Nonesuch Records

The Idea

Nonesuch is a record label that has an eclectic mix of artists such as kd lang, Randy Newman and Laurie Anderson. They;ve just relaunched their site and are busy promoting the new look. You’ve got artists’ news, a shop to buy the stuff (and I love the fact that when you get an album, you get a digital download – with no DRM-as well), video, tour information and best of all a great ‘radio’ which streams tracks from all their artists, a lovely way to find loads of new stuff, either through the general stream or through the theme stations.

Screenshot from site

What I think

This is just a re-launched site for a record label, not a campaign, but you can see they’ve thought long and hard about the relaunch of the site, how to tap into the changing attitudes to music and leverage what they have to provide fans the information they need. From the pitch, the goal for the redesign was to:

• better reflect the label’s branding with an improved user interface;
• to use more modern techniques to reflect how audiences consume music today;
• and to provide the artists roster with a new platform to engage with fans,

I’m pretty sure they’ve met that brief. The site was redesigned by Sisu media and they have a lovely little case study about the changes.

The blog is a great place to connect with potential purchasers but there’s little interaction there a the moment, which leads me to wonder how much going out and about the lavel is doing to find people who are talking about their artists and introduce themselves. I adore the radio channels, but on the rest of the site, I feel there’s just one click too many to find the music and sample it, it should be on the artists pages. They also seem to only sell albums, not single tracks that I can see. The ability to get 320kbps tracks, along with all the album details by download is great; the problem for me is they only ship to the US, which means I can’t just get the digital version by the look of it.

The Pitch

Despite the concerns of Jami from Sisu Media, it was a pretty good email. She’d obviously read my moans about getting pitches from mailing lists and confessed that I was on her list as well. But there’s a huge difference between getting an email that has been created with a mail merge than getting one that is slightly more handcrafted, with acknowledgement that I’m a real person instead of a media throughput machine! The release has got lots of key information and leaks, so overall, pretty good.