The package contains no less than 3 different remixes from X-Press 2 and has already been given full support by the trio in their sets and charts, plus picked up on by a wide range of international DJs since first emerging at Miami WMC back in March. For this key release, content assets include streams of the track, images and a doc containing interviews with Hakan and Rocky for press/bloggers to use for quotations or in their entirity. All supported across Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and beyond.

There’s plenty more to come from SOUNDZ and it’s legendary house music-focused sister label, Slip N Slide, over the coming months. As online streaming, Twitter and mobile all become increasingly central to the promotion of new tracks, the importance of a good content generation and management package becomes ever more obvious.

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.

The story broke on Friday that Paris Hilton had been involved in a bit of a DJ booth bust-up at Miami’s Winter Music Conference. The first major account of the incident came from Paris herself in her MySpace blog, and her tale of the brawl involving her boyfriend Doug Reinhart was rapidly picked up by the celebrity media machine.

However DJ Steve Angello, an Alchemy client, had quite a different take on the events. So we swung into action with a rapid damage limitation campaign, with Matt putting out a statement to all key media.

By constantly monitoring all the online activity, we were able to not only respond effectively and fast to the negative news reports, but to turn the issue to our advantage, securing worldwide coverage with 150+ online stories in the process.

An interesting week for sure. And a totally genuine reason to use ‘Paris Hilton’ in the title of a blog post rather than being one of those poor, desperately misguided SEO scams. Result!

Seeing as Miami’s Winter Music Conference is now in full swing, we’ve been monitoring social media activity around the annual orgy of electronica. (Ok, so it’s a poor second to actually being out there. Poolside. In the sunshine. But it’s as close as we’re getting this time).

While there’s unquestionably more content than ever in terms of regular blogging, live streams (check out the new Awdio), pics and tweets going up ‘as it happens’, tracking this coverage down is a real hit and miss affair.

The experience highlights the shortcommings of Google when it comes to real-time and current events searching. Twitter search is better for catching links to live/fresh content, however the results are dominated by people saying ‘wishing I was at WMC’ as opposed to actual relevant media from out there.

Huge events like WMC really lend themselves to all kinds of digital media experimentation. When we reach a point where all the material can be easily found in one place everyone will benefit.

The Kyte player above is a project we worked on at Ministry of Sound during WMC 2008. I thought more people would be onto this kind of ‘live from my mobile’ footage this year, but phone livecasting is yet to capture the collective imagination (so far…) and they are all probably too busy enjoying their poolside strawberry daquiris right now anyway.