BY ADAM BLUMENTHAL, Curious Sense

Technology and innovation have forever altered the relationship that consumers have to content and have reduced the control that the music industry wields over how music is heard and bought.

With such easy access to immeasurable volumes of music online, consumers place less value on the traditional recorded music product than they used to. It may not seem fun now, but it will be. While new ways to access and experience content are the causes of the industry’s woes, they also present lucrative opportunities.

Record labels have huge catalogs of timeless recordings and continue to produce new material beloved by music fans worldwide. They just need to present their music differently. So how to start?

Two years ago, after spending many years as a digital strategist and producer at ad agencies working with global brands, I started designing new digital entertainment products with record labels and artist managers.

At great ad agencies, an R&D spirit flows relentlessly. They’re on fire with great, smart ideas and they manage the development process well: research, analyze, brainstorm, design, test, build, launch, repeat.

But I’m not seeing much of the R&D spirit in the music industry. Let’s light that fire.

When digital and online media emerged as a primary communications channel and fragmented the entertainment market, advertising strategists redoubled their efforts to identify consumers most likely to buy their products. We learned who they are, where they spend their time and what they like. The new media world necessitated a new connection strategy. Advertisers started having conversations with consumers and built experiences that bridged the numerous media channels where consumers spent their time.

Fostering conversations reflects the participatory nature of the new media environment. The experiences are multimedia, multi-channel, often entertaining encounters where the value, in part, is in the good feeling consumers get from engaging with the experience ¬- even if it is a well-disguised ad.

In order to create new value around music products, we need product innovation — new ways to experience music that fulfill the media consumption expectations of a 21st century consumer. First, master the social Web. If you want to catch-up with all the customers that stopped buying your stuff, half a billion people are over on Facebook, and one in five is playing games there. About 70 million people a month — mostly adults — play the game Farmville. I’d love to show you how many would play a game called “Margaritaville.”

Next, start a conversation with your audience. In the music business, “360 deals” refer to single companies consolidating services and getting a piece of every slice of artist revenue. In advertising, the 360-degree concept describes the multi-channel communications eco-system where you connect with your audience. The idea is to start a conversation with the consumer in any one channel and continue it across all the channels where the consumer encounters your product. Then move from having a conversation with a consumer to building a relationship.

A 360-degree deal for consumers is the experience through which you cultivate the relationship, and into which you integrate new types of products, for example music video games or online virtual concerts.

The 21st Century Fans loves the richness of these multi-dimensional encounters: an email to fans sends them to a Web site promoting a new album. The site hosts a fee-based online game designed around the album. The game connects to the band’s Facebook page, where visitors can enter a contest to win concert tickets and where a sense of community is fostered. Marketing messages and calls-to-action are seamlessly integrated.

Offer consumers new ways to interact with the music they love, and they’ll have a new reason to pay for it. This is where it gets lucrative: new product types create new business models and bring new revenue sources. Use the new product to drive attention to your existing products. Identify your most loyal fans and create a fulfilling subscription offering. And bring in the brands.

If you can corral a bunch of your fans together (whether on tour or online), there are brand marketers who want to be there too. If done well, fans don’t mind because this group is already predisposed to like, say, Chevrolet, and because fans are winning cool prizes (“Find the ‘golden ticket’ in the game, and you could win a brand new car!”). Chevy’s getting the benefit of millions of consumers spending hours of time within this co-branded multi-channel experience. For you the benefits are many, including the brand’s contribution to your R&D effort and new product launch.

Remember, you have what we all want: awesome entertainment, great talent and decades worth of content. Develop a 360 relationship with consumers and put a new music product at the center of it. Give consumers new ways to interact with the music they love, and you give them a new reason to buy.

Adam Blumenthal is founder/CEO of Curious Sense, a digital product design studio that produces games and apps with entertainment companies.

For 30 years the Grateful Dead recorded music and toured the world with their unique blend of rock, folk and psychedelic songs, gathering an army of followers known as Deadheads.

Over those three decades, the music never stopped until Jerry Garcia, the band’s lead guitarist and composer of hits such as “Truckin’” and “Casey Jones,” died of a heart attack in 1995. While members of the band continue to be active, Garcia’s death meant the end of the Dead for many of its followers.

But now, for Deadheads in the doldrums, there’s a way to recapture the magic online in a videogame, “Grateful Dead Game: The Epic Tour,” that goes live on April 20.

“What we’re doing is creating an adventure by traveling through Grateful Dead history, Grateful Dead time and space to make their way back to ten shows,” said Adam Blumenthal of digital media company Curious Sense, which created the game.

Since Rhino Records took over recording and merchandising for the Dead in 2006, they have tried to take the band’s music to an audience – particularly younger listeners – that goes beyond the nomadic artists, artisans and party people known as Deadheads who scheduled their lives around the band’s tours.

There are a wide range of products including skateboards and lunchboxes bearing the Dead logo, and according to Rolling Stone magazine, a new movie about the band is in the works.

For the game, fans were asked to select their favorite concerts, and the makers gradually whittled the list down to 10 unforgettable shows from 1970-1990.

Players move from venue to venue, joining forces to shine the Dead’s “love light” in dark places. The “light” represents the collective “positive vibe” of the Dead, and it becomes a beacon as players show acts of kindness, cooperation and cultivation of flower gardens.

“There’s not really an end to the game,” said Blumenthal, which seems appropriate for the jam band. “It’s a game where the objective is to keep having fun rather than get to the end.”

Groovy.

“Epic Tour” has none of the drug use or talk normally associated with the band and its followers.

“There’s nothing explicit,” said Blumenthal, who was bound to keep the game family friendly. “The visuals are psychedelic, they’re fantastical, they’re colorful, they’re whimsical but no drug references.”

While a younger audience may sound out of reach for a hippy band from the 1960s, Blumenthal said the average Deadhead is 40 years-old, and a 2011 study conducted by ESA (EntertainmentSoftware Association) puts the average age of a gamer at 37.

“Online gaming is now a mass medium, played by as many adults as kids,” said Blumenthal. “We create a new way to experience music through immersive gaming – re-packaging the album as a game.”

Other musical acts are beginning to test the videogame market too, including a recently announced one from hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and a Jimmy Buffet ‘Margaritaville’ game.

As for the “Epic Tour,” the top concert chosen was one played in 1977 at Cornell University. “There is a rabbinic-like debate about the best show,” laughed Blumenthal who believes the band was at its peak in the late 1970s.

“A grand Ivy League campus in upstate New York, gorgeous waterfalls and gorges. It was a spring day, May 8, 1977,” recounted Blumenthal. “And when people came out of the show that night there was a blizzard! All these things add up to epic.”

(Reporting by Jordan Riefe; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

Bill Radke: Does the name REO Speedwagon ring much of a bell? If so, you may be at — or approaching — middle age. Well, the band is still together, and it’s trying to stay relevant — thus its new video game coming out today. Here’s Marketplace’s Jennifer Collins.

Jennifer Collins: REO Speedwagon has teamed up with a video game producer. The goal is to keep sales alive.The band’s new game leads players on a kind of treasure hunt. Naturally, there’ll be reminders of REO’s music and members.Tom Standage covers emerging technologies for the Economist: …And this is a sort of game that’s particularly popular among older, particularly female players. And that’s clearly the demographic that they’re aiming for as a band that was best known in the 70′s and the 80′s.

The New York Times reports the band is using the game to promote its Christmas album and tap alternate sources of revenue. But before you bring your ship into the store, keep in mind the game is available only online.

I’m Jennifer Collins for Marketplace.

The Grateful Dead have their own golf balls, wine, neckties, USB drives, blankets and wind chimes – and now they have their very own video game, too. Today, the band launched “Phase One” of The Epic Tour at GratefulDeadGame.com, allowing early users to design their own Dancing Bear avatar and cast votes for their favorite Dead shows of all time. The top 10 user-voted shows will form the “itinerary” for The Epic Tour, in which gamers will work interactively to try to see every show on the tour – an endeavor that, for many Deadheads, will cause real-world flashbacks.

The Epic Tour is also designed to be a social game in which users battle good and evil forces (“Light” versus “Dark”) in a communal experience aimed toward finding some kind of higher ground, so to speak. But mostly, players are just trying to get to the next show, represented here as planets in the Grateful Dead time-space continuum. The full virtual tour will launch in April 2012, with the 10 epic shows and planets announced on January 31st, 2012. A variety of game packages are currently available, ranging from the common-lot “Burrito” level ($10) to the VIP “Diamond” level ($400). Memberships include a variety of both real and virtual items, including “Stealies” (the virtual currency of The Epic Tour), posters and even laminates. The game was produced by Curious Sense Inc. in partnership with Grateful Dead Productions and Rhino Entertainment. Check out a trailer for the game featuring a voiceover by celebrity Deadhead Bill Walton who – as an NBA champion – is no stranger to games himself.

AS the recorded music industry struggles, rock bands have been trying to stay in the limelight by marketing themselves in myriad ways. A familiar group from the classic-rock era of the 1970s and 1980s is hoping to get fans to pay for play.

The game joins the ranks of online video games sponsored by or created for marketers. Among them are DQ Tycoon, for Dairy Queen, and The Office, inspired by the sitcom “The Office” on NBC.

The REO Speedwagon game was conceived and produced by Curious Sense and developed by Dhruva Interactive in Bangalore, India. It is intended to promote the band in general and its new album, “Not So Silent Night: Christmas With REO Speedwagon,” in particular.

For instance, game buyers receive coupon codes for 25 percent off the holiday album. And there is a sweepstakes for players who find the “golden ticket” hidden in the game; 20 prize packages will include real tickets to see REO Speedwagon at a concert in 2010 and to meet backstage with the band.

The downloadable interactive game features avatar versions of the five band members and a make-believe reporter for an entertainment TV show. The plot is centered on the disappearance of Kevin Cronin, the lead vocalist for REO Speedwagon.

The game will be made available on Web sites popular with casual gamers, likeBigFishGames.com, MSN Games (games.msn.com) and Yahoo Games (games.yahoo.com). It will cost computer users about $8 to play for each session, which can last as long as 10 hours; they can play the first hour free.

“We build digital experiences beyond a typical Web site, which offer long, interactive times between the content and the consumer,” said Adam Blumenthal, president and chief executive at Curious Sense in Durham, N.C.

The hours spent playing games online are a far cry from the brief moments a consumer spends watching a television commercial or glancing at a banner ad. That interested Mr. Blumenthal, who worked at agencies like McKinney and R/GA before starting Curious Sense as what he calls a “product development studio.”

Also of interest is the potential revenue from the game. It costs about $80,000 to develop and market a typical online casual game, Mr. Blumenthal said, and “a good game” can be bought by 100,000 to 150,000 people.

“The games pay for themselves,” he added, “and then some.” (Revenue in this instance will be divided among the producers, the Web sites that host the game and REO Speedwagon.)

The game is intended to provide the band — and potentially, any band that wants to star in a similar game — with an alternative source of revenue, in addition to that from participation in other video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, licensing songs for commercials, selling songs on iTunes and peddling merchandise at concerts.

Such revenue is increasingly important to musicians to compensate for the falling sales of CDs and other forms of traditional recorded music.

•

“It’s a great concept and we’re very happy to be involved,” said Tom Consolo, a manager at Front Line Management in Los Angeles who has represented REO Speedwagon for more than 20 years.

“You have your ups and downs” as a band, so “you’re always looking to reach a broader audience,” Mr. Consolo said. “And with the advent of the Internet, you can reach around the globe.”

In fact, the game — being promoted on the group’s Web site (reospeedwagon.com) and a Curious Sense Web site (therom.com) — will be available in French, German, Japanese and Spanish as well as English.

When Mr. Blumenthal contacted him about having REO Speedwagon take part in the game, Mr. Consolo recalled, “I didn’t even know what casual games were.”

“I remember the first time I saw a pinball machine with Kiss,” he added. “This is a 21st-century version.”

“For me and the band, it’s always interesting to try new ideas out,” Mr. Consolo said, because it helps cultivate an image for the band as contemporary rather than an oldies act.

“You don’t just lay back and play your greatest hits all the time,” he added.

Mr. Consolo said he appreciated the irony that the Internet, which has been blamed for falling sales of recorded music, could generate interest in bands through online games.

(It is appropriate then that the game features a version of the REO Speedwagon song “Roll With the Changes,” along with versions of other hits like “Keep on Loving You” and “Can’t Fight This Feeling.”)

There is another benefit to the Internet, Mr. Consolo said, in that “kids are getting turned on to a lot of classic-rock radio artists” they may not hear on the radio — either because they do not listen to stations playing those acts or because they do not listen to radio at all.

Mr. Blumenthal recently met the band members at a concert and demonstrated what the game looked like after six months of development and production work.

“I was struck right off the bat by the dazzling good looks of my avatar,” Mr. Cronin said, laughing.

“There is a need for us to explore all kinds of different avenues to get our music out there,” Mr. Cronin said in a telephone interview. “If you just think about how it used to be, you’ll be left in the dust.”

After today, the long strange trip that is the Grateful Dead’s career may just get longer and stranger. Thanks to Curious Sense Inc., a digital-entertainment company that today announced it had obtained exclusive rights to the group’s legendary music vault, the legendary band may soon have a digital resurrection, complete with interactive gaming and social media experiences.

“Right now we’re figuring out the best way to use the band’s music, characters and lore and translate it into a fun interactive experience,” says Adam Blumenthal, founder of Curious Sense and a self-proclaimed Deadhead. “This is an innovative way to reach both old fans and prospective fans in a mass-market medium played by both kids and adults.”

A recent report by eMarketer bears this out. The research group forecasted the social gaming market will surpass the $1 billion mark in 2011 with 62 million Americans playing at least one game a month.

The deal, brokered with the Grateful Dead’s Legacy Manager David Lemieux (formerly their official archivist) and Rhino Records, gives Curious Sense exclusive worldwide rights for three-and-a-half years to create online and mobile experiences from the Grateful Dead’s voluminous music and visual assets. The band’s vault reportedly contains more than 4,000 recorded live shows.

“The ideas are not completely settled yet,” says Blumenthal, “but we are considering a card-playing game complete with a saloon, characters and multi-players.” Other likely concepts include a name-that-tune-like game that would fit in with Deadheads’ penchant for deep song research and band trivia, as well as a recreation of band’s legendary “Shakedown Street” parking lot experience. Here, if participants are lucky enough, they might win a “miracle” — that valued commodity in the analog world that once meant a free ticket to a Grateful Dead concert (though in the digital realm a miracle might include merchandise or rare recordings).

The Grateful Dead social media and gaming spaces are being developed for both mobile and online platforms and will be featured both on the band’s official site www.dead.net and a new dedicated website yet to be named.

Titles the company is considering for the new destination include “Terrapin Station,” “Truckin’ ” (the band’s best-known anthem) and “The Music Never Stopped,” which Blumenthal points out contains rather prescient lyrics: “No one’s noticed, but the band’s all packed and gone. Was it ever here at all? But they keep on dancing.”

You could be playing with the band: Jerry Garcia, left, with Grateful Dead bandmates Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Brent Midland (seated), Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart in the mid-1980s. Garcia died in August 1995.

The Grateful Dead is truckin’ its way into virtual reality.
An online world based on the music and culture of the seminal San Francisco band of the ’70s and ’80s is being developed by Curious Sense, publishers of a game devoted to the rock band REO Speedwagon.

A launch is planned for August, with the developers “mining the music for themes and words and characters and settings that would adapt well to games, and then looking at the best types of games out here and utilizing them,” says Curious Sense founder Adam Blumenthal. “The experience will exist online as its primary destination, but we’re also building a mobile version of it.”

Even though the gamemakers have access to names and likenesses of all the Grateful Dead band members as well as its vault of audio recordings, video, photos and artwork, don’t expect a music game like Guitar Hero: Metallica or Green Day: Rock Band.

“I know that I want to create the ability for players to feel like they are playing in the band, that they are sort of jamming with them, but in a way that is different,” Blumenthal says.

The world will be built around the band and its music, he says. “If you know their music well, you know the themes that are prevalent are the Old West and trains and rivers and space and biblical themes. So I think we will have a world that is designed with different regions that look and feel like these themes, and players will sort of zoom into them.”

As players click through the environment, they might be zapped “through a rabbit hole into a world that will look completely different from the larger world,” Blumenthal says. “It could be Terrapin Station or it could be Dark Star, and they will be taken into a game specific to a song. … Even Angry Birds, this new blockbuster game, that model could be adapted for a game based on the song Samson and Delilah in which the chorus is, ‘If I had my way, I would tear this old building down.’ ”

Another possibility is a pinball game based on the introductory animation sequence in The Grateful Dead Movie from 1977.

Even before the Internet went mainstream, Dead fans created online lyrics databases and concert-tape trading communities; the band created an early website to keep followers informed. One of the band’s lyricists, John Perry Barlow, founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Dead “has always looked for ways to embrace new technology,” the band’s legacy manager, David Lemieux, said in a statement. “We’ve found a great partner in Curious Sense. They are lifelong Dead Heads who have some brilliant plans to take our fans on a very cool journey.”

The band’s record label is on board as well. “Curious Sense is the perfect partner to translate the Grateful Dead experience into the video game world,” Rhino Entertainment’s Mark Pinkus said in a statement. “We look forward to working closely with their team to develop an exciting game that will be loved by longtime Dead Heads and new fans alike.”

With the rise of the iPhone/iPod Touch apps, the popularity of the Wii and DS, and the huge boom of Facebook gaming, gaming is more ubiquitous than ever.

Why are games everywhere?”

Excerpts from the Panel Discussion at the 2010 Triangle Game Conference:

…Part of it was that more people simply had a gamer’s brain, said Blumenthal. More people had grown up in the age of Atari – in the age of the videogame…

…The future of gaming “may not be Facebook,” said Blumenthal, “but it will be social … Facebook is a medium. The content is shared by thousands of people – that’s a trend that’s not going away. There are more and new kinds of gamers.”

…Blumenthal was enthusiastic, arguing that younger consumers were more comfortable with the idea of immersion and using one’s entire body to play games, but Benito believed it was a “pet rock” and that people would get bodily fatigued after constant use.

One of the world’s biggest and most anticipated convergence events of all things music, film and interactive, SXSW is in its 25th year. South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual event that takes place in Austin, Texas. By day – discussions, demos, debates, at night, hundreds of musical acts from around the globe all over Austin.

Adam Blumenthal, Curious Sense CEO, spoke about the new types of digital products Curious Sense creates with licensed entertainment content, and the benefits of both revenue and measurable brand value.

Panelists:
Joel Johnson (Gawker)-moderator
Adam Blumenthal (Curious Sense)
Annie Lin (The Rights Workshop)
Randy Shefer (Sony ATV Publishing)
Colin Mutchler (R/GA)

“Find Your Own Way Home” designed for gamers and music fans

Legendary rock band, REO Speedwagon, has released a first-of-its-kind video game product aimed at the worldwide audience of “casual gamers.” Estimated to be nearly 200 million consumers, casual gamers are primarily adults over 30, more than half of them women – a demographic that overlaps well with the REO Speedwagon audience.

“Find Your Own Way Home – The Game,” was conceived of and produced by digital product studio Curious Sense. It is the first game featuring an actual rock band in the thriving global video game category of “downloadable casual games.”

In Find Your Own Way Home, the player is the protagonist in a story that unfolds across dozens of game levels for several hours of entertainment. The game is designed to appeal to both the typical gamer, and the dedicated REO Speedwagon fan. For music fans, the game introduces new ways to interact with music; and for the typical gamer, it brings several innovative game features to the category – in particular bridges between the game experience and the real world.

As players reach certain milestones in the game they earn prizes. For example, the product features an exclusive release of REO Speedwagon’s new re-recording of their classic, Roll With the Changes, a single from their brand new album, “Not So Silent Night – Christmas with REO Speedwagon,” and a well-hidden “Golden Ticket,” which, when found by the player makes them eligible to win concert tickets and a backstage meet-and-greet with the band.

“Just when we thought we had done it all, along comes an awesome video game, where millions of people around the world can interact with us, and our music. How cool is that?” says Kevin Cronin, lead singer of REO Speedwagon. “We are always looking for exciting ways to stay current in a music world which is constantly changing. Video gaming is a whole new vehicle to get our music out to our fans, as well as connect us with new fans world wide…and our avatars are quite handsome.”

“Find Your Own Way Home” is unlike fast-paced action video games such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band. This game uses the popular “hidden object mystery game” model to deliver the music of REO Speedwagon to a huge global gaming audience. The game is being distributed globally, in five languages, first as an online product via dozens of “game portals,” then likely, to be put on a disk and packaged for retail distribution.

“With global reach, long, fun interaction time, and a purchase from gamers, products like “Find Your Own Way Home” are high-value marketing experiences and revenue-generating products,” said Adam Blumenthal, CEO of Curious Sense. “This product concept comes from our company’s focus on helping music artists use new media. By building an experience that applies the best practices in game design to a body of great rock music, we have created some very interesting new ways for bands and fans to interact.”

Curious Sense developed the concept for the product with REO Speedwagon manager, Tom Consolo, at Frontline. “Tom encouraged us to draw from the themes of the band’s latest album when designing the game,” said Blumenthal. “Those themes, with a fictitious plot and more than a dozen REO songs utilized in interesting ways, appeals to gamers who may not know REO, and REO fans who may not yet be gamers.”

In the game the player is an entertainment reporter who has been on assignment with REO Speedwagon as they’ve been finishing their new album. The game takes place on the day the new album is to be released at a fantastic release party. But something goes wrong, when Cronin goes missing, and it’s up to the player to locate the missing star.

Curious Sense has designed some innovative incentive programs with the game:

1. Everyone who buys the game will get a discount coupon to purchase REO’s new album, Not So Silent Night – Christmas with REO Speedwagon.
2. Hidden deep within the game are “Golden Tickets.” Players who find a Golden Ticket will be eligible to win two real tickets to a real REO Speedwagon concert, and a backstage meet-and-greet with the band.

The game launched along-side other REO Speedwagon’s recently released new Christmas album, Not So Silent Night Christmas with REO Speedwagon, on Sony Legacy Recordings, produced by Joe Vannelli, with associate producer and lead singer Kevin Cronin. The album features 13 Christmas classics with a unique REO Speedwagon musical twist.