Ride the Sonic Branding Wave

Here's something I have learned.

The mark of a great salesperson is not that they are great listeners or smooth operators or have a contacts list as long as your arm (though these are all useful). The true sign of a great salesperson is that that can spot a wave coming (at approximately the right moment) and ride it for as long as it is worth riding.

Selling is super-super easy when you have a product or service to sell that people actually want. Understanding this - and letting this principal guide you - will allow anyone to be great salesperson. Trouble is, passion, emotion, sunk costs and a general lack of ability to 'smell the cheese' often get in the way of a person's ability to think clearly: Do people want what I am selling? If not, how can I change what I am selling so they will want it.

So much sales training is based upon techniques for changing the minds of the buyers - to get them to want your product. I'm afraid that is all bull***t. You can't work that way and have long term success - unless you want to turn into this.

The point of this post?

For the first time since I started in sonic branding I can say without a hint

of BS that the market finally wants what I have to sell.

Here comes the wave...get yourself a board.

Finally...a post about sonic branding...sort of...

So I spent last week in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, at the second Global Multi-Sensory Branding Forum. Here's a little of what I learned:

1. VERY few organisations have created clear, successful and recognisable multi-sensory platforms for their brands

2. When people talk multi-sensory, most of them are actually selling 'olfactory' branding - which is fine but very hard to successfully activate

3. The word (brand) 'activation' is only slightly less over-used and under-defined than the word (brand) 'experience'. Both have simply become short-hand for 'not a TV Commercial'

4. When a most honourable Chinese host pours a bottle of brandy for some Gom Bui action, even a battle-hardened 38 year old sonic brander can turn into a vomiting idiot.

Many thanks to the hosts of the event. Next year in Shanghai!

Born To Lose

Whilst parenting this weekend, it occurred to me that my oldest son is an appalling loser. By which I mean that he HATES losing.

Full disclosure: He is 5. I had two running races with him. I won the first because he ran to the wrong tree. Because he was upset we had a second race and he had a big head start. To my shame, I sprinted as fast as I could and beat him. He was beside himself. But hey, the kid's gotta learn.

As with all things father and son-ly, this got me thinking. Is my son a bad loser because I am? Or can I blame his mother?

After literally minutes of self-analysis, I figured out that I am a bad loser but not in the crying and stomping around way. Even worse I have realised that I am a bad winner but again not in a conventional 'in your face loser!' kind of way.

Here's the deal:

I love the competition. Running races, pitches, thought leadership arms races in sonic branding...I love to compete. I do like to win. It is nice to have the 'champagne moment' but my problem is that as soon as the bubbles have been drunk I am thinking about the next race. The last was nothing - the next is everything. So winning is just a moment - one spark in time followed by an instant yearning for the next race.

And here's the real kicker. Losing is not just a moment - a fragment in time - losing stays with me for months, years, decades. I carry my failures with me everywhere I go. They are enduring, they are the permanent scars of a life spent competing.

It is my fear of losing that really drives me - the knowledge that a slip-up will last forever is naturally stronger than a desire to sip-up the champagne.

I will try to teach my kids to enjoy the wins little longer, forget the losses a little quicker. I will also seek their forgiveness as it seems that I have no deniability at all when it comes to passing on poor character traits. Sorry boys.

It's NOT a post about sonic branding...

I can't help it. I may be a sonic branding guy but what really interests me these days is the business rather than the creativity; I'm in it for the deal - not just for the music; I want to make a difference - not just make some noise.

My strategy? It's simple.

Here it is. No lie - no bullshit - I am really working this. It is simple, not particularly original and I won't explain it. It is:

Good things with (or for) good people.

If you catch me doing rubbish things for bad people, feel free to arrange some kind of intervention.

Corporate Decision Making and Honey Bees

Music is perceived and consumed inside our brains and nobody knows if how you or I hear a single piece of music is consistent.

We know for certain that listening to music lights up huge areas of our brains - but that the patterns discernible through investigations with EEGs are different for different people. We also know that music and memory are inextricably linked - so we can deduce that when I hear a piece of music, particularly if I have heard it before, then my personal memories of when, where and how I first heard it will form a part of my understanding of it today.

So how can marketing people and corporations ever agree on a piece of music for a commercial or as part of their brand identity when in reality, they are all hearing and perceiving that single piece of music differently?

Over the years, I've seen a few patterns emerge in how decisions get made in this most subjective of areas. Here is one of them. I'll save others for a rainy day...

The Honey Bee Decision

Honey bees are clever little social creatures and the way they communicate with each other shows us one way corporations make decisions (on anything really but I'll focus on music).

In searching out new flowery hunting grounds senior bees are sent out into the world to do some fact finding. When each bee returns to the hive, it communicates the quality of the blooms it has discovered by doing a dance. So what you get after a major exploration day is a lot of bees, all dancing furiously in order to tell the rest of the bees that their discovery is worth a visit. Here's the clever and simple bit. The hive will only follow the bee that does the most elaborate and longest dance. In other words, the bee that bee-lieves (see what I did there?) the most in its own discovery will dance with more passion and fervent energy than any other and as a consequence, other bees will follow it to the flower-bed it is championing.

Over the years I have seen the bee dance in action. In corporations where passion and belief are usually in scarce supply, if one person - no matter their seniority in a group - is willing to jump up and down and wave their arms about for long enough they will often end up getting their own way. Others will follow simply because they don't have the personal belief or stamina to champion their own choices in the face of the long dance. The group ends up making a decision because of the conviction, confidence and willingness to stand up and be counted of a single member of the team.

Now for the bad news. In my experience, the person willing to do the dance is hardly ever the person championing the best option for the corporation - they usually champion the best option only for themselves. Where bees have no ego, unfortunately advertising and marketing people do. My advice? Beware the bee - and don't follow the dancer.

NB Agencies (like mine) are founded on their abilities to identify and select strategies for getting subjective work agreed and signed off by large groups. Do you feel used? Have I ever done the bee dance? Are all questions rhetorical?

DJ

The Half-Life of a Papadum

In this, my second (and probably last) food-based business lesson, I will investigate the strange thing about popadums.

A papadum is a thin, crispy Indian flatbread that goes well with a whole range of Indian chutneys and a pint of Kingfisher. But the really interesting thing about a papadum (and this can only be discovered through close ethnographic studies in Indian restaurants) is that a papdum has a half-life.

Nobody at the table ever takes more than half of a papadum. They start off about the size of a dinner plate - before you smash them into pieces and people start eating. For a while everyone gorges but at some point - usually towards the end of the popadum course - you get down to just one piece left in the basket. This is where the strange psychology of the popadum half-life starts to occur.

No matter how small that single piece gets - with people breaking bits off for a nibble - nobody EVER takes more than half of it. To take more than half would be greedy, uncaring and unsharing. Other diners would be resentful. It's like the single piece of popadum is screaming to stay alive - fighting for its life - refusing to give up until it is too small to be divided again (about the size of a large coin) and it is either left alone completely or some late-comer to the table eats it out of their own desperation and hunger.

The number of interesting business ideas that I've learned from the half-life of the popadum are almost as numerous as the choice of chutneys (4) at my local Balti:

1. Get stuck in early. You are entitled to half a piece - no matter how large the papadum starts out. The early grab gets you a massive amount of value for your half.

2. Don't leave it late. Come into the papadum market at the end at your either get a tiny half - or you end up with the scrap that's had everyone's fingers on it.

3. When you are trying to sell a proposition, double up what you really want to sell because the half-life principals apply. People will almost always bite off about half of what you can do.

Now it's your turn.

You know how you can only fold a piece of paper in half 8 times - no matter how large it started out? I wonder how many times a papadum can be halved before you get to the fingery end-piece. Answers on a postcard please.

Cinnamon Pretzel or Pointy Thing?

These delightful eatables are called cinnamon pretzels. They are from Louis' Hungarian Confectionery in Hampstead, North-West London.

I pass hundreds of cafes and delicatessens, tea-rooms and restaurants on my way home from work every week but once a week, usually on a Friday, I make a point to stop on my journey, go to Louis' Hungarian Confectionery and buy these frankly AWESOME pretzels. I usually buy myself a coffee too. And sometimes something else to eat.

Louis' has been running for nearly 50 years and I put that longevity down to these pretzels. I have never seen them anywhere else, they are ridiculously tasty and they are always the same.

Do I need to spell out why this is interesting?

First up - these pretzels are a point of difference for Louis'. They are the one thing Louis' do better than anyone else - and frankly the coffee is pretty poor but I drink it anyway.

Secondly, these pretzels make my life a little bit more enjoyable. They are a positive force for happiness and Louis' provides them. This is why I love Louis'.

Lastly, they are consistently good, have never let me down (except for when they are sold out) and so I have come to trust them - these inanimate sugar/cinnamon cakey things are like old friends.

So I'm reminded of how my business needs to run: We only really need to be known in the market for one thing - and as long as that thing delivers real benefits and is consistently delivered we should continue to be successful. This 'one thing' becomes what I've heard call a 'pointy thing'; the thing that allows a service business like a sonic branding agency to get through the door of a big corporation - even when they already have vast rosters of general marketing agencies.

Of course, once you have made it through the door, your strategy can change - you can sell coffee and sandwiches - but try selling your average coffee without having a cinnamon pretzel to bring in the customers...it's just not going to happen.

The best sonic branding agencies have cinnamon pretzels; maybe logo design or retail sound design, vocal branding or device sounds. The companies that work out what their pointy things are and concentrate to make them as good as they can possibly be are the ones who will share in the enormous growth of the industry over the next few years. My personal challenge? I like almond danish. And lemon drizzle cake. And pain au chocolat. And Brioche. And tiramisu.

Chief Sonic Officer

A little future gazing...

It's the 28th June 2020 and in response to the massive surge in music-based marketing and sonic branding initiatives around their global businesses P&G have just appointed their first Chief Sonics Officer. In a press release today, Ashton Kutcher, the FMCG giant's Chief Marketing Officer stated:

"We have been using music as a branding and marketing platform since the dawn of the broadcast age and though for decades our initiatives were handled within the broader marketing mix, it has become clear over the past decade that music and sound are too powerful to be left to chance within advertising or other marcomms activities."

Incoming CSO Damon Albarn, who was known as a multi-million selling popular music writer and performer of Blur and Gorillas, takes up his role based in P&G's Global HQ in Shanghai in September. "10 years ago I would never have dreamed of a job like this but the music industry has changed beyond recognition. When the global market in recorded music died, writers and performers were left with two options; go on the road as a live performer or seek patronage from brands to earn the right to keep creating music.

Musicians have always been funded this way; 500 years ago it was the Church that paid, then it was Royalty, then there was the brief period in the 20th Century when mass, popular music took hold and finally it has come down to the Church of FMCGs to provide the financial backing musicians need.

This appointment follows the recent appointment of Justin Bieber as CSO of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Bieber said "there used to be a joke: Q. what's the difference between a musician and KFC bargain bucket? A. a KFC bargain bucket can feed a family of four! How oddly circular that joke now seems."

DJ

1-9-90

Maybe I am the last to know about it but the number sequence above seems to be pretty famous, particularly among social media connoisseurs.

Never one to avoid lifting a concept from somewhere and seeing how it applies to sonic branding, I have been thinking about where sonic branding is on the 1-9-90 scale.

To explain where this number sequence comes from...it was first applied to the web in which it is a general rule that 1% of people contribute content, 9% edit, amend or add to the content and 90% of people simply consumer content without contributing. So how can this apply to sonic branding?

Well, I am constantly trying to work out where my industry sits in terms of maturity. It has to be said, I mainly do this when I am preparing financial forecasts. Where are we today, what will demand look like tomorrow?

When I started out in sonic branding, I was the '1'. This was not a pleasant experience. Lots of mistakes made, no real model to follow, all the pressure to create the rules as I went along. I think it took about 10 years for the industry to move properly into the '9'. and that is where I believe we are today: there are a number of very experienced practitioners, all contributing to the global understanding of the industry and doing interesting work.

For some time I have been likening the current maturity level of sonic branding to that of visual branding c. 1960 when I would say it was going through its '9' period. A few smart people had the experience of creating logos and though it was still broadly speaking a cottage industry full of artisans and practitioners of IP arbitrage, it was a growth industry - albeit relatively slow growth.

Today, visual branding is a science and is measured and accounted. It is a mature industry with 100s of experienced and competitive practitioners. The maturation took place in the 1980s and early 1990s when branding became something that the whole world knew about. It emphatically entered it '90' phase. It took visual branding 25 or so years. Will it take sonic branding that long?

My bank hopes it will happen more quickly than that - and I remember when I first met Julian Treasure in 2003 (a fellow member of the gang of '9') he said that sonic branding would be 'massive in 10 years'. I am starting to believe he may be right. The speed of change and growth at the moment is astonishing and the next 3 years may well see the industry boom. If it does, those of us in the '9' (and it is not too late to join, I think) will have had the honour of having creating a new branding paradigm and even if this industry never creates a sonic branding billionaire, at least we'll have contributed.

My conclusion on the 1-9-90? Best not to be the 1, better to be the 9, fingers crossed that the other 90 show up!

Shanghai, no surprise

Back from trip to Shanghai where I got a glimpse into the future of the sonic branding industry in China. It was only a glimpse though. Whirlwind trip!

I was very impressed with the place and with the desire of those I met to listen and learn. There is a humble desire to find out how we do things in the West and a less humble ambition to absorb and overtake our creative industries - and do it all locally with local people.

I don't blame them for their ambition, nor do I really see the best innovation businesses in the West having any problems at all staying competitive...but China (Asia in general?) will eat the breakfast of any industry that fails to constantly update their offering. They have proved time and time again the ability to imitate (initially with inferior quality) but then emulate and quickly supersede Western industry.

Fortunately, sonic branding is still an innovation industry. I liken our position today to that of the visual branding world in the 1960s...lots of brands aware of it, very few with any working knowledge of it and a tiny smattering of evangelists running around the world spreading the word. The majority of experience is in Western Europe and North America. China can't replicate that any time soon so China simply isn't a threat to Western sonic branding agencies. If it's not a threat then it must be an opportunity right? Well, yes. But a qualified one.

Here's the equation. If you want to discuss it, let me know:

2.6billion ears + sonic branding - high cost of sales (for a Western business) + innovative revenue model = fame (for Chinese brands) + fortune (for Western business) - Intellectual Property

Enjoy that one.

DJ

Cannes You Back That Up?

Last month I was fortunate enough to spend a week on my company's boat at the Cannes Film Festival. Now, glamour and glitz aside this is a pretty big event in the annual calendar of Cutting Edge as the movie industry is our centre of gravity so it wasn't all champagne and parties; some proper work gets done on the boat.

That said (and though I personally met some very nice, hard-working people) there was a slight whiff of the fake and phony. Reading Kevin Jackson's blog the other day reminded me of Cannes and how it seems full of people pretending to be things, in the hope that one day the pretence might become real.

I lost count of how many actors and producers, development executives, packagers, executive producers and writers I met. Some of them were the real deal - the vast majority were anything but. It is an old joke that anyone can be a producer - all they have to produce is a business card!

To my mind, you are not anything unless you can earn a living doing it. Actors may claim to be actors but if they are incapable of landing a role then why are the deluding themselves?As for Executive Producers...If all it means is that you fund your own activities in the movie business then why not go spend your money on something more worthwhile than a trip to Cannes and a lot of hot air? Buy a camera? Write a script maybe? If you are any good then the money will find you.

But of course, the movie business is not the only one where blaggers pretend to be what they are not. Sonic Branding has seen its own explosion of blaggers; people jumping on the bandwagon without taking the time and effort to know what they are doing. This only damages the industry - every client who is sold a half-baked solution is lost to us for many years. So I urge anyone who wants to be in the sonic branding game to first do your time (and I think the 10,000 hour rule applies).

Read the books, then work in music, sound design, branding or advertising. Do this for a long time. Listen ALOT. Once you understand how the whole relationship between a brand and its audience works, once you know music theory and have an understanding of consumer psychology, then you can call yourself a sonic brander...until that point how about saying 'I am learning about sonic branding'.

I'm still learning and I've been doing this longer than anybody!

Right, I'm off to pursue my career as an F1 racing driver. Did I not mention that is my real job? Of course, I've never actually sat in a car but...

My Friend Jack

Today I visited the London offices of Jack Morton Worldwide. They are one of the very best experiential agencies around and I just wanted to post a few quick observations. Full disclosure: I would love to work with them - they are a good bunch of smart, friendly people. New business goals aside however:

1. JMW is a business that undertakes the most complex tasks in brand marketing. They design and create immersive brand experiences: they put brands in live spaces, let people feel them, push and pull them around and test them. They demand of their audiences that they are engaged physically and emotionally. What other agencies even try this?

2. For a business that has used music for many years as a part of the brand experience, it is amazing how poorly the music industry has served them. There has been no focus on the creation of long term assets, no unifying processes or standardised pricing. Why does the music industry think it is so special as to avoid such megatrends as ROI measurement and industrialisation?

3. If more clients really understood the potential that the brand experience agency offers, they would fire their ad agencies today and divert the budget. The new paradigm; from passive consumption of messages to active participation in a brand's purpose is too compelling to resist!

DJ

Sonic Branding 2.1

This looks like the next in a series...where I am going to slowly tease and reveal how the next gen of sonic branding businesses need to structure themselves to achieve success.

Now, I am not so arrogant as to believe I know everything about everything but I do believe I have specific role in this industry - that is to make all the mistakes first, spot the patterns and help lead us all to a more mature, open and successful future as an industry.

As an aside, I am sorry I was not able to attend the first industry gathering that the IABA put together last year. I hope that the success of the event means there will be another gathering this year. Anyway...

Today's nugget of information, which will join with other nuggets in weeks to come and build into a handy model for the industry:

Composers, musicians and sound designers are all free spirits and should be treated as such. Do not try to standardise, homogenise, industrialise or centralise your relationships as a sonic branding business with the 'talent'. What you can do is use the wonders of the Internet to lower your transaction costs with 'talent' and create what my friend Ian Thomas would call a 'value web'.

It is possible to automate collaborative working among musicians, composers etc (anyone remember the YouTube Orchestra or Bowie's early experiments?) and my business is currently successfully running a globally distributed roster of 'talent' delivering single client solutions via online platforms. We do this without forcing single processes on the talent but by giving them the tools to operate iteratively, in their own time but towards a single goal.

To conclude: Talent cannot be homogenised, nor can the creative processbe standardised but it can all be targeted effectively at unified goals and deliver against the objectives of a sonic branding business.

Subtext: You may have noticed the 'commas' around 'talent'. These are here to signify that just because these people call themselves talent does not mean that they are the only talented people in the business. I value a talented accountant as much as a sound designer.

Subtext II: The implication of this view of 'talent' as an unwieldy and non-standard group of individuals is that you should never, under any circumstances, look to take on 'talent' on an employee basis. I have tried it, occasionally with success but it never works out long term for the business or the individual. Much better to leave the 'talent' freelance/contract. There you go, I have just saved the sonic branders thou$and$ and the 'talent' endless angst at being corporate slaves.

More to come...

Sonic Branding 2.0

So here is a clue to what we are up to at Cutting Edge. And though full disclosure on this blog is never going to happen, I do feel that it is time to share.

There are some major trends in the world of sonic branding that I have been noticing over the last 11 years (yes, it is that long since I founded my first agency) and each of these is reaching an interesting point at just about the same time. Let me expand, one trend at a time:

1. More audio-enabled touchpoints

When I started out, we had TV, radio, cinema and some music-on-hold as our major ways to use sound to affect a brand audience.

Now? Well every retailer puts a proper sound system in, every person you meet owns a digital media device (iPod or whatever) every brand has a website and delivers rich media content. It's a rich playground for the sonic brander.

2. Less power concentration in ad agencies

Don't get me wrong. I support the ad agency model and don't agree with those who feel it is doomed. Big, creative hubs will always be relevant to big, corporate entities. That said, a little less focus on the 30" TV spot as the flagship medium for brand communications has allowed sonic branding to gain traction where none would have been possible 10 years ago.

3. An outward-looking music industry

So they are not 100% there yet but they are getting better. When we all turned off the tap of cash to the record companies a few years ago some of them (and more and more now) realized that they had to look elsewhere (brands?) for revenues and opportunities. Would any major label have seriously talked sonics a few years ago? I was derided in 2000, in 2010 there is a desire (if not yet a clamour) to understand what this is all about.

4. Maturity in the sonics industry

Those of us who have made it this far are just about figuring the right business model. It's not online, it's not pure consultancy, nor simply tactical execution of a client's needs. The model for sonic branding splits into 3 parts...and they will be the subject of my next post!

Meanwhile, I am interested in hearing from anyone out there who wants to join Cutting Edge in London or New York. I'm still hiring!

DJ

Lame excuse for posting porn

Which brands do the best job when it comes to their relationship with their audience's ears?

Two of the biggest and boldest of them all spring to mind - Disney and Coke. Now, neither of these is remotely typical but both have lessons for the aspiring sonic brander. This is clearly not the place to go into depth but how about this for an anecdote, some nostalgia and a good excuse to show some soft porn:

1989. Robin Beck sings the theme tune to a new Coke ad. The song is subsequently released and is a top 10 hit everywhere the ad has played. Hear it here.

2010. I am in the gym, on a running machine. Inexplicably (and were I not such a geek I would never have worked out why) I feel the need to drink a Coke. The reason is because this track is now on hourly rotation in my gym.

Ignore the dodgy videos. The simple truth is that the 17 year old Daniel had 'First Time' by Robin Beck planted in his mind forever...and the subliminal effect is still working 20 or so years later.

Coupled with my fetish for ripping off my shirt every time I hear Eta James, I think Coke owns far too much real estate inside my brain.

Defining Sonic Branding

I've been here before. I started 'defining' sonic branding back in 1998, have contributed to dictionaries, wrote a book and yet...here I am still refining what it is.

This is my current definition. It reflects my 2010 mindset in that:

1. It is short - just like our attention spans

2. It is plain language - I've simply had enough of corporate, middle-management, 3 letter acronym, bullshit-laden marketing speak

3. It is easy to understand - so everyone (you included) can get a grip on this stuff without having to engage too much of your brain. Heaven knows, there is too much information out there - I don't want to pollute your heads.

So here it is:

Sonic branding is: A brand's relationship with its audiences through their ears

If you have a better definition (and you may well have) let me know via Twitter @DanielMJackson

The Father of Sonic Branding

This week's teaser:

Name the owner of this dog?

Now think for a little while about the understanding that this dog's owner brought to the world in general and its implications for sonic branding?

Answers on a Tweet please...@danielmjackson

NOT Sonic branding

Today a client asked me if I thought that the Amy Winehouse/Fred Perry tie-up constitutes good sonic branding? Though the answer to this question is easy (the association may be many things but it is not sonic branding) the fact that the question was posed in the first place is more interesting.

What is the real relationship between an artist, their music and a brand? How can we separate an artist 's individual brand from the music they create and which is of greatest value when aligning with a 'corporate' brand?

Though so many music choices are made according to their popularity, artists are the least important component in the sonic branding mix.

At the top of the hierarchy is the corporate brand - they monetize the whole transaction through their clients, they pay the bills. Understanding the business of the brand - how it makes profits from its customer transactions - is the primary task in sonic branding.

Next in line comes the music. The definition of the notes on the page - and the ownership of them - defines how successful the exercise will be...this is a hits business same as any other in entertainment (a nuance for another day).

Last in line is the artist. They are cheap(ish), largely expendable and (usually) only of short term value - can you name a long term artist/brand association?

Where artists work well in a sonic branding sense are launches and PR - reference Justin Timberlake for McDs or U2 for iTunes - but don't look for long term dividends from artist involvement...they probably won't materialise.

So unless Amy starts writing music for Fred Perry (and why not?), as well as designing clothes, we can all dismiss this as just another celeb / fashion tie up with a short shelf life and nothing whatsoever to do with sonic branding. Sorry for wasting your time.

Free music anyone?

So maybe I shouldn't blog twice in a day - but what can I do? I have just had an interesting thought...

At Cutting Edge, we have been grappling with our client's desires to have 'free' music for their websites. What are the options? How do we keep our clients happy but still honor the fact that we work in a world of licensing, royalties and ownership? We are PRS members, after all.

It is pretty easy to go down the unsigned route. Grab the music of some youngster - ready to be exploited (in the nicest way) but is there another way?

Maybe it is here http://www.publicdomain2ten.com/

There has to be an amazing opportunity right now in music that is going public domain. I haven't done all the homework yet - how long is copyright of masters and publishing? - but I do know that some of the recordings on this site are pretty usable (in terms of audio quality and musicality). And every passing year brings a greater volume of works into public domain.

Food for thought...or is this just a can of worms?

Rage Against The Machine

I spent the last ten years building a sample library, buying more and more powerful computers and selling my clients on the idea that you can make music more easily, more cheaply and more creatively with one man and his machines rather than with live musicians.

Now I think I was wrong.

I have just seen the creative director of Cutting Edge hold a sonic branding session with three musicians in a studio + a client. What came out of the session was an organically created piece of work that everyone contributed to, has a vested interest in and has more soul than anything we have every come up with using the machines.

Having espoused a mechanised approach to music creation I am now firmly flip-flopping into the camp of those who believe the real magic happens when talented people get together in a room and play their instruments, use their ears to judge what they hear and develop iteratively.

I am sure there are some parallels to be drawn from the world of software development; SCRUM methodologies versus Waterfall and all that but I'll leave that for another day (and another book?)

For now, I just wanted to say that musicians are not the enemy of sonic branding - just the opposite. Time for the people to rise up against the machines!