Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter #27 w/ 👟Converse 🔫, Shooting and living in Amsterdam, Merchandising and 🤖 Cyanite.ai!
Dear readers!
Another edition here of the Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter on all thing music, tech, culture, and more tech. All killer, no filler!
Enjoy!
Marcel
1. Converse. Create Now, Create Next.
Inspiration by a next generation of artists, musicians, and creators from around the world.
Converse! The brand that might have started out as a basketball brand, but over the years has become the brand that is part of music’s inherent cultural fabric. Their iconic Chuck Taylor All-Stars have been seamlessly integrating into the uniforms of subcultures, ranging from the Ramones to Snoop Dogg. Converse continues to restate this connection with their new campaign, “Create Now, Create Next.”
For this campaign, Converse has gathered a multitude of talents from all over the creative spectrum, including rapper Vince Staples, producer Honey Dijon, nouveau punk band Turnstile, and pandemic-born Tiktok rap teen sensations A1 x J1. Each act in 6-second films shares stories about drive and passion. The various clips come together in the collective movie, shown below, which adopts the help of Grammy-winner Tyler The Creator as executive music producer of the campaign.
Hey-ho!
2. Digital Amsterdam is so real it even includes hordes of tourists.
Call of Duty gives you the chance to shoot it all up.
Realistic renditions of real-world locations have popped up in several games in the last few years. My birth city, Rotterdam, was featured in 2018's Battlefield V. Battlefield V is a first-person shooter that takes place during WW2, right before the ‘Rotterdam Blitz,’ the Nazi bombing that annihilated the entire city center. Obviously, I've never seen the city portrayed in the game as it is, but it looks quite realistic to people that did (hi, grandma!).
Call Of Duty Modern Warfare II takes place in the city where I currently live, Amsterdam, and takes realism to a whole new level. As part of the early access campaign, which began last week, players have been able to explore a slice of our fair city, faithfully recreated right down to its signature streets, narrow canals, and annoying tourist.
For a complete 4K Amsterdam Mission Gameplay Walkthrough, click here; even better, however, is the video below, which is a Modern Warfare II Amsterdam vs. Real Life Comparison, that perfectly showcases how insanely realistic the folks at Activision recreated Mokum.
3. Schaamteloos Randstedelijk is a great Podcast you should listen to right now.
Too bad for most of you… it's in Dutch.
I have a new favorite podcast! It's called "Schaamteloos Randstedelijk," which would best translate to "Shamelessly Metropolitan"? The podcast describes itself as a podcast for young people living in urban areas looking for something to hold on to.
Each week hosts journalist Doortje Smithuijsen and brand strategist Perre van den Brink hold up a mirror to young metropolites and, very humorously, themselves as they explore modern life and its apparent contradictions. We all know gentrification is bad, but we simultaneously want an oat milk pour-over coffee bar/gallery around the corner. Sustainability and the environment are of the utmost importance, but so is that two-week yoga-in-the-morning-tinder-at-night Bali break.
The overall theme of the podcast deals with the new forms of conspicuous consumption, consumption that functions as a means to showcase social status, values, and beliefs.
Wisecrack's excellent video below explains this phenomenon in English, how you and I, even though we are convinced we don't, also do this, and how Millennial conspicuous consumption has led to new standards in (brand) merchandising.
4. TL;DR Merchandising.
Nice band shirt, name three songs!
And speaking of merchandising and conspicuous consumption. According to a recent article in The Guardian, it is now merch that is saving the music industry!
Rapper Travis Scott recently sold $1M in merchandise at a show, surpassing BTS's earlier sales record. This increase in merch sales is part of a broader trend where more and more artists are making more money from their merchandise than their recordings or live appearances. As a result, music merch has become an industry in its own right, with global retail sales surpassing $3.5bn in 2018 and many companies facilitating these exploding demands.
According to the article, merch has also become fashionable. Brands including Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, and ACNE have included radically expensive versions of band T-shirts in their catwalk collections, and much to traditionalists' chagrin, Primark and Urban Outfitters sell T-shirts of Fleetwood Mac and the Ramones to young people who might like the logo more than the back catalog.
I played in bands that couldn't rely on record sales alone (and that's putting it mildly). My old band Das Oath luckily, was pretty clever with merchandise already 20 some years ago; items sold at shows include branded underwear, dildos, condoms, and cum-stained limited edition 7" records (yuk, don't ask).
Of course, the all-time kings of merchandise are KISS. According to a Billboard interview in 2017, KISS has grossed over 500M in just merchandise during their existence in articles ranging from collectible dolls and pinball machines to coffins.
The film below shows an extraordinary collection of strange KISS merchandise items, just in case anyone reading this needs inspiration for upcoming merchandisable items.
5. Say hello to your new best friend.
This Berlin start-up is creating an AI music supervisor!
Say, “Guttentag Cyanite!”
Cyanite is a Berlin-based company that does AI-music tagging based on emotions and moods and helps their clients to search music catalogs at scale. In a recent experiment, Cyanite combined OpenAI's playground, Midjourney, and their own AI to mimic what is essentially the creative part of music supervision.
Cyanite had OpenAI write movie plots that, in turn, used the created text prompts to produce images in Midjourney. They then used the same text prompts to ask the Cyanite AI to pick an accommodating soundtrack from a music library. The video below perfectly illustrates the current power of AI models to comprehend and connect complex forms of media solely based on text input.
When it comes to music for media and with 65M+ songs and counting out there, arguable, there's little to no need for music to be composed on spec. The main reason we still often do compose music for moving images is that we haven't figured out how to:
1. License music friction-free, at scale, and within budget and deadlines
and;
2. how to find the right music at scale from a catalog of 65M+ tracks.
Problem 1. is what we’re fixing at Ringo by rethinking the music procurement process and what constitutes a friction-free music license experience; what Cyanite showcases here is an excellent example of how problem 2. might be solved in the nearer-than-you-think future.
Good stuff.
Allirght!
C’est ca for this edition.
If you’re attending Web Summit next week in Lisbon, gimme a shout, we are part of the Alpha program with Ringo. Other than that, don’t forget to like and forward this to a friend, a family member, or a co-worker, and above all, don’t forget the struggle, don’t forget the streets, and keep that PMA.
Bisous!
Marcel
Excellent stuff - as per usual, Marcel. Keep up the good work - love reading / watching everything every week !
Cheers,
Fiona