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Archive: packaging

Gristleism: a different take on the Buddha Machine concept

16 March 2010 23:45

Categories: Entertainment, Music, Reviews, Technology

I have written before about the Buddha Machine. It is like a mystical modern-day music box. I’m a big fan.

The original was described by some as the anti-iPod. It looks like the sort of iPod knock-off that you might get free in a cereal packet. Instead of loading it with several gigabytes of your favourite music, the Buddha Machine comes pre-packaged with nine low-fi loops, which vaguely emanate from the fuzzy in-built speaker.

And it’s marvellous. The Buddha Machine may look cheap and tacky, and the sound quality certainly is not great, but this all adds to the quaint and charming nature of the device.

It became a cult object. Brian Eno is said to have been so entranced that he bought eight of them on the spot. It was treated by some as a musical instrument in its own right. Artists created remix albums inspired by the Buddha Machine. It even spawned a bizarre game, Buddha Boxing. Any resemblance to World Championship Stare-out is purely coincidental.

The second version of the Buddha Machine brought new loops, and the addition of a pitch-bending function, adding an extra dimension to the curious box of sounds. But it still retained its charm.

Now the idea has been developed further with Gristleism. It is a new variant on the Buddha Machine concept developed by the revered experimental group Throbbing Gristle.

As you can see from the demonstration video, Throbbing Gristle’s take on the Buddha Machine is rather more brutal than FM3′s more relaxing version. And while the originals come in unassuming, antiquated, almost second-hand packaging, Gristleism has a very slick, modern and extravagant style to its packaging.

Gristleism is an altogether different product. But it chimes with the same ideas about what it means to buy music in a physical format in these days of digital downloads. Record companies are increasingly seeking to make the physical editions of albums more appealing by making the package more of the product. The stylish packaging of Gristleism asks questions about music, just as the original Buddha Machines did.

Musically, Gristelism fulfils a completely different role. The originals, with the music composed by FM3, were more ambient in nature. They could sit happily in the corner, quietly emitting unobtrusive drones.

But as you would expect with Throbbing Gristle, things are a bit more madcap here. I have to admit that when I first started playing with this, I couldn’t stop grinning. I had to interact with the music. You can really utilise that pitch altering knob to great effect.

The blunder of Woolworths

11 January 2009 02:54

Categories: General, Personal, Work

(Almost) 100 years of Woolworths

A series of posts

By the time I started working for Woolworths, the company was pushing its in-store ordering system big time. In Summer 2006 The Big Red Book was launched to encourage customers to make use of the ordering facility. As sales assistants, we were always encouraged to offer to order any items that weren’t in stock.

Unfortunately, the ordering system was, in my view, a customer satisfaction minefield. The system was slow, clunky and difficult to use. Worse still, the majority of times I checked for an item, it wasn’t in stock and it wasn’t available to order (latterly, it was actually a surprise if an item was in stock). Customers would often raise an eyebrow and say, “I thought you were ordering it because it wasn’t in stock.” No such logic in the Woolworths system. And the flat £4.95 charge for home delivery simply wasn’t worth it for smaller items.

The catalogue also raised customers’ expectations about what they could find in store. A customer would browse the catalogue at home, and expect to be able to find every item they wanted in store. Not so, of course — that’s why they produced a catalogue in the first place. But there were a lot of disappointed customers.

During my stint at Cumbernauld there was a problem soon after the price of pic ‘n’ mix increased. It was still being advertised in the catalogue at the lower price, and the customer demanded to be charged the lower price. I know of at least one other similar incident with another product. The company seemed to forget that producing the catalogue meant they couldn’t really increase any prices.

The Big Red Book experiment was an inept attempt to beat Argos at its own game that was doomed to fail. I have heard that the experiment was ultimately an expensive disaster, and that the ordering system was one cause of the stock availability problems. The catalogue was scrapped in late 2008 (but not before the company had already produced not one but two Christmas 2008 catalogues), but the damage had already been done.

The whole adventure is ironic given that Woolworths was an early player in the catalogue store format with its Shoppers World chain. Woolies gave up on it in the 1980s. Maybe if they persevered they would never have had to worry about Argos.

Smarty-pants analysts like to point out that retailers need things like catalogues and high online sales to survive. But where is Poundland’s online ordering system? I notice also that I can’t buy my food shopping on the Aldi and Lidl websites. Yet these three stores are all in rude health, and are expanding as though the credit crunch never happened. That’s because they focus on providing goods that customers want at low prices — not producing costly catalogues.

It’s highly notable that those currently well-performing stores are all value retailers. Once upon a time, Woolworths would have been seen as a value retailer. Somehow it took its eye off the ball. Woolies was neither a place where you would be sure to find value-for-money bargains, nor a place to buy high-quality goods. Instead, it uncomfortably took a path in the middle — a retailing no man’s land.

In fairness, the launch of the WorthIt! brand was a good stab at offering value-for-money products, and the value was indeed often impressively good. Unfortunately, this sometimes seemed to be at the expense of the main range of products.

For instance, you could always find a better range of stationery in WH Smith (even if it was more expensive there). But alarmingly, the range at Woolworths seemed to get worse since I started working there. Of course, some products had to go to make shelf space for the WorthIt! range. This meant that I could buy sets of WorthIt! notepads that were undoubtedly excellent value for money, but they weren’t quite as good as my preferred kind of mini notepads that disappeared from existence.

Meanwhile, can you believe that latterly we did not sell such basic stationery equipment as a tape dispenser? I only realised this because a customer asked me if we stocked them. I instinctively said yes (of course we do!) only to lose the spring in my step once I had led my customer to the stationery area, realising that I had not seen one in yonks. Boy, did I feel like an idiot.

There were few signs that the product range was going to improve from 2009 onwards. Among the last new products that arrived was a dummy CCTV camera. This must have been designed to be put on sale after the Christmas period, the tell-tale sign being that they came in with half price stickers plastered all over them when they were not yet half price.

Unfortunately, at full price these plastic pieces of crap that literally did nothing (the only feature of this plastic, fake CCTV camera, was a blinking LED) sold for well north of £20. Customers did not touch them with a bargepole, even when the store-wide discount sat at 90% off on the final day.

There they are on the bottom-right of the above photograph along with a million and one WorthIt! laundry hooks. These were among our unsold products after the shutter went down for the final time on Tuesday. In fairness to the laundry hooks, they probably sold fairly well. The only reason we had loads left was because the distribution centre sent us way too many. By that time, crisis mode was well under way, and clearly the distribution centres’ only aim was to get rid of all the stock, just chucking stuff on cages and waving goodbye.

Another of the final new products to arrive was a set of four crocus vases with crocus bulbs. Not a bad product in and of itself. The problem was that the packaging was shockingly bad. There was next to no protection for the individual vases, meaning that they rattled around inside the box, clattering against each other. This sometimes damaged not only the vases but the bulbs as well (which just sat loose on the top of the vases). If a box was dropped, it was curtains.

Worse still, the boxes came with a huge display window. Not so unusual, except for the fact that it wasn’t so much a window as a massive hole in the box. Unprotected by any kind of cellophane covering, it didn’t take too much jiggling for a vase to “accidentally” fall out of the box. A shoplifter would have had a field day with these, simply being able to inconspicuously reach in, grab a vase and pocket it.

The packaging was so poor that the whole lot ended up being scanned off the books. We took the surviving vases out and sold them separately, sans crocus bulbs, for 30p each. But what a load of money that must have gone down the drain, and all for some thoughtlessly bad packaging!

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The future of music: pretty boxes

19 January 2008 22:57

Categories: Current affairs, Economics, Entertainment, Internet, Music, Technology

Copyshite

A series of posts

Copyshite
The entertainment industry’s wrong turns
The future of music: gigs and t-shirts
The future of music: pretty boxes

There are only two things in the world that give us absolute total happiness. One is seeing other people fail. The other is unwrapping a newly-bought CD.

–Armando Iannucci

In the wake of all the upheaval that the recorded music industry is facing, a lot of people have been predicting the death of the CD. After all, the very reason why music is cheap or free these days is because they don’t need to be put on a physical object which then has to be transported around the world. Surely digital downloads are the only conceivable future for music distribution.

I don’t like the idea of this. If I was five years younger it would probably make perfect sense to me. Last week’s edition of The Economist tells the story of a focus group that EMI held. It was aimed at understanding yoofs better. At the end of the meeting, the teenagers were invited to take as many free CDs from a pile on a table as they wanted. Not a single person took a CD.

It’s just the latest example of a recorded music industry that has always found it difficult to adapt to new technology. Historically, consumers have gone for the most convenient and cheapest format rather than the technically excellent one. So says Fredric Dannen if you scroll a long way down.

When the long-playing record (LP) format was introduced by Columbia Records back in the late 1940s, the industry as a whole resisted it, and many predicted it would never take off because 78s sounded better. Without question, early LPs did not sound nearly as good as 78s. But given the choice of listening to all of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on two sides of one record versus sixteen sides of eight records, the consumer opted for convenience and simplicity (not to mention less shelf space).

…You can always count on the record industry to cling to the past, and to fight innovation.

So does the arrival of MP3 mean the death of the CD? I personally hope not. I love CDs. I am of that generation, probably a small five–ten year window of people who wouldn’t consider vinyl but had no access to file sharing as they grew up. Napster came onto the scene in 2000, when I was 14 — well into my music-consuming life.

I have been collecting CDs since I was nine years old. I haven’t counted, but I must have around 600 CDs. I only bought my first vinyl records a few years ago. I bought them grudgingly, only because they were not available on CD. I reckon today I have 30 vinyl records.

I have only ever bought around a dozen MP3s — again, because they were not readily available on CD or vinyl. (I have downloaded a few dozen more because they weren’t commercially available at all — mainly live bootlegs and demos.) I would consider buying more. But although MP3 is the format du jour, there is a big block in my mind preventing me from buying something that I will never be able to see or touch.

I suppose this makes me a collector. (Yes, my collection is in alphabetical order — or it was until I ran out of space.) Collectors tend to be fans of vinyl though, which makes me an anomaly.

It would be nice to think that the CD will limp on and eventually survive another day in the MP3 era just as vinyl has done in the CD era. I have grown up with CDs and I love them. I’m not an audiophile, so the sound quality issue doesn’t worry me too much. And to be honest, I can’t be bothered with the faff of vinyl.

Whether it is CD or vinyl, there will always be people like me who treasure the physical presence of an album. It’s not just about a collection of notes. It about an event, a happening. It’s the artwork, the packaging. The sleevenotes, the lyrics. The smell of the booklet. It has an aura. When you hold a copy of a good album, you are transported to its space without even having to put it on. Could all of this really die because of the internet?

When Radiohead released In Rainbows, the pricing structure grabbed all of the headlines. But that wasn’t the interesting thing for me. The pay-what-you-want method is just a belated recognition of the fact that people could choose to pay nothing anyway.

The other aspect of the release of In Rainbows interested me much more. I didn’t pay anything for the MP3s. I downloaded them for free when they were released on 10 October. That’s because I got them as part of the £40 “discbox” set.

The discbox is a premium edition of In Rainbows. It comprises a CD of the album, an second CD with eight extra tracks and enhanced content, a 2× vinyl edition of the album, and generally all-round badass packaging.

£40 is the most I have ever paid for an album. I hesitated before I ordered it — but not much. Although I am sort of a collector, I have never been a completist. I am usually happy to have the CD version on its own. But I couldn’t resist the awesomeness of the discbox — despite the fact that I hadn’t even heard the album.

This was largely ignored in the media coverage of the album, but to me it was the most notable aspect of the unconventional release of In Rainbows. When I first posted about In Rainbows, I neglected to even mention the fact that the MP3s were free. I didn’t find it that interesting.

People like me, who love the physical formats, will be continue to be catered for. It is easy to make money out of us. Slap a sticker saying ‘limited edition’ on a record and suddenly demand for it will become price inelastic. Suckers like me will buy premium versions of albums at higher prices than we would otherwise consider. And this will become ever more important for the record companies as physical sales continue to get eaten into by the internet, where profit seeking is impossible.

In Rainbows wasn’t the start of this. Limited edition versions of albums have been around for a very long time. But in an age where it is becoming increasingly difficult to make money out of recorded music, it is becoming more and more prevalent.

When I went shopping for Sigur Rós’s Heima DVD I thought £17 was a bit steep. Then I saw the limited edition version for £25 and bought it.

The deluxe multi-format edition seems to be becoming more common as well. Björk’s latest single, ‘Declare Independence’, is available as a deluxe edition, yours for only £19.99.

Formatted in the same extravagant packaging as the Volta double LP, this contains all conceivable formats of the single: double vinyl, CD and DVD.

Something else that is becoming more and more common is for people to automatically get the MP3 version for free when they order a physical version. For instance, Nonesuch has started doing this. You can choose between standard 128kbps MP3s or maximum quality 320kpbs at no extra cost.

It makes sense to me. Being able to have your entire music collection on a portable device is becoming an expectation these days. Since vinyl is a bit more tricky to get onto your iPod, it would be good to get the MP3s of music that you have already bought automatically for free. Hopefully more record companies will adopt this approach.

A lot of people have wondered aloud if the fact that we can now get music for free from the internet is devaluing music. But it seems to me as though the internet is not only driving the price of music down — it’s also driving the price of CDs and records up.

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Sigur Rós — Hvarf, Heim, Heima

22 November 2007 19:51

Categories: DVD, Entertainment, Film, Music

I was beginning to lose my faith in Sigur Rós a bit. Takk… was a pretty good album, but lacked the oceanic beauty of Ágætis Byrjun, the novelty of ( ) and the experimentation of Von and Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do. The most recent EP, Sæglópur, contained the most boring output I have ever heard Sigur Rós release.

So I was not expecting too much from their latest release, Hvarf / Heim, a double CD. The Hvarf CD contains “new electric recordings”, although really it seems to be old leftover songs that never made it to an album.

‘Salka’ is nothing particularly special. ‘Í Gær’, meanwhile, sounds like it was specifically designed to be used on any television programmes that want to evoke a kind of creepy, wintery feel. That tuned percussion provides plenty of ammunition for those who have bemoan the use of same Sigur Rós songs on television over and over again. (‘Í Gær’ is the music used in the Heima trailer which I have embedded at the bottom of this post.)

However, it is good to see ‘Hjómalind’ (what used to be called ‘Rokklagið’) finally getting a proper release. But why not ‘Fönklagið’? It might not fit in with their current image, but I still think it’s a great, fun song.

The reworked version of ‘Von’ is also a pleasant listen. The new version of ‘Hafsól’ is fantastic as well, although was previously released as the B-side to ‘Hoppípolla’ so is not really anything new.

Heim meanwhile is a disc of live acoustic recordings of classic Sigur Rós songs. The songs are inevitably a little bit stripped back and raw. Some of the performances were recorded in outdoor locations. In ‘Heysátan’ in particular you can hear the birds enjoying the performance.

Despite the stripped back nature of the album, long time collaborators Amiina perform alongside Sigur Rós, meaning that the band’s grand sound remains in some songs. After all, ‘Starálfur’ would be nothing without the string quartet.

But the best song on the disc is performed by Sigur Rós alone. ‘Ágætis Byrjun’ has long been my favourite song by the band, so it was always going to be a stand out for me on Heim. The original version is largely acoustic anyway, but there are still a couple of subtle differences. The piano almost takes its rightful place at the forefront.

Part of what I love about this song is the fact that most of it sounds beautiful, but dissonant notes briefly appear just after the climax of each chorus. I wonder why? “An all right (but not perfect) beginning” perhaps. Whatever, these bits stand out a lot more in this live version than on the album version, and it sends a shiver down my spine.

But the best part of the tripartite alliterative Sigur Rós bonanza that hit the shops this month is the DVD of the film, Heima. It follows Sigur Rós touring Iceland, playing a series of free concerts in a diverse variety of locations.

Conventional concerts are documented. My favourite moment of these is at the start, where the band are performing ‘Sé Lest’. At the appropriate moment, a local brass band unexpectedly emerges from backstage to perform the brass part. But the moment is fleeting as the band walks between the members of Sigur Rós, climbs off the stage, makes its way through the audience members and out of the door.

As well as conventional concerts, the band also performs in some stranger places, such as an abandoned fish factory (where lead singer Jón Þór Birgisson and Amiina perform in a giant fish-oil tank, creating a peculiar audio resonance). The band also played a protest concert, performed without using any electricity, where a dam was being built at Snæfell.

The Icelandic tourism board must be cock-a-hoop. The film follows Sigur Rós, but it focuses as much on the scenery as it does on the band. The whole film has a beautiful visual style because of this. Heima will probably do more to advertise Iceland as a potential tourist location than anything else.

The film also follows Sigur Rós visiting some locations for pleasure. The best of these features is about Páll Stefánsson, who makes percussion instruments out of natural materials. The film shows Stefánsson tirelessly testing stones, checking the tone each makes, so that he can build a stone marimba. Sigur Rós later perform an improvisation on the makeshift instrument.

I was a bit apprehensive about buying the Heima DVD. I can never resist buying the limited edition if there is one, and this one cost £25. But with two discs (the second disc contains two hours worth of full performances of each song featured in the main film, spanning all four of their albums) and lush packaging, it feels worth it.

In fact, the artwork and packaging is a strong point of Heima and Hvarf / Heim. Both feature nostalgic-looking, treated photographs. They have been deliberately aged, with colours bleeding. It is similar to what Boards of Canada do, but I think the Sigur Rós artwork is even more evocative.

The limited edition DVD comes with a 116 page photo book. A lot of the photography is stunning — as good as the photography in the actual film. And, most importantly, the book itself smells wonderful (smell, I find, is one of the most important aspects of music packaging).

Now I find it incredible that I was actually reluctant or indifferent about buying these. I was becoming tired of Sigur Rós, but Hvarf / Heim and Heima have reminded me why I love the band so much. If you were swithering like me, I would advise you just to buy.