The Music Tee is a pretty cool concept developed by LNAclothing and Invisible DJ. Invisible DJ works with artists and record labels regularly to develop unique programs and platforms to promote music for up and coming artists. LNA sells plain-ish-American-Apparel-ish style clothes primarily to the funky, hipster crowd. Naturally, these two companies would come together at some point, and hence, The Music Tee is born.
The Music Tee prints the album cover art on the front of the tee, and the song list on the back. The hangtag that comes with shirt purchase contains a URL that allows you to download the entire album. Sounds awesome you say? I think so too. What I see are a few ways the Music Tee may inspire within the music world…somewhere most of us think of as a slowly dying place where artists don’t get enough credit (or money) for their work, and labels are doing everything in their power to stay afloat. Here are a few of my thoughts on how Music Tees can boost the industry:
Easy, grassroots style promoting (who doesn’t like to wear t-shirts of their favorite bands?)
Bringing back the enthusiasm for awesome cover art
Generate revenues for the digital music that would replenish sales that are lost and diminishing from cds
An easy ice-breaker for meeting people who share the same music tastes
The first music tee I saw is the one for “The Asteroids Galaxy Tour” that is being promoted on the site. This makes sense because Invisible DJ contacts and clients tend to be up and coming artists. However, Mos Def just started selling Music Tees for his latest album, which gives a little more credit to the product and increases the chances that this concept will take off. A blurb was written about music tee in YPulse, a Gen Y online publication, and feedback/comments tend to be very positive for everything I’ve seen about the subject. I’ll be watching how Gen Y responds to this once it really goes mainstream. From an interactive perspective, there are many ways we can build off this concept to create cool campaigns for music tees. This could be something like developing an application to allow fans to “Design-Your-Own Music Tee”, to contests that leverage multiple social networks. The Music Tee already utilizes a concept of social advertising by having people wear their own advertising and talk about the album on their backs, and therefore lends itself quite easily to the social world on the web. Or, this could be a combination of both – something similar to what Twitter and Threadless Tees in a collaboration called Twitter Threadless Tees (create your own t-shirts with your tweets!).
Kudos to LNA and Invisible DJ for thinking outside-the-box. I love the concept, and I think it will do a lot for music fans and artists alike.
June 23, 2009, Los Angeles – Here at Zugara, we’re proud to announce the launch of our newest application, The Webcam Social Shopper. Coupling the functionality of both Augmented Reality and Motion Capture, this application will allow anyone with a webcam to shop online right from within their video feed. We like to think of it as “Augmented Reality meets Utility”. This app allows you to seemingly hold articles of clothing up in front of yourself to see “how they look”. And the Motion Capture allows the app to track your movements so you can interact with the site (e.g. cycle through a product’s various colors/styles or take a picture of yourself so you can get immediate feedback from friends on Facebook) while standing several feet away from your computer’s controls. No extra downloads, no new plug-in, no consumer headache.
To see the application in action, check out our video below.
Now that you’ve seen the application in its “Alpha State”, think about the potential an app like this has as we partner with brands to allow their consumers to do things like:
Livestream their webcam’s feed to friends and loved ones, and get comments and feedback right next to the application in real time.
Receive “clothing care packages” from loved ones who might be somewhere else in the country and set up times to “shop together”… online.
Enter their measurements into the app and get a “fitted image”.
Match entire outfits at the same time, both top and bottom.
Shop right within a branded Facebook application.
It’s not a secret that friends/family recommendations influence a consumer’s purchase decision and beat any other “consumer touchpoint”. Now, we can help brands empower their consumers to integrate their friends and family into their online shopping process like never before. The thinking is that this application will help bridge the gap between how people like to shop offline and how they are forced to shop online, subsequently providing an enhanced interactive shopping experience for the consumer and increased sales for the brand. So, what do you think? Please, feel free to share this post with anyone and everyone, or embed the video above in your own blog. And, as always, we’d love to know your thoughts below…
(UPDATE: We’ve partnered with RichRelevance to integrate their recommendation engine into WSS and create a completely unique application dubbed Fashionista. Fashionista is currently live on Tobi.com and you can read more about that launch on Fast Company.)
About Zugara
Zugara is an interactive marketing agency with a passion for emerging media and technologies. Unlike most agencies, we don’t claim to do everything: Interactive Video, Social Media, Mobile Marketing, and Website & Application Development are our core competencies. Since our doors opened in 2001, we’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the world’s best brands such as Reebok, Sony Computer Entertainment Of America, Toyota, Activision, Jelly Belly, Casio, The Air Force, and Lexus to create strategic interactive campaigns that focus on accomplishing their business objectives. Based in Los Angeles, we’re currently in the process of expanding, and opening our second office in New York (www.zugara.com) (www.zugarastudios.com).
For more information on The Webcam Social Shopper or ZugMo Technology, please contact ar@zugara.com. For all other inquiries, please contact info@zugara.com.
Copyright 2009 ZugMo Technology
Copyright 2009 Webcam Social Shopper
Copyright 2009 Zugara Inc.
Patent Pending
Show support for the people who fight for democracy at Iran, and change your Twitter avatar to have a green overlay (the official color of the movement). It’s easy, just one click…
This is before the release of the $99 iPhone 3G pricepoint and the upcoming launch of the iPhone 3G S with more hard drive space and better graphics capabilities.
Somehow Flash Lite or some other form of mobile Flash keeps getting brought up every year as we get closer to a new OS release or next generation handset. So far, Apple hasn’t caved and is sticking to it’s PR line that Flash is a resource hog and therefore will hinder the mobile internet browsing experience on the iPhone. Though this is 1/2 true as Flash websites would definitely require more processing power, memory and drain your battery faster, iPhone Apps use many of the same system resources that Flash would. But, that’s not the real reason. The real reason is that Apple has a good thing going with their App Store so why invite Flash to basically crash the party?
Think about it. A good majority of the Apps in the App store could just as easily be Flash applications built into web pages. And if Apple allowed this, they could kiss some of the 30% of revenue they’re making off the predicted $365 million – $800 million in sales the App Store is generating annually. They would have no control over what Flash sites or content people are accessing via the Safari browser. So by allowing Flash on the iPhone they’re faced with both a loss of revenue and loss of control. Doesn’t sound like your classic ‘win win’ to me…
The main appeal of Twitter is that many people use it for a variety of different things. But one area I don’t quite get is why you would ‘tweet’ a video on a platform off Twitter that requires you to spend time not only uploading but converting it as well? At least to me, the appeal of Twitter has always been short, quick text based information and the availability of real-time search (of that info).
In this recent mad dash to have a Twitter video platform, companies like 12 Seconds, Twitvid.io, and even YouTube, are trying to create a service similar to TwitPic where you can upload your videos for your Twitter followers to view. Once uploaded, your followers would be notified that the video is ready for viewing. But that’s the problem – Twitter’s success is based on real-time information and conversation. So the same should hold true for Video in order for it to provide the same impact of a real-time conversation and flow. Does a few minutes really matter if someone’s not watching video in real-time. Well yes. Think of watching a sporting event as it happens or being told 10 minutes later what happened during the sporting event. What has a greater impact?
Then you have practical internet and consumer bandwidth limitations to deal with. Video is a much larger sized upload than a picture. So even with YouTube’s recent announcement that they’re joining ‘the stream’, they’re still not offering information in a real-time capacity for users. They’re only sending out a ‘tweet’ about your video after it’s been uploaded AND converted in their system. And if you’ve done this before you know it’s not an immediate process.
Though we’re still in the infancy of the real-time web and information ‘stream’, everything is evolving at a breakneck pace. You can see some of this evolution by tracking some of the live streaming sites or people that are already ‘lifecasting’. For example, Qik and Ustream already have Twitter integrated into their platforms so that the second you start broadcasting live, real-time video, a tweet goes out to your followers with a link so they can watch your broadcast in real-time. Not only is your audience notified in real-time and can join your broadcast as it happens, but they can also interact with you while your broadcasting. (We recently used Qik on the iPhone to experiment with live interactive mobile broadcasts at E3 and blogged about it here.) Contrast this with YouTube’s method of tweeting out an uploaded video and it almost makes the online video market leader look even more behind the times than they already are.
Further emphasizing how important video will be to the web is a recent forecast from Cisco that by 2013, 90% of all internet traffic will be video. With recent announcements of video on the iPhone 3G S and Qik’s addition to Nokia’s handsets, mobile real-time video is also going to contribute to the real-time and ‘in the moment’ nature of how video is both viewed and shared. Shooting your video, uploading, waiting for it to convert and then finally letting someone view it is not going to be optimal for this real-time revolution.
The question isn’t whether the real-time revolution will continue to evolve (like it has) to feed people’s increasingly insatiable need for instantaneous information. Rather the question will revolve around who, from the current stable of real-time streaming video communities, is poised run the next leg of the real-time race. Currently, Qik and Ustream are neck in neck in that race with no indication that either is about to let up.
We Are Organized Chaos (WAOC) is Zugara’s (www.zugara.com) interactive marketing and advertising blog where we’ll be featuring some great projects and discussing upcoming trends in the digital world. Work — good and bad — will be critiqued. Hope you’ll enjoy reading our insights and thoughts on interactive.
