Pop star Cee Lo Green will make about $20 million this year. His hit single “Forget You” (actually it’s not “Forget”, but another shorter word beginning with the same letter) became the 12th most downloaded track of all time. But his music sales represent only a small proportion of his earnings. The New York Times calculates “F*** You” earned him about $700,000. The other $19 million or so come from a variety of projects and deals.  Cee Lo‘s management company, Primary Wave Music, has come up with some very creative ways to make money for Cee Lo without relying on music sales. Not so long ago sales of recorded music were the mainstay of any musician‘s earnings as a hit single would lead to big album sales and plenty of cash, but now with the demise of the album artists like Cee Lo have had to look elsewhere. Primary Wave’s CEO Larry Mestel says album sales represent the smallest slice of the revenue pie. A stream of TV appearances, endorsement deals, TV commercials have traded on and built Cee Lo‘s brand. He’s been a judge on TV talent show “The Voice”, has his own shown on cable network Fuse, appeared on Saturday Night Live and been in TV commercials for 7-Up, Absolut Vodka and M&M’s. Next year he will have his own show, “Loberace“, in Las Vegas and will star in a Mark Burnett produced TV show in the UK called “Cee Lo Takes the UK.” What Primary Wave is doing for Cee Lo is the model for the future of the music industry, and is a good lesson in creativity and innovation for many other industries that are seeing their worlds changing through technology. Necessity breeds invention, and without invention we might find ourselves being forgotten.

Bjork has released her new album, Biophilia - which was partly recorded on an iPad – as a series of apps, becoming the world’s first “app album.” She described it as a multimedia collection “encompassing music, apps, internet, installations, and live shows.”

Businesses that give two hoots about innovation are finding novel ways to collaborate with artists who have ideas coming out of their ears. Artists for instance, like Dave Stewart, my co-author on The Business Playground. I recently asked him about his advisory role to Nokia. Dave was stranded in London on the other side of a plume of volcanic ash while I was in Los Angeles on the other side of a swathe of smog. Go figure.

Mark: Dave, you’ve been an advisor to Nokia since 2006 and have the title “Change Agent.” What does your role entail, and do you have business cards?

Dave: My Title is “Change Agent.” At Nokia Ideas Camp they gave me another title “Master of Prescience.” Yes I have business cards. Very mysterious ones!
Mark: Nokia used to be a rubber boots company, then a mobile phone company and now they want to be a content network. What does that tell you about how they think?
Dave: Nokia will be the largest distribution network of content in next few years. They already are the largest camera company! Mobile is the fourth screen. They have more screens than anyone and now they are gathering content. Nokia has a large brain and all those excitable neurons in the brain are working away at future ideas and concepts that will change the way people can communicate, learn, share and live in a wired world where the device in your hand becomes your portal to a universe of options.
Mark: What does Nokia get out of the relationship, and what do you?
Dave: From me Nokia not only gets creative ideas that can be practically put into action and executed, but I plug Nokia into a network of the world’s greatest creative thinkers and doers. Meanwhile I get to see ideas come to life and to engage in the future of mobile technology and be at the tip of knowledge about the way the world will function in the future. I have lots of friends at Nokia now and we are working on incredibly exciting things together.
Mark: One of your first ventures with Nokia was launching some music by Cindy Gomez via a game on Nokia’s OVI platform. So, to get this clear, you took a sexy singer and instead of releasing a CD, you and Nokia created an avatar of her dancing on a game to her music on a mobile phone. Are you quite mad?
Dave: Yes I am mad, but that’s beside the point. We did that as an experiment about an unknown artist and her music being embedded within a game that people play. This is very popular with known artists – in fact hugely popular from the simple tap tap revolution to guitar hero etc., all using famous artist and bands – but our experiment was the reverse to get attention for an unknown artist.
Mark: As a rather successful artist yourself, what do you find interesting about Nokia? Is it the Finnish vodka?
Dave: Nokia holds the keys to many possibilities, and one I am very interested in is the potential for solving the basic problem of fair trade for artists, and another is their exciting possibilities for distribution. Nokia is an ever-changing company, but they are building huge foundations before they seemingly evolve. “OVI” means “open door” in Finnish language and OVI is going to be huge.
Mark: How is what you’re doing with Nokia the shape of things to come?
Dave: Right now I am working on three major projects with Nokia, one of which I created and two of which I am involved in as part of a team. They involve a narrative multi-platform approach and the general public will take part in these quite huge experiments which will actually change storytelling whilst teaching people about huge technological advances in Nokia world.

This weekend saw the release of the latest film in the Lady Dior series starring the French Oscar winning actress, Marion Cotillard, and her Dior handbag.  The latest film is directed by David Lynch and has a distinctly Twin Peaks feel to it. The previous film directed by Jonas Akerlund has the gorgeous Ms Cotillard singing a Franz Ferdinand track, The eyes of Mars. Beautiful.

You will have seen the announcement earlier this year that pop sensation Lady Gaga has become the creative director for instant camera company Polaroid. The cynical amongst us might view this as a publicity stunt that won’t translate into anything more than a few column inches. After all, now that all pictures are pretty much instant, the Polaroid brand could be accused of desperately trying to find a reason to exist. And for a performer whose most recent music video featured, count them, NINE product placements, one more brand could be put down as just another endorsement deal.

But wait, scratch a little beneath the surface and there’s more substance to the deal than first appears. Polaroid is not quite the has-been it almost became. After being close to closing shop a couple of years ago, Polaroid has found a new lease of life that makes its positioning of instant pictures relevant the digital age, with new designs and new range of products that include mini portable printers. And as for Lady Gaga, or Stefani Germanotta as she used to be called, she is a long-time Polaroid fan and says she sees this as a big opportunity to add her artistic vision to an iconic brand. See what she said on CNBC, the news network: “I want to make very high quality products that speak to the Polaroid consumer in a way that is very lifestyle oriented. It’s all about, for me, the functionality and the feeling.” She speaks intelligently and comes across more like a brand manager than a pop star puppet.

There has been a shift in the relationship between bands and brands over the past few years and the deal between Lady Gaga and Polaroid, while unusual, is by no means unique.  (In 2007, for instance, Puff Daddy was made the brand manager for Diageo’s Ciroc vodka.) The shift has occurred for a number of reasons that together have encouraged brands and bands to want to, well, get into bed with one another. First reason being that music sales have taken a dive and artists and their managers have been forced to look elsewhere for revenue. It used to be, sales of recordings were the number one source of income, now it’s live performances and third party sponsorships. Second reason, marketers have found that as media fragments and consumers have discovered new ways to be distracted (phones, ipads, Facebook, Twitter, games to name just the obvious ones) it’s more difficult to engage them for any length of time or with any depth. Those annoying ads just won’t cut it any more.

So, enter music, stage left. Fans have a deep emotional connection with music, so the logic is that if the brands form partnerships with the artists they can get a bit of it too. But, in Lady Gaga’s case it’s about more than just her music. She is a brand in her own right and she’s taking the artistic vision that shaped that brand and applying it to Polaroid.  Gaga sees herself as not just a singer, but a renaissance woman with creative skills that work across all sorts of lifestyle products.  Even before Polaroid she had launched a line of high quality headphones called Heartbeats. She describes them as “headphone jewelry” and in a press conference announcing their launch, she told reporters she “loved the idea of creating a headphone that sonically made it possible for fans to listen to music the way that producers and artists intended for them to hear it.”

Lady Gaga is very savvy about branding and, while she has a whole team of marketing people from Universal Music Group advising her, she clearly knows what’s she doing. When she first stated to perform music in bars at New York University she was largely ignored by the drunken students there until she stripped down to her underwear – and barely one year later she had crafted an image that made her a superstar. Music industry veteran told Forbes Magazine last December: “She is directing every frame of her music and her life, imagining how clips will appear on YouTube and what people will tweet after she appears on the VMAs.”

The video for her latest single, ‘Telephone’, with Beyonce was an epic that she co-wrote with director Jonas Akerlund. At a time when budgets for music videos have been largely nonexistent, this 9-minute extravaganza took three days to film and a month and a half to edit. There were product placements throughout – the nine mentioned at the beginning of this piece – but only a few of them were in fact paid-for endorsements. Others were included by Gaga just because they added to the story. The brands that did stump up to be featured provided much needed cash for a hefty production budget. Her manager, Troy Carter, told US advertising magazine Advertising Age: “If Michael Jackson was making ‘Thriller,’ he would do this too. These million-dollar music videos have to have partners to be produced.” ‘Bad Romance,’ another Gaga video, has thus far been viewed 180 million times on YouTube, making it the second most viewed of all time (the first being a baby biting his brother’s finger).  We don’t think this is selling out. The fans are in on the joke and get the music they want without having to pay for it. We applaud the fact that the music industry, not too long ago a poster boy for an industry desperately in search of a business model, is fast becoming a hotbed for innovation, and that marketers are seeing value in artists for their branding as well as their musical talents.

Punk band Anti-Flag and useless.org released a limited edition tee shirt for Earth Day. The shirts are unwanted shirts that were gathering dust in Anti-Flag’s warehouse, that have now been repurposed with a new message. All proceeds fund a water and sanitation project in Sierra Leone.

See more details here.

It took Kutiman just two months to finish ThruYOU, the project that would make him both a musical pioneer and an Internet celebrity. Kutiman — a.k.a. Ophir Kutiel, an Israeli musician — took footage posted on YouTube by amateur musicians and mixed it together (drums, piano, synth, theremin, vocals, whatever he could find) into video jams of amazing funkiness, in the process creating an all-new art form that combines DJing, video montage and found art. Some of the players are just goofing around. Some aren’t even very good. What makes it work is the performers’ unjaded enthusiasm, the hypnotic effect of the looped samples and the sheer serendipitous grooviness that brings it all together as if it were meant to be.