music blog
In his latest song “Without You” Avicii is combining two music styles in one song: It starts as a vocal and acoustic guitar song and then builds up slowly to become an instrumental trance-style song at 2:27 min. Very cool idea.
For some reason the plucked octaves in “Without You” e.g. at 2:31 – 2:33 min. remind me of a Tella 2XLC remix of the song “Spring” from the German music producer RMB (Rolf Maier-Bode).
The Norwegian a-ha lead singer Morten Harket is 58 in the meantime but his voice remains unchanged. This month they have published a beautiful “MTV Unplugged” session, in which they performed again their 1985 hit “The sun always shines on TV” with assistance from the Ingrid Helene Håvik, the lead singer of the Norwegian band Highasakite. The venue took place at the Øygardshallen, close to the Ocean Sound Recordings studio on the small island of Giske nearby Alesund.
In this session they also presented their beautiful new song “This is our home”, with the pure voice of Marten Harket.
As a music publisher it’s necessary to announce that your new song is available in music stores. The announcements can be done in Social Media as image posts or video teasers or in any other media. In this context it is helpful to understand the guidelines of the music stores because it get’s tricky when you use their logo in your own artwork or video teaser.
Each music store has different requirements and it is recommended to read them all before you use their logo.
Don’t stress the music stores by using their company symbol in a wrong way.
Try to look from the perspective of the brand: The logo is a symbol for the values of the company and it is also copyright-protected property of the company. Music stores in general have no problem if their logo is used in own media content but the ask you use it according to their rules and follow their design guidelines. It is for example forbidden to use just the Apple logo in own media content. Respect the rules of the brand.
All-electric cars became attractive with Tesla. The design of a Tesla is beautiful and test-driving a Tesla is amazing. Once you get out of a Tesla, you don’t want to go back into your stinking gasoline-powered car again. Electric cars are actually giving the hope of a good future, with less dust and noise in cities.
Mercedes has created an extreme vision of an electric car: Their design study has become reality in a Maybach 6 Cabriolet, an all-electric car with a 750 horsepower electric engine. The shape is stunning.
The teaser video combines excellent product close-ups with drone shots and a cinematic music that reminds so much of the movie score of The Island by Steve Jablonsky.
The German ADAC published several high quality photos of the design study in his blog, the original article by ADAC can be found here.
It’s totally impressive that one pitched word is causing a thunderstorm in music stores. This version of “Thunder” by All Saints points out that one word is the key component of the song.
Imagine Dragons themselves are very successful with the song, currently at 310 million streams on Spotify. The video has nice impressions of the Dubai Marina and Sheikh Zayed Road.
Remembering July 22, 2017 in Croke Park. We were watching U2 from Cusack Stand but the U2 fan Paulo Vetri has created a great memory of this “Beautiful Day” from many different perspectives.
As mentioned earlier in this article I’m a very happy user of the music distribution service of DistroKid, which allows artists to expose their music to the huge audience of the big music services like Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, Deezer, etc. DistroKid is amazing simple to handle, has an amazing low yearly fee of $19.99 and will give the artist 100% of the royalties collected by the big stores. All in all an amazing offer for home musicians like me who want to expose their music to a big audience. Make sure to check out the 7% discount code, see below, if you’re interested to sign up with DistroKid.
One of the big success stories of DistroKid is the band Jack & Jack. Watch Philip J. Kaplan, the owner of DistroKid, unboxing the Gold Record of the Jack & Jack song “Like That”.
This is the song behind the Gold Record. Jack & Jack are very popular in Social Media, they have 2,5 million Followers just on Instagram. A Gold Record means that they have sold more than 500,000 copies of “Like That” through the music distribution service of DistroKid, keeping 100% of their royalties. Respect!
Hearing the radio today I immediately fell in love with a new song from Alecia Beth Moore alias Pink. Different to previous Pink songs “What about us” is now almost a dance song with beautiful melodic phases throughout the whole song. Co-written by Johnny McDaid (who produced e.g. for Snow Patrol, Paul van Dyk and Ed Sheeren) and Steve McCutcheon (who also produced for Ed Sheeran and e.g. Robin Schulz and Clean Bandit), this song has a wonderful build-up phase with a low-pass filtered piano and then releases its full power after the break at 2:32 min. The original video distracts too much from the music and could have been even more in a dance style but the lyrics video is just perfect, it keeps the focus on the music. Great work of Alecia, Johnny and Steve!
Seeb meets OneRepublic in a cooperation for the song “Rich Love”: It has the Seeb signature in the pitched lyric line “Hey man nice to meet you” of the refrain and of course it has the unique voice of OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder. Just wishing they would have used some photography elements of their superb @onerepublic Instagram page for the video. Great work – more please!
Coldplay has just released another song which confirms once again that they are a special band: “Miracles (Someone special)” has quite a long introduction and build-up phase but then releases a heavenly refrain melody: A little off-beat together with the guitar pad and Chris Martins voice generate a magic atmosphere in the refrain. The very expressive video clips during the refrain match perfectly to the music an lyrics (I love the baseball scene at 1:51 min and the look of the woman at 2:11 min). Brilliant work once again. I’m just wondering who accidentally pressed the mute button three times at the beginning of the song – this is probably a new type of “ear-catcher”.