Barenaked Ladies Tap Crowdsourcing
September 14, 2006 by Mark Evans
Filed under Business
The Barenaked Ladies are pretty creative band – and also into the Web. So, it’s not a huge surprise BNL has jumped on the crowdsourcing movement by using the Web to get their fans to design T-shirts, a music video and remixes/mash-ups as part of a new album. (source: Canadian Press). So far, the contributions have been all over the place from country to a waltz. “People are doing amazing remixes,” singer-songwriter-guitarist Ed Robertson told CP. “We’re getting these ridiculous disco versions of our songs. There’s a lot of people that are really good.” Among some of the other crowdsourcing initiatives are a call out for the best air-guitarists to appear in a video, “Wind It Up”, which stems from a request BNL put on its MySpace Web in the summer. With crowdsourcing all the rage, you wonder how long it will be before a band puts 30-second clips of a couple dozen songs on their Web, and asks fans to pick the best ones to be put on an album. If this is what it takes to encourage community and CD sales, then why not.
There is a great article in this month’s WIRED with Terry McBride of Nettwerk, BNL’s management company on their innovation in the music space as well as other work he’s doing.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/nettwerk.html
Mark, Interesting you would mention BNL on crowdsourcing (not too sure if I like this emerging term – it has the ring of “cattle call). I would say BNL has been doing crowdsourcing, word of mouth, viral (insert name here) long before they became terms of new media popularity …I usually don’t post my own posts on other sites but in this case, given the fact I made them my first entry on the Canadian Word of Mouth Discoveries List – i’ll make the exception, have a peek
http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com/agentwildfire/2006/08/canada_word_of_.html
cheers, sean moffitt