MULTIMEDIA CASE STUDY 3 - CROWFLY MUSIC

Crowfly Music is a newly formed interactive content developer. The company launched in the summer of 2005 with "Crowfly Live", an unique service which records live concerts and provides online digital downloads within 24 - 36 hours after the live event.

After creating a logo, corporate identity and presentation files, Logic House Media developed the corporate Crowfly Music website using a full screen Flash interface.

World renowned guitar hero, Grammy winner and former frontman
for "Dire Straights" Mark Knopfler was Crowfly Live's first client. His new album "Shangri-La" would be followed by a world tour supporting the album. Grammy winning producer Chuck Ainley put together a compact recording system for extremely efficient integration into the tour's live recording system and mixed the recorded performance afterwards, making the concert available with 36 hours following.

Logic House Media developed an entire suite of electronic and print pieces for promoting the individual concert events and concert downloads including an eCard campaign, postcards, 4-color event handouts and a unique promotional package (shown at right) consisting of a cardboard sleeve CD package containing a blank CDR and simple after-concert instructions on how to download the concert directly from Mark's official site.

Mark Knopfler is very much an artist and is rightfully cautious with "selling things" from the stage and and overemphasizing commerce in his promotional efforts. Logic House Media developed a Flash banner to be used on Mark's official website (as well as many others) which would take the user from his site to a Crowfly Music "transition page".

The transition page accomplished several things:

• It provided a non-invasive solution for easy integration into an existing site. In Mark's case, like most others, artists already have a website, complete with their own branding, functionality and programming. The vital information on the downloads would be hosted on Crowfly's end and all the artist's webmaster would need to do is add a banner link to their site.

• In most cases the transition page provided a more immersive interface than the artists' own site. Logic House Media carefully mimicked (reverse engineered) the look and feel of the client's official site and expanded it into a full-screen, large imagery presentation. By using simple Flash animation and client controlled dynamic text, the user encountered a much more involved experience.

• The transition page also provided tour information, contest and giveaway promotions, listen-only preview of songs, and corporate sponsorship advertising in "presentation format" rather than a static website.

    

From the transition page, the user jumps to a download point-of-sale site to purchase the concerts. In Mark Knopfler's case, the concerts were only offered in their entirety as a "double album" package. The downloads were wrapped in DRM (digital rights management) codec and sold through a custom "Shangri-La" Passalong music store which Logic House Media provided art and direction for.

In addition to Mark Knopfler's concert downloads, Logic House Media developed Crowfly Music's "Nashville Star" contestant download transition page. USA Network's popular country music TV show Nashville Star allows contestants to perform in front of a live television audience while being critiqued by "judges". Each week a performer is voted off. Crowfly Live recorded each weeks performance and made the downloads available immediately following each episode, which was an industry first. The Nashville Star transition page's slideshow started with each week's winner and cycle through the other contestants indicated the song they performed that episode. Additionally, a scrolling list of prior weeks performances helped promote past contestants downloads.