Tonight their weekly Subliminal Sessions Voodoo Nights at Pacha in Ibiza plays host to hip hop legend P. Diddy.

The party is one of the key events of the summer on the island, that has already seen Kylie launch her album at Pacha, and ahead of BBC Radio 1’s annual blow out this weekend featuring Underworld.

Diddy is a Twitter legend, with over 2.7 million followers and daily tweeting habit. Check out his live (and very lively) feed below to keep up with the action if (like us!) you’re not luck enough to be on the island tonight.

Alchemy Content provides a stream of fresh news content for erickmorillo.com and subliminalrecords.com including artist interviews and release/event news, as well as managing all associated social media profiles and campaigns.

With Erick playing 5 gigs a week across Europe throughout August, on top of hosting the likes of Diddy at his weekly home in Ibiza, there is plenty to talk about with his fast growing online community.

Subliminal Records is also back in a big way as a 100% digital concern, releasing monster tracks each and every week. Check out this amazing video for Erick’s ‘Live Your Life’ single for a taste of the output and the Subliminal parties around the world.

FeedWind

So we’re only hours away from a general election result, but the influence digital media has played on it all won’t be decided until the dusts of history have begun to settle. The fact that it hasn’t dominated the commentary has been refreshing. Perhaps as a society we are finally getting over the novelty of being able to communicate ideas/images in real-time from/to anyone/anywhere?

Having said that, the breathtaking lack of digital media savvy from the Brown team in the ‘Bigotgate’ incident (breathtaking to Gillian “You’re joh-king!” Duffy at any rate) in not only leaving a mic on the PM, but then not thinking that a BBC Radio studio might just have a webcam set up, shows we’re still at a pretty basic stage.

Bizarre Limbo

Something as steeped in history and protocol as an election is bound to struggle to keep up with the pace of change. It feels like a bizarre limbo between different worlds to go to a polling station where a man with a pencil and ruler crosses off your name on a big list, while the person behind you updates their Facebook status to “…is voting” to the world from their phone.

If anything, being social online really has inspired younger people to engage with politics this time, even if it is inevitably in a more presidential, personality-driven way. No party may have mobilised support online in quite the dynamic method of the US Obama campaign, but this was never going to work like that in the UK. Acerbic wit on Twitter is much more our style. What real effect that has on voting patterns is debateable. A outright victory for Nick Clegg would seem assured when looking at the Twitter search feeds, with David Cameron’s Torys repeatedly mocked, yet the polls tell us they lead.

Unwritten History

Our society’s digital divide clearly remains wide, and particularly split by age and, of course, media savvy. But whether we notice it or not, this election has probably squeezed that gap a little more. Even if the blue rinse Conservatives are not part of the digital conversation, the way social media is changing the expectations of those who are is having a profound, unstoppable social effect.

The result of the election has implications for our media history too. Will the newspapers still be able to claim it was their desperate front pages ‘wot won it’? Will a hung parliament be said to result from tribal populism for the Lib-Dems invigorated by TV debates and Facebook’ed up youth? Are pollsters more or less accurate now we’re all wired up? All will be revealed tonight. See you on #ge2010 for the real-time action…

Electronic music’s most legendary mix CD series and its associated record label, Global Underground, has just completely relaunched its online presence, with Alchemy Content now providing regular editorial feeds and social media management for the brand.

GU was way ahead of the game in terms of building a passionate fan community on its site over a decade ago, but little much had changed about the basic site design over the years.
The brand new Globalunderground.co.uk has a completely fresh visual identity, a strong new Heritage section telling its history via those infamous City Series mix CDs, less intrusive but more comprehensive e-commerce for buying music and merchandise, plus new Tours, News and Forum sections to make the most of the strong community, rather than hiding it away as before.

The famously acerbic regulars on the GU forums have been quick to make their opinions felt, but the 2-way conversational approach of the new site is already paying dividends, opening up a real dialogue with the loyal fanbase to help provide the facilities they actually want. It’s a really exciting project that should see the label fully take advantage of today’s digital media tools to build upon its amazing international following.

Alchemy Content will be producing short regular magazine-style content and social media activity for GU, with the next big milestones being the return of the club residency at London’s Ministry of Sound on March 6th and the annual WMC party at Mynt in Miami on March 24th.

A key aim of all this ecleticism is to bring classical music to a younger audience by breaking away from some of the more stuffy conventions of such events. Therefore performers will join the audience for informal chats at the bar, everyone can bring drinks in to the main space and the music will be accompanied by striking visuals.

Having spent recent weeks working on the social media campaign for the series, and in the process interviewing many of the key artists, we’ve been inspired by the wide variety of creativity and enthusiasm there is towards removing these historical barriers.

From the passionate conductor Charles Hazelwood enthusing “saying someone who likes Drum & Bass won’t like Wagner or a fan opera of can’t appreciate R&B is bollocks” to Madonna’s favourite pianists the Labeque sisters speaking about creating their foundation to connect young people to classical piano music via graphics and videos, and composer Rolf Hind discussing his plans for balancing experiments in audience participation with the need not to appear patronising or gimmicky.

SUNNATA excerpt – Rolf Hind by AlchemyContent

These stars of the classical world are very keen to engage their music with a thoroughly contemporary audience, and judging by their approach, there is no reason why the crossover need be awkward or contrived. They are more in tune with today’s young audiences than many pop or obscure underground artists of the moment. And you’ll find them Twittering about it too…

Join the Reverb @ The Roundhouse Facebook Group for daily updates and links to some amazing examples of what’s in store. There’s also a group ticket discount and some events are free for under 26′s. For full program details plus info on the workshops and talks around the concerts, check the Roundhouse website.

We’re currently working with exciting new band Burn The Negative on their digital content strategy.

The guys are playing at festivals every weekend throughout the summer and are active social media users, so we looked for a way of making the most of their stories to grow their fan community.

We designed a new ‘feeds’ section on their website which pulls in anything posted on their Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc in a nice real time feed.

Lifestreaming like this is not exactly new, however many artists have leapt onto the social media bandwagon quite randomly, sending their fans off to Facebook groups or Twitter profiles, then blasting out/repeating promotional messages across all these networks (often next to ads for which they receive no revenue), without paying attention to their own ‘shop front’ on the web.

Not long ago, many even spoke of abandoning their expensive flash websites in favour of simply pointing everything to MySpace. In retrospect (and really, at the time too) this should never have seemed a good idea.

We think that using each network for a specific type of content, then filtering everything back through the central hub of an artist’s own website, makes much more powerful use of all these great tools. It also gives a better sense of a single fan community than idle, spammed and poorly branded pages elsewhere.

The feed allows us to easily pull out the photos and tweets from each road trip, using the cool Storytlr tool, to tell a short story that is instantly compelling, visually attractive and easy to use. It’s even geo-tagged so you can plot the bands travels on a full screen Google Map.

All digital content is best served up at the top level as a feed, but how this information is aggregated and presented is vital, otherwise quality content will simply be lost in all the noise.

With an ever growing array of social media platforms requiring a presence, artists and brands need to find new ways of bringing these together as part of a coherent strategy for their own websites and mobile apps. Then, rather than struggling to keep up, they can really start to connect with their whole fan community.

Burn The Negative’s Social Media Feed
Buy their new single, ‘Low’, here now