and more. What's even better is that it provides RSS feeds of most of its content.
Both the YouTube and flickr strips are scrollers like the Free Video one. Feel free to play around with them. When you click on a flickr photo, it will pop up in the center of your screen without leaving the main artist area. The same goes for the YouTube video, which you can watch right there and then come back to all the DragonForce news we post each week.
All fans have to do at either site is "tag" the photo or video with "dragonforce" and it'll eventually show up on our site. A tag is like a note left with the photo giving a description of what's in the photo.
If you click on the Video or Photo Gallery tabs to the left on any artist page, the respective strip will appear there as well.
Gaining Control
We recently began rolling out Wikipedia-based bios on the site on a limited basis. With input from the marketing staff, we've introduced another innovation in the creation of a tabbed biography. This allows us to present both the wikipedia bio and the official bio at the same time. Check out the Dream Theater bio for a great example.
There are still some formatting issues with these, but in general they all look great and give us something we didn't have before: an active, yet painless hand in influencing the direction of information on Wikipedia about our artists.
Whatever your opinion about Wikipedia, it's where our fans are going. Try a Google search for Dream Theater and their bio is the #2 link. Now we're actively sending fans to these bios to help clean them up. What's more we're sending them to Wikipedia with all the official information and content right there for them to use.
And, in the not-unlikely event of someone vandalizing say, the Slipknot entry with "Slipknot is gay," the bio can be reset on our site with the push of a button.
Minor Revamping
In addition to these uber-cool changes, we've introduced a minor, but effective one to our overall Artists page.
View it here.
Being able to feature certain bands on that page is a pretty obvious innovation I'm sorry I missed bringing to the table for the last year. Thanks to Jon and Andrew, we can now pull out and feature specific bands.
The Next Six Weeks
Expect tweaks and styling changes to all of these as we discover what works best. Also expect a wholesale revamp of the design and usability of our artist pages. We solicited and received a proposal and comps for a redesign of the artist pages that takes them to another dimension entirely. Expect a robust tool with which to super-serve our acts in the coming weeks.
Watching Videos and Downloading Music
As I explained in the internal web report last Friday, the music and video changes we introduced created an upsurge in media usage on www.roadrunnerrecords.com. Take a look at the Airbourne page for reference.
The prominent "Download Now" button under Free Music will get you an mp3 right on your desktop. In the Free Video section, we've introduced a scroller. Simply hover over it with your cursor and move the cursor to the right and then the left within the scroller. Clicking on a thumbnail will open the video in its own section right on the page, without ever leaving the artist content.
When there are not enough video thumbnails, the scroller reverts to a "Watch Now" button taking the visitor to the standard video page. (See that in action on the Opeth page before we get a kickass promo video through the door!)
Buzzword Bingo: User-Generated Content
So all has produced great, tangible results so far, but what about making all of that fan energy work for us? I'm glad you asked. Last May Andrew and I created the Within Temptation tour mini-site. I promised at the time that eventually a lot of what you saw there would make it to the Roadrunner web site.
Promise fulfilled.
Take a look at the DragonForce artist page. You probably noticed this at Airbourne, but since DragonForce is smack in the middle of fan interaction on the interwebs, we'll take it from there.
See the sections below Free Music and Free Video with a bunch of little thumbnails? They're labeled Your Photos from Flickr and Your Videos from YouTube. I'm sure everyone is familiar with YouTube by this point. (If not you should probably put the romance novel down and join 2006 at www.youtube.com.)
flickr may be new to you. It's basically a very popular photo site used by professionals and amateurs alike. It's very malleable and a wonderful place to create photo albums, slideshows, and more. What's even better is that it provides RSS feeds of most of its content.
Both the YouTube and flickr strips are scrollers like the Free Video one. Feel free to play around with them. When you click on a flickr photo, it will pop up in the center of your screen without leaving the main artist area. The same goes for the YouTube video, which you can watch right there and then come back to all the DragonForce news we post each week.
All fans have to do at either site is "tag" the photo or video with "dragonforce" and it'll eventually show up on our site. A tag is like a note left with the photo giving a description of what's in the photo.
If you click on the Video or Photo Gallery tabs to the left on any artist page, the respective strip will appear there as well.
Gaining Control
We recently began rolling out Wikipedia-based bios on the site on a limited basis. With input from the marketing staff, we've introduced another innovation in the creation of a tabbed biography. This allows us to present both the wikipedia bio and the official bio at the same time. Check out the Dream Theater bio for a great example.
There are still some formatting issues with these, but in general they all look great and give us something we didn't have before: an active, yet painless hand in influencing the direction of information on Wikipedia about our artists.
Whatever your opinion about Wikipedia, it's where our fans are going. Try a Google search for Dream Theater and their bio is the #2 link. Now we're actively sending fans to these bios to help clean them up. What's more we're sending them to Wikipedia with all the official information and content right there for them to use.
And, in the not-unlikely event of someone vandalizing say, the Slipknot entry with "Slipknot is gay," the bio can be reset on our site with the push of a button.
Minor Revamping
In addition to these uber-cool changes, we've introduced a minor, but effective one to our overall Artists page.
View it here.
Being able to feature certain bands on that page is a pretty obvious innovation I'm sorry I missed bringing to the table for the last year. Thanks to Jon and Andrew, we can now pull out and feature specific bands.
The Next Six Weeks
Expect tweaks and styling changes to all of these as we discover what works best. Also expect a wholesale revamp of the design and usability of our artist pages. We solicited and received a proposal and comps for a redesign of the artist pages that takes them to another dimension entirely. Expect a robust tool with which to super-serve our acts in the coming weeks.
Friday, February 1, 2008
3IOB, Still Remains Superbowl Predicitons at Rhapsody
Find out who these dudes (and other metal performers) think will win the Superbowl over at Rhapsody's blog:
http://blog.rhapsody.com/2008/02/q-who-will-win.html
http://blog.rhapsody.com/2008/02/q-who-will-win.html
Airbourne Free Track of the Week at Wal-Mart
We have great placement on their MP3 store at:
http://downloads.walmart.com/swap
as well as placement on their Music homepage at:
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?cat=4104&fromPageCatId=10
http://downloads.walmart.com/swap
as well as placement on their Music homepage at:
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?cat=4104&fromPageCatId=10
Airbourne Mentioned on MSN Music
Airbourne received a short paragraph at MSN Music. Click here to take a look.
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