Ok, OK, tagged campaigns or headphones only events aren't new to the most geeks of us, but Sony Japan has strike a cool chord with this campaign.

After Tupac playing "live" a few years after his departure from this planet, are we about to experiment yet another crazy idea ? Sony has teamed with a few top notch advertisement companies (Naked Communications and Frontage) to launch a campaign to sell their new line of headphones. The idea is that the audience sees posters and target them with their smarphones. They are immediately being shown a concert by the band they choose (4 different bands were proposed). They were also handled the said-headphones to experiment this augmented reality show in the best conditions possible. The campaign was very successful and open for more ideas from the same barrel: expect in a few years to have full shows ready for such consumption, a bit like VOD but with bands and "live" performance.

Headphones are one of the hot topics of the moment and silent discos or even silent performances are rather common: there's a lot of interesting ideas floating around. You can go to specific discos and dance while wearing a headphone. In some...

Separating music from alcohol and drugs consumption would be like deliberately remove x and y from maths or salt from french fries (belgian fries as it turns out but that's beside our point from today) and we surely don't want to do that today and are even going to concentrate on beer and rock music.

A london-based company, Signature Brew, is very cleverly asking rock bands to be part of the brewing process of a beer that would therefore be totally personal to them and to their fans. So far, two Signature Brew have been issued and sold really well as one of them, The General beer, title of a Rifles song (one of the bands having design a beer), has already seen 6000 bottles sold ! There are a few more bands lining up for that great idea and this connection between beer and rock must for sure resonates well for rock bands and fans alike.

Signature Brew goes quite deeply in the entanglement of the band and the beer's taste as it's asked to the band to actually design the beer: they need to go and taste some and refine it with the help of a microbrewer in the UK. One of the beer is crisp and rather fizzy while the other one is more like mexican beers. Of course, the...

In an interesting article from Billboard, it seems major brands are using more and more indie artists for the music in their commercials and it goes much deeper than just a few notes on the packshot at the end of the TV clip.

And this is to be linked with a blog entry we had a few months ago: Y generation people don't mind when brands and bands are connecting (http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/music-more-important) which is good for bands in an era where synchronisation rights can be an important stream of revenues..

And even Bon Iver goes along with that, and even more: they refused to play at the Grammy's Night but their music is featured in a few adverts and they're even endorsed by a whisky company !

Why is that ? What attracts major brands in using often obscure music by obscure artists to pimp up up their commercial videos ? Well, it seems that in this new digital world, indies/underground artists can upscale a product and the less-sexy the product is, the more the music will make it shine in a better light, especially towards a younger audience. And it's also easier, cheaper and...

We had a blog entry the other day about how the Y Generation sees very little evil at all into corporates funding artists. And maybe this is one of the ways Music can expand and grow: commercial companies seeing the benefits of being a sponsor. Just like in the Renaissance where artists were being able to survive and do their work thanx to rich benefactors...

In this case, Rolex his a sponsor for the Arts since 2002. More than 170 artists from different fildls (dance, film, literature, music, theatre and visual arts) have been assembled into doing a one year project between a mentor and his protege. People like Youssu N'Dour, Martin Scorcese or Peter Sellars have teamed up with youngs gifted artists and have interact with them for a period of at least 6 weeks, assembling new pieces or just communicating together...A bit like If Yoda a swiss watch was wearing to Jedi Padawan lessons to give :)

Brian Eno (universally known as a musical genius since Roxy Music to his work with U2 and others) has mentor Australian born artist Ben Frost (a post rock musician now living in Iceland) and together they made music, talked philosophy and arts....Here is a very interesting 5...

Just to tackle on from the hilarious but oh-so-true Henry Rollins rant on sell-out (?) songs being placed as soundtracks for adverts (http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/i-want-sell-out-now) , we have this as a counter example...Here are songs that forever and ever will be stained with the adverts using them as aural beds...This said, it's hilarious to notice The Rolling Stones "Start Me Up was used for Windows 95 or that a Violent Femmes song was used for a junkfood commercial when in fact its bass player is profoundly vegetarian :)

http://flavorwire.com/203000/10-songs-that-have-been-ruined-forever-by-a...