I did some hunting and found more details on the Vodafone Live TBA
gigs – the most recent with the band, Razorlight.
The microsite is here: http://www.vodafonemusic.co.uk/
Vodafone certainly appear to be going for live music in a big way, even to the point of producing Vodafone Live Hour.
As the Live Hour site explains:
The Vodafone Live Hour is be the ultimate celebration of live music featuring the best bands and newest acts. From intimate acoustic gigs to stadium pumping anthems, we’ll bring the world’s stage direct to you, each and every Monday.
The Vodafone Live Hour. Monday 9pm – 10pm.
Do you know what I thought this was going to be? Sad, and geeky I know: I thought that the Vodafone chaps had worked out that they could afford to eat mobile data bandwidth between 9pm-10pm daily and that if you were a Vodafone customer, you could tune in to the Live Hour service on your mobile, via 3g.
That was just me connecting dots, which, alas, don’t appear to be there. No, instead, if you want to listen to the service, you have to go home, sit at your computer at 9pm and fire up your web browser AND use either Windows Media or Real Player to listen.
I think this is possibly taking the interest in music a little bit tooooo seriously and glancing past the reason for having a mobile in the first place. Surely Vodafone stand for mobility? Surely this is a core tenet of the Vodafone brand and service? What’s the point of making your apparent-music-obsessed target audience rush to their internet connected computer to listen to a service at a preset time……. the rest of the world is moving to on-demand service. You know – podcasting. Surely you should be encouraging handset and data usage rather than desktop computer usage? SURELY you could have at LEAST made the audio available to download in 5 min chunks to my handset’s music player? You know, try weaning me off my ipod?
I’m not making this up:
The live stream may take a few seconds to load. You’ll need Windows Media Player or Real Player to listen to this show. The Vodafone Live Hour is a live radio show. It starts at 9pm and ends at 10pm every Monday. It is not available outside of show times.
The ‘It’s not available outside of show times’ does NOT lend exclusivity. It’s not making you look good. Whatever level buzz of excitement that ‘be here or be square’ policy might generate is neutered by the fact I’m meant to be able to do anything, any time, with my Vodafone handset. So what if it’s a ‘live radio show?’ Chris Moyles produces a ‘live radio show’ and I, like hundreds of thousands of others, don’t listen to it live, instead I get the best bits on the iTunes podcast. Same with the Mark Kermode Film Reviews on Five Live and… and… [insert the other ton of live radio podcasts I listen to on demand].
How many people can honestly be bothered to listen ‘live’? I wonder.
As for other downloads, well… They’ve got exclusive TBA gig downloads. I think that’s good. They’re ringtones of the live event too. That’s pretty cool. And they’ve done it properly: they’ve sorted out the format issue. Whether it’s a Nokia or a Samsung, Motorola or Sony Ericsson, they’ve got your tone format. That is important.
I can’t work out if this is a proper, serious, we’re-not-kidding music site that Vodafone are actually wanting to make work… or whether it’s a beefed up extremely expensive microsite which is due to be switched off next quarter when the Autumn marketing strategy kicks into gear.
They’ve done a ton of work getting news stories on to the site — good, relevant news.
They’re clearly going to town with their LIVE music awards. You can vote here.
They appear to have what looks like a veritable ton of unsigned bands listed on the site. Each band has its own profile on the site (here’s an example of Nightprowler’s profile). This is good work. The band can upload music tracks and you can listen to them via a flash player. My heart sunk when I found out you couldn’t send the track to your handset. Bit of a shame.
If it was me, I’d have appointed an editorial team to publicly appear on the site and give it a bit of personality. It’s very sparse — the issue with Vodafone is that they have zero credibility in the space compared to the giants such as NME and so on. Is it a community site, aiming to provide you with a one-stop-shop guide to live music… or is it an enhanced brochure-ware site on steroids?
I applaud the effort. It’s super to see the company engaging in this method — I encourage them to go just a little bit farther. Let your editorial team go a bit mad – let them off the lead – promote a personality on the site rather than faceless and slightly clinical news stories. Turn the frontpage into a dynamic, welcoming area and dump the brochure-ware. Don’t be afraid to invest more in connecting the service to the handset even more: e.g. moblogging of the music events (put a feed of the pictures on the frontpage — for the Razorlight gig there are just six professionally shot pictures…), offer text-your-questions-to-the-band (you know, some sort of handset interaction), mobile video and heck, why not broadcast it all live on a video shortcode for people to dial into on-demand later on — or even ‘live’? If I’ve joined the site, it means I’m interested, so give me the choice to receive regular text and MMS updates about what’s going on in the music industry. Put a spin on it. Show your personality. If I wanted clinical news feeds, I’d get my music news from Reuters. I’d love to see them really, really go to town with Vodafone Live Music.
Anyway despite my geeky issues, I like the innovation and I like the effort.