5 Most Viewed Articles on the Delvinia Link Pool: Dec 20 – Dec 26

• User Expectations with Mobile Apps – Catching Up With Effective UI
  UX Booth
• Puma Steps Up In-Store Experience With IPad Concept
  Advertising Age
• The New Rock-Star Paradigm: Succeeding in the music business isn’t just about selling albums anymore
  Wall Street Journal
• iPad Ads Engage Magazine Readers
  eMarketer
• 10 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year – 2010
  Flowing Data

Click here to see what links we’re sharing this week.

Billboard Introduces the Social 50 Music Chart

Last week the venerable music trade magazine Billboard debuted its new Social 50 chart. The introduction of the Social 50 goes to prove how important the internet has become to marketing music artists. With artists now likely to break first on YouTube rather than music television or radio, it’s become vital to look beyond mainstream media sources to gauge the popularity of musicians and their music.

The chart is created by social music tracking service Next Big Sound, which tracks an artists’ increases in friends, fans and followers along with page views and plays on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and iLike. The chart saw Rihanna at the top spot in its first week followed by Justin Beber, Eminem, Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj.

Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s director of charts said on the company’s website, “The Social 50 provides a weekly snapshot of artists with whom music fans engage with the most in the social arena, which in today’s world is a significant validation of their investment in an act.”

Another Chapter in the history of Billboard

This latest move by Billboard is just another chapter in its long history of charting the entertainment industry. Beginning in 1894 as a trade paper for the bill posting industry, it quickly moved into reporting the circus, carnival, vaudeville and live entertainment industry, as well as motion pictures in 1909 and then radio in 1920.

Billboard is most famous for its Hot 10o music chart which were first published in 1958 combining single sales and radio airplay. The Hot 1oo and other genre charts served as the weekly bible for radio music programmers to create their playlists.  The Hot 1oo’s first brush with digital came in 2005 when it first included digital downloads and soon after in 2007 it included streamed and on-demand music. The Social 50 is just another page in the evolution of tracking and reporting the popularity of media.

Big Champagne and the Ultimate Chart

Another company monitoring music on the internet is Big Champagne. It publishes the Ultimate Chart, which top 10 bears more than a passing resemblance to Billboard’s Hot 100. Big Champagne too monitors social media sites as well as P2P, and file sharing sites around the world, pulling in real time data that can show geographically how an artist is breaking. This can be extremely helpful to the marketing teams as they can see the results of their promotional efforts immediately.

What sources do you use to discover and enjoy music?

Arcade Fire, The Wilderness Downtown & Transmedia Storytelling

One of the most inspired and compelling web experiences we have seen recently launched on Monday, a collaboration between Google, filmmaker Chris Milk and Montreal mega-indie band Arcade Fire.

This is not the first time we’ve seen Arcade Fire push the envelope of what a music video should be. In 2007, the band released a short interactive video for the title track of their second album Neon Bible on their bonlineb.com site. The viewer could click to control what Win Butler did with hands, or click on his face to reveal the song’s lyrics.

The Wilderness Downtown Experience

The latest interactive Arcade Fire project ‘The Wilderness Downtown‘ described by Google as a “Chrome Experience’, features the song ‘We Used to Wait’ from their new album Suburbs. The lyrics of the song refer back to the days before instant communications when we used to write letters and the anticipation of waiting for them to be delivered. The experiment was built using the latest open web technologies including HTML5, video, audio and canvas. The details of how each technology was used in the project are listed on the Chrome Experiments site.

The experience begins by entering the street address of your childhood home.  Upon launch we see a browser pane open with a child running down a suburban street. Soon, other windows begin to open and we see flocks of animated birds, a Google Maps satellite view and rotating Street View images appear based on the address chosen. I’ve watched this with several friends over the week, and have seen the smiles appear on their faces as they point out the house they grew up in. Its inspiring to see a project on the web generate such emotional response.

One of the most poignant moments happens when they viewer is invited to write a postcard to their childhood selves. After drawing the message with your cursor, the animated birds fly in to roost on the type before flying off into another one of the panes. The song climaxes with animated trees exploding into view on the paved streets within the Street View image captures.

The experience continues by ‘Sending your Postcard Downtown’. The digital postcard has a unique URL that the user is asked to bookmark, this is where they will receive digital postcards from other users. The postcards will also be used as live concert visuals during Arcade Fire’s tour. Some postcards will be made into printed cards on special paper that contains birch tree seeds and distributed at concerts. Plant the cards and a tree grows.

Transmedia Experiences

Its inspiring to see artists such as Arcade Fire break out of the norm and expand upon the idea of what a promotional video is, and to take advantage of technologies to tell a compelling story. We can expect to see much more projects like this is the future, involving combinations of the real-world, web, mobile, augmented reality and social media. The only limits are the artist’s imagination, whether than artist be a musician, visual artist, filmmaker or programmer. The term “transmedia” has been adopted to describe these experiences, as stories are presented across a number of media platforms with multiple paths, entry and exit points available to the viewer.

Digital Touchpoints & the Customer Experience

These transmedia experiences can be compared in scope to the digital customer experience world in which Delvinia operates. The customer’s story with an organization or brand can evolve in any number of ways. What is key is that the digital and ‘real-life’ touchpoints provide a positive experience for the customer whether they are on your website, Facebook page, on the phone to your call-center or walking into a physical storefront. Create a compelling and positive story for your customer to tell.