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More Music Matters
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 10 May 2011
A second splurge of activity has been announced by organisers of Music Matters, the rather lame Universal-backed marketing effort to encourage the kids to only access music via legitimate sources.
As previously reported, Music Matters v1.0 had its upsides – a trust-mark that legitimate digital music providers can use to show they are licensed is sensible, and the animated videos about the music making process of various artists posted on the Music Matters website were artistically sound.
The communications around the venture, though, were somewhat shambolic, which was a shame for what was, at the end of the day, primarily a PR initiative. In fact I’m still at a bit of a loss as to what message the whole thing is trying to communicate even now.
One of last year’s animations basically told how one artist, Blind Willie Johnson, was screwed over by the music business and died penniless despite making some classic recordings during his long career, which is an odd way to persuade the kids to do business with the record industry. Others focused on why music mattered to the artists who make it, but failed to explain why music mattered to society at large, let alone why that meant people should pay for it.
Anyway, another bunch of videos have been put online, featuring the likes of Elbow, Bernard Butler and Paloma Faith, and there are plans to “ramp up online consumer engagement over the next twelve months”, whatever that means. And apparently there is a “pan-industry steering committee” who are “working together to communicate the work of the campaign effectively”. They possibly want to focus less on communicating the work of the campaign, and more on what the point of it all is.
Still – the animations are lovely – www.whymusicmatters.org
