Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter #23 w/ 😱 Ford's 150 Horror Movie, ⚽ Rick and Morty & Adidas, 🔥 🧊Game of Thrones and some music news.
Hello readers!
Edition number 23 here of the bi-weekly newsletter on tech, music, advertising, culture, and more music, by me and myself, Marcel Alexander Wiebenga.
This edition is once again filled to the brim with highly curated, condensed must-see things from the fascinating world of music, culture, tech, and beyond!
Mucho enjoy a la playa or wherever you find this.
Marcel
1. The Ford 150 Horror Movie.
Brilliant, or all style and no story?
Developed by Wieden+Kennedy New York, Ford released a two-minute faux horror grindhouse-esque film trailer/commercial entitled "Scary Fast" for its F-150 Raptor truck. The spot comes with complementary merch, from t-shirts, to slipcovers, to back seat air-sickness bags.
I like this advert a lot for its style, its style and yes... it's style. But perhaps this is also where it ends and why this advert is an example of advertising for advertising's sake and perhaps for a select group of media-savvy, cinephiliacs and horror aficionados.
In an opinion piece on Fast Company, writer Jeff "hey-there-poser-I-wish-you-were-a" Beer perfectly sums up how this Ford's F-150 campaign uses the power of horror to get our attention but why this is almost impossible to do well.
According to Beer, horror works because of a thing called excitation transfer; after fear-induced reactions, such as accelerated heart rate, heavy breathing, and sweaty palms, we experience intense relief. This intense relief floods our brains with all sorts of feel-good chemicals. However, due to how we interact with commercials, ads can’t do that.
So brilliant and stylish or horribly self-indulgent?
Have a look below and tell me what you think.
2. Rick and Morty and Adidas
I love it when fictional characters advertise real-life products, especially when those fictional characters are Rick and Morty. The duo has been at the center of many commercials promoting a wide range of products, amongst others Carl's Jr. hamburgers, Playstation 5, to video games to pretty much everything, as you can see in the compilation below.
Now Adidas has teamed up with cynical mad scientist Rick Sanchez and his good-hearted but fretful grandson Morty Smith to bring Adidas Speedportal football boots.
In this 90-second original short animation, they experiment with the power of multidimensional speed that comes with the new boots unlocked by the likes of Mohammed Salah and my favorite star of the Dutch women's team Vivianne Miedema.
Miedema grants the football aspiring Morty the power of the striker and "speed with or without the ball" and tops it off with the power of eating Dutch cuisine like raw herring... which is essentially sashimi, so not really a superpower I guess.
Fun spot featuring fun (fictional) people.
3. Nerd Alert! Duolingo offers lessons in High Valyrian!
Ahead of the August premiere of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, language-learning app Duolingo is offering fans lessons in High Valyrian. . The app already featured the language for a while and supposedly has over 500K active learners, and recently added more than 150 new words and 700 new sentences.
High Valyrian is a constructed language, which means it was intentionally created by someone, in this case by David J. Peterson, instead of languages that emerge naturally without a single creator, like Dutch, French, or English!
In a 2019 interview, Peterson explains how he created Valerian (and Dokthrati, for that matter), why that was difficult, and why there's no word for please in Dothraki.
If you don't have time to learn a fictional language, but are as excited as I am about the House of Dragons. Trailer below and Valar morghulis.
4. Have all the songs been sung?
New music consumption is declining.
Could "old music" be jamming “new music” out of the marketplace?
According to a recently released study, the answer to that question is a definitive yes, as music streaming continues to grow, while new music consumption is shrinking significantly.
A bold statement that needs some factors to consider.
First off, a lot of the old music isn't really that old. More than a third of music consumption is of music that came out between 2017 and 2019.
Secondly, streaming data allows us to see what people listen to as opposed to what they buy. In the pre-streaming era, it was impossible to tell if you just bought a record and put it on a shelve or played it till it broke.
Third, "old music" has always been popular; the Beatles are still the biggest-selling group of the 21st century.
Having considered these factors, it's striking to see that nostalgic consumption is overwhelming the hunger for anything new as current music isn't just losing market share; it's getting statistically less popular. Some numbers:
Current music dropped 2.6% YoY in terms of on-demand audio streaming volume in H1 2022;
It also fell 10.4% YoY in terms of on-demand video streaming volume;
Yet overall on-demand audio streaming volume was up 24.7% YoY in H1 2022;
Overall on-demand video streaming volume was up by 28.1% YoY.
Summarized: While the volume of music streams continues to jump up by double digits year on year, new music is significantly losing ground.
Dive into the full report right here.
5. (I'm from the neighborhood) Strange Fruits.
A step by step guide on how to break the music industry!
A while ago, I wrote about Strange Fruits, a controversial record label-cum-playlist company that found a way to beat the Spotify algorithm. Strange fruit has millions of followers on Spotify, that rack up tens of billions of streams and gather millions of the streaming eurodollars.
Their most popular playlist is Rain Fruits Sounds. Rain Fruits Sounds contains over 2,000 "tracks" with rain noises, just over 30 seconds long, designed to maximize payouts through Spotify's pro-rata royalty model. This approach ensures they get paid more, but "real: artists with "real tracks" get paid less. An example:
Bohemian Rhapsody is just over five minutes long. Playing that track triggers one payment on Spotify; 30-second Fruits Music Rain Tracks trigger ten payments in those 5 minutes.
In the Music Business Worldwide Podcast episode below, Tim Ingham interviews the founder of Strange Fruits, 25 years old Dutchmen Stef Van Vugt. Stef deep dives into the history story of Strange Fruits, his operation that approximately spends 20M annually in digital marketing, accusations that his business model hurts 'real' artists, the 'gaming' of streaming playlists, and what he thinks about a shift to 'user-centric' licensing on streaming platforms. Especially his answer to the latter question might be surprising.
I love me a good pirate/rule breaker/system shaker. Steff van Vugt showcases verbally in this interview and through his companies that the streaming system is broken and needs fixing.
Hurrah to that, and highly recommended listening below.
Thanks once again for making it down here and for the feedback I get from you. It is nice to know this is being enjoyed; this list has grown to almost 3000 subscribers.
I’m taking a short summer break, but will be back sometime in September.
Enjoy summer and bisous!
Marcel