Each year there are a number of deaths that ripple the music industry and 2012 has unfortunately already started off with us loosing some very notable and respected people in the biz.  I just want to take a brief moment to show our respect to those that helped shape us and the industry we work in.

Etta James (1938 – 2012)

She was a powerful force and we were all saddened to hear of her passing.  Her soulful tunes will continue to be an influence and she will for sure go down in history as one of the greatest vocalists ever.  Not much else is needed to be said here, she’ll be missed.

Johnny Otis (1921 – 2012)

Johnny Otis, a ‘white’ man with a ‘black’ voice that was able to take R&B and bring it to the mainstream audience in the days when racial tensions were high.  Songwriter, singer, producer, DJ, and much more; he was dubbed as the “Godfather of Rhythm and Blues” and without his influence, our music and culture might not be what it is today.

Winston Riley (1946 – 2012)

Winston Riley, a Jamaican born reggae artist and producer was recently found shot to death in his home in Kingston.  Riley helped bring reggae to Europe and his beats have been sampled by numerous reggae and hip-hop artists.  Most notable was his work as a front man with The Techniques as well as his production work with some of the biggest names in the biz.  His last project, “Ring the Alarm” by Tenor Saw is still one of my favorite reggae tunes, check it out:

John Levy (1912 – 2012)

Just today the news came out that bassist and longtime jazz manager, John Levy, passed away at his home at the age of 99.  Dubbed as the “First prominent African-American manager” in the industry, his artist lineup included everybody from Herbie Hancock to Roberta Flack.  A true “Jazz Master”

Warren Hellman (1934 – 2011)

Though Mr. Hellman passed in December, the news is still recent and his passing hit hard.  He was the founder and financier of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, a notable figure in the San Francisco Bay Area for his philanthropy, as well as a respected banjo player.  Pulled from the HSBF website, a great quote by Mr. Hellman in relation to his free bluegrass festival: “How could you have more fun than that?” he told Forbes. “What the hell is money for if it isn’t for something like that?”

Some others we’ve lost this year include country musician and producer Larry Butler as well as funk saxophonist Jimmy Castor.  We hate to see the passing of anyone but at-least these people have left a lasting impression and we thank them all for what they have done.  May they all rest in peace and their spirit continue to shine.

CES 2012 recently wrapped up, and we are once again presented with some of the most innovative and new technologies to be coming our way.  The 21st century just seems to be trucking along and with the technological changes we are seeing in our day-to-day lives, we are also seeing some dramatic changes in the way live music and concerts are being presented to the audience.  Live music will continue to hold its roots but the next step in the evolution of concerts is here, so lets take a look at some new technologies and engagement ideas that might just change your perception of concerts forever.

Holographic Performances

No live performers on stage, just a hologram and endless room for imagination.  As crazy as this may seem its already caught on in Japan and we’re starting to see it pop up more and more around the globe.  Japanese audiences have been helping to create and shape their fantasy star, Hatsune Miku, for several years now.  Audiences help write songs, pick outfits, and generally control the flow of the show.  While I don’t know if American audiences are ready for an animated or ‘imitation’ musician, we are seeing though many big name stars and company’s embrace it as a major marketing tool, examples being;  Celine Dion (duet w. Elvis), Deutsce Telekom and T-Mobile teaming with Mariah Carey, and the Black Eyed Peas…for some more good examples see Musion’s portfolio.  One day when we all have a holodeck in our home (StarTrek geek coming out), the in home live streamed holographic concert could be next.  The possibilities here are endless and this I see as truly being futuristic and the beginning of something I feel we will be exposed to in many faucets of our lives in the years ahead.

Live Stream

This isn’t necessarily new but it is taking on quick as many bands and festivals are utilizing the web to bring live concerts to your living room.  The Rolling Stones were one of the early adopters of the technology and started streaming live content to their fans back in 1994.  The growth is due in large to the bandwidth and CPU processing speeds able to handle this, and again as technologies advance, so will live streaming.  There are many benefits to live streaming and it turns out to be a good thing for all parties involved.  Bands find a new outlet for revenue in light of record sale declines…and fans now can watch a concert of their favorite band live, half a world away, in the comfort of their own homes.  It may not be the same experience but it does give you the opportunity to see a show you otherwise couldn’t be at, and thats pretty awesome!

 Downloadable Concert Recordings

Audience recordings of concerts have been around for quite some time, especially noteworthy are the pioneering ‘Deadheads’ who recorded and documented (and continue to do so) each Grateful Dead concert.  Many bands are now offering soundboard downloads for sale, or for free ,as soon as the show is over.  As someone who forgets concerts frequently (usually due to a beer too many), this has been a blessing to help remember and experience the show for years to come.  Look for this to become more and more popular especially with bands that perform unique live shows.  There are plenty of sites out there and many bands have their own sites now, but a couple good sources that I like are Wolfgang’s Vault, Nugs.net, and Archive.org’s Live Music Archive.

Audience Involvement and Misc. Advancements

The days of simply attending a concert and watching someone entertain you might be a thing of the past.  Audience involvement in concerts will continue to shape itself to make it a more interactive experience instead of a one-way street. Areas where this is being developed is in audience controlled lighting, such as being done by Weiv.  By taking Wii remotes and putting them in the hands of fans, Wiev is letting the audience control the shows lighting and feel more involved in the experience.

A creative use of audience interaction is with DJ and producer Ritchie Hawtin, aka Plastikman, who has been using the iTunes app ‘SYNK’ that allows the audience via their iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad to see interactive cameras on stage, live data on percussion patterns, as well as they can control lighting, visuals, and even loop feedback.

Audience picked set-lists are gaining some ground as well as many artists want to deliver the content their fans want.  We’re seeing a wide range of artists use this but two notable ones that have seen good success are Roadrunner Record’s Motley Crue and Avenged Sevenfold.

One top example of fan engagement is “The Rapture”, their tiered marketing campaign let fans pick set-lists, perform on stage, design branded merchandise, and even get a chance to hang with the band…great way to build fan loyalty and a good subscriber database!!!

The ‘concert movie’ is gaining more and more ground and yet again provides additional revenue for the bands and additional opportunities for the fan to become involved in the experience.  One upcoming release I’m looking forward to is The Chemical Brothers movie based off their last tour “Don’t Think”, which has been touted as a visual masterpiece.

SMS, Twitter feeds, and other forms of social media are being utilized to give the audience a direct voice in the concert, good example here with Katy Perry.

QR Codes, proximity locations, and other forms of live capture are taking on as it gives the band the opportunity to build their subscriber database while providing a fun form of interaction with their fans.

Along with the evolution of the concert itself, the venues are also seeing some new light.  Improved lighting, sound, and seating are just the beginning.  Many venues now offer premium dining options, other forms of entertainment, vip and box seating, environmental improvements, and the list just goes on.  AEG’s Staples Center and Orlando’s Amway Center are two prime examples.

Conclusion:

So as you can see the concert is taking new form, for better or worse.  Areas of advancement will continue to be seen as time goes on and hopefully the concert experience will continue to improve with such advancements.  We’ve touched on some big changes here but it’s really just the beginning and I’m excited to see where all of this heads!  And I know there are plenty of things I didn’t touch on here, so we’d love to hear from you on what you think the next big thing is, your experiences with new technologies and forms of interaction at concerts, if you think these are good changes or not, or just what your opinions are.  Leave us a comment here or find us on Facebook or Twitter @fancentric.

A newly added (or just now documented) feature of the ExactTarget SOAP API is the creation of Data Filters. A Data Filter is simply a set of simple logical operators strung together to create a query like filter. What really makes this powerful is that all ExactTarget accounts have Data Filters, which makes this a viable solution across the ExactTarget realm. And, it also can be used to replace simple query activities that would normally be needed without the need for AIM to be turned on.

$wsdl = 'https://webservice.exacttarget.com/etframework.wsdl';

/* Create the Soap Client */
$client = new ExactTargetSoapClient($wsdl, array('trace'=>1));

/* Set username and password here */
$client->username = "username";
$client->password = "password";

$sf_1 = new ExactTarget_SimpleFilterPart();
$sf_1->Property = "First Name";
$sf_1->SimpleOperator = ExactTarget_SimpleOperators::equals;
$sf_1->Value = "Nick";

$sf_1 = new SoapVar($sf_1, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, 'SimpleFilterPart', "http://exacttarget.com/wsdl/partnerAPI");

$sf_2 = new ExactTarget_SimpleFilterPart();
$sf_2->Property = "First Name";
$sf_2->SimpleOperator = ExactTarget_SimpleOperators::equals;
$sf_2->Value = "Mike";

$sf_2 = new SoapVar($sf_2, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, 'SimpleFilterPart', "http://exacttarget.com/wsdl/partnerAPI");

$cf = new ExactTarget_ComplexFilterPart();
$cf->LeftOperand = $sf_1;
$cf->LogicalOperator = ExactTarget_LogicalOperators::_OR;
$cf->RightOperand = $sf_2;

$cf = new SoapVar($cf, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, 'ComplexFilterPart', "http://exacttarget.com/wsdl/partnerAPI");

$fd = new ExactTarget_FilterDefinition();
$fd->Name = "My Filter Name";
$fd->CustomerKey = "my_filter_key";
$fd->Description = "My API Filter";
$fd->DataFilter = $cf;

$object = new SoapVar($fd, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, 'FilterDefinition', "http://exacttarget.com/wsdl/partnerAPI");

$request = new ExactTarget_CreateRequest();
$request->Options = NULL;
$request->Objects = array($object);
$results = $client->Create($request);

When using dynamic content within emails on the ExactTarget platform it is often useful to pull data from Data Extensions in order to populate content. Since the Retrieve function is not available within emails, therefore, developers are forced to use the Lookup function. At first glance, the ExactTarget wiki sample code (found here) is a little misleading in that it suggests that only one column from the selected Data Extension can be searched on. Below is the sample code for a simple Lookup:

var testDE = DataExtension.Init("testDE");
var data = testDE.Rows.Lookup(["Age"], [25], 2, "LastName");

The first two arguments of the function are the column to search and then the value to search for. It is very simple, but what gets overlooked is that the first two parameters actually accept array data types as their arguments. This means that multiple columns can be searched on for their respective values! Take a look at what I mean:

var testDE = DataExtension.Init("testDE");
var data = testDE.Rows.Lookup(["Age", "Zipcode"], [25, "45014"], 2, "LastName");

This will return all records where the age equals 25 and the zipcode equals 45014. Using multi-column lookups will help return smaller record sets, which cuts down on additional filtering and load time. Hopefully, this will be useful in extending the functionality and efficiency of your ExactTarget emails. Click here to download the entire source code example.

Ok, so the end of the world as predicted by many Mayan enthusiasts isn’t true, that little girl singing might have more soul then Edward Sharpe himself, your Zodiac sign isn’t changing, and yes, unfortunately we all know who Rebecca Black is and how much she likes Fridays.  All of the aforementioned stories and videos I’m sure you’re aware of because they’re entertaining, captivating, and represent some of the most viral content of 2011.  Viral in a good sense, in the sense that it’s so damn compelling you can’t not but enjoy and share!  Word of mouth buzz and viral content will spread like a wildfire and with the social channels that are open nowadays, the ‘viral video’ is becoming a game changer for businesses in regards to how they develop creative marketing content.

The entertainment X-factor has always been a driving force behind advertising, one of my favorites being Macintosh’s release commercial in 1984…but what we’re seeing now is truly remarkable and only limited by ones creativeness.  Remember Volvo’s commercial with that cute Darth Vader kid, the Old Spice guy, or how Snickers helped to propel Betty White back to stardom?  Of course you do, those are some top recent examples of commercials that were highly successful and popular in the mainstream market.  With the web though, advertisers no longer are limited to 30second blips and ‘PC’ messages directed to a mass audience.   Case in point, K-Swiss‘ Kenny Powers commercials and his claim of “making marketing that touches people”.

Caution: Video contains flagrant and funny material.

You can now speak to and engage your customers unlike ever before and having a catchy video or slogan can help propel your message to the next level.  The key to creating what you hope to be a ‘viral’ advertisement, is knowing your fan-base and developing your strategy wisely.  K-Swiss would never get away with such an edgy commercial in the mainstream but by reaching out to their fan-base and those that will listen and engage with this type of message, it has been advantageous in defining their brand and creating hype.  People are choosing to see their commercials instead of being forced to, and that’s as good as gold to a marketer!  So in 2012, don’t be afraid to be bold, to entertain, to shock, to embrace comedy, to say what you really want to say, and go VIRAL!

I’ve created a simple API wrapper for the Ticketfly API written in PHP which has been made available for public download on Github. It is a simple class that will allow you to access all endpoints within the Ticketfly API. Download it here!

For more info about Ticketfly please visit ticketfly.com.

If already don’t know about ExactTarget AMPScript TreatAsContentArea function, well you definitely should. It is an essential tool when sending large scale emails where several different sets of content are to be sent out depending on attributes of a subscriber. What makes TACA (TreatAsContentArea) so unique and useful is that is a caching function for content. What does this mean? And, how does this apply to my ExactTarget email sends? Well let’s look at a theoretical situation where I want to send a weather forecast to everyone of my subscribers in the United States based on state.

What TACA Does For Us

As you know there are 50 states within the US and thus I will have to generate 50 different types of content, one for each state. Now, I can send the email without using TACA and it will work just fine, but it will not be the most efficient. Imagine if I wanted to send an email to every single person in the US (approx 300 million people). This would mean I would have to generate the content for every subscriber, which as you can imagine would really slow this send down. Enter TACA. What if I could cache the content for each state and then send? This is exactly what TACA allows us to do. Let’s take a look at some theoretical code.

1. First, the TACA syntax: TreatAsContentArea(“unique_key”, “content”, “impression_region”)

The first parameter is the unique identifier for the content. In our theoretical case we could use the state abbreviation, which is easily found by pulling it from the subscriber’s attributes. As for the content, we could use a pre-generated content area or a lookup from a content area. Finally, the last parameter defines the impression region for the content.

2. How Exactly Does TACA work?

This is probably the simplest thing about TACA and makes everything make sense. For each unique key that TACA uses it caches the content for that key. When that key is used later during the send the data is pulled from cache rather than evaluating the content parameter. For example, say our first subscriber lives in California. The first time through TACA, we give it a unique key of CA based off the subscriber’s attribute. The next subscriber is from Ohio, so their key is OH. The third subscriber is from California, so TACA takes initiative here. When we again insert CA as the key for the third subscriber, it pulls from cache the CA key and doesn’t evaluate the content parameter twice. Likewise, any subsequent duplicate key will retrieve the cached content.

3. How to use with External APIs?

The idea of caching when using external APIs is very very important. In our theoretical situation recall we wanted to send to approx. 300 million people, but most APIs don’t let us hit their API more that a couple thousand times an hour if that. So what do you do? Cache it. In our example case we only have 50 possible combinations, so if we were to use the weather.com API, why would we want to ping the API 300 million times when we only have to do it 50 times. This is the true beauty of TACA. Let’s take an example:

TreatAsContentArea(“OH”, HTTPGet(“http://weather.com/get/?state=oh), “weather”)

This will retrieve data from the “theoretical” API endpoint and store it under the key OH. However, we need to make one addition in order to mitigate the risk of HTML content being retrieved by TACA and then rendering it. We want to encode the content prior to caching it. We’ll use Base64Encode and then Base64Decode when we want to use the content.

Set @weather = TreatAsContentArea(“OH”, Base64Encode(HTTPGet(“http://weather.com/get/?state=oh)), “weather”)
Set @weather = Base64Decode(@weather)

This will let you retrieve the data from the API without going over on your API usage!

I’ve created a simple API wrapper for the LastFM API written in PHP which has been made available for public download on Github. It is a simple class that will allow you to access all endpoints within the LastFM API. Download it here!

For more info about last.fm please visit last.fm.

The holiday season is upon us and time is running short to get those last minute gifts.  Buying something for your musically inclined love one shouldn’t be that hard since there is so much out there, but often times such purchases can get pretty expensive as you try to keep up with emerging technologies.  So just in-case you need some help, here’s a quick peek at some budget-minded gifts for the music geek in all of us.

ThinkGeek is a pretty neat website with all sorts of techie related items.  There’s plenty on this site to explore but some of the coolest items I’ve seen are these interactive t-shirts, including; electronic guitars, drum kits, synthesizers, Wi-Fi finders, and equalizers.

They have some other neat items like a pocket synthesizer, optical theremin, The Mozart Magical Cube (a musical toy for infants that claims to improve “spatial-temporal reasoning”), as well as these vibrating speakers which let you turn anything into a speaker:

There are a plethora of other sites out there to snoop around on but one I like is Findgift.com.  When you search for ‘music‘ you get a good assortment of gifts linking you to the manufacturer’s website.  Some of my favorite finds included record bowls and clocks (which make for a great cheap DIY project!!), as well as the Washboard Tie, piano wire bracelet, and guitar ice cube tray and stirrers…details here:

An easy to get gift is always a subscription to one of the many music related magazines like; Rolling Stone, Relix, Billboard, and Spin.  There are many options out there, but hopefully this short list will give you some ideas for the upcoming holiday or special event, without breaking the bank.  Have fun shopping, have a happy holiday, and just don’t forget shipping time if needing something soon!!!

I’ve created a simple API wrapper for the Rapleaf API written in PHP which has been made available for public download on Github. It is a simple class that will allow you to access all endpoints within the Rapleaf API. Download it here!

For more info about Rapleaf please visit Rapleaf.com.