According to Brand Week, Coca-Cola and Live Nation agreed upon a multi-year marketing and sponsorship alliance. As “the official soft drink of Live Nation”, Coke will develop marketing deals using the worlds largest concert promoter’s assets with a goal of selling more drinks and promoting concerts and artist.

This gives Coke the opportunity to tap into Live Nation’s vertical assets including its concert venues (House of Blues, others), artist relationships, VIP experiences, online ticketing, licensing and merchandising, music distribution and a growing list of artist-to-fan services. Live Nation benefits from Coke’s marketing muscle on media allowing it to do promotions  on cans to commercials.

Could the Coca-Cola and Live Nation alliance mean endorsements deals for Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Mariah Carey and others on the Live Nation roster?

According to Smule the developer of the I Am T-Pain iPhone app, the application has generated 300,000 downloads. With over 14,000 downloads a day, average users spent 66minutes with the app open and launched it 12.5  time. The app is priced at $2.99

Lets do the math with 300,000 downloads priced at $2.99 thats $900,000 in revenue. Record labels award plaques to artist for singles, albums and ringtone sales  I wonder if  Apple gives out plaques for the most apps sold.

Source: Mashable

London based photographher Dan Tobin Smith discuss the artwork cover of Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3 album.

This is one of the most anticipated albums of the year, and the first album Jay Z hasn’t appeared on the cover, how did you get involved in the project and what was the reasoning behind a much more sculptural approach?

Greg Burke, the creative director on the project at Atlantic records had seen the Letter ‘E’ I had shot with the set designer Nicola Yeoman and I guess he had it in the back of his mind when he was thinking of ideas for Jay Z’s new artwork for Blueprint 3. I think Greg and Jay Z had lots of ideas about what the album meant and it seemed to be about taking it back to the source, in terms of the music itself and then subsequently the artwork. For the album and the idea was it was very much about the music and all the things that make music. The 3 is represented by 3 bars which is of course the old way of writing ‘3’ so that seemed to work really nicely with the idea behind the album and the set design that evolved. We all liked the idea that the installation was almost machine like, like all these things were interlinked. That’s why everything is packed and jumbled together. Like it had kind of grown out of this corner.

I think it was a brave approach for Jay Z as all his previous albums have had him on them. I love still life, and the way I shoot is quite old school. It took 3 days to shoot, was all shot on 10×8 inch film, so the quality in the whites is fantastic, so much subtle tone. We worked long and hard on the colour work on the post and even in a single page mag advert I can see that effort. You could blow the image up to the size of a building and it would still hold up. It seems the album is about that old school crafted production so its nice that that same method went into the shoot.

You’ve worked on big ad campaigns in the past and as a result the work has been seen by a large audience. However, it might not have been talked about as much as this, what’s the reaction been?

The reaction has been really good. Kanye put it on his blog which was nice. I’m sure some people want to see Jay Z on the cover but at least they will talk about it. I love the idea of this kind of still life photography being so looked at. When they see the rest of the shoot for the singles I think it will grow on some of the people who were maybe less enamoured with it. There has obviously been comparisons to the letter E, some people not realising it was me who shot it! It was great that we shot it and the whole experience was great, everybody worked together really well.

Props: NahRight via ItsNiceThat

“Lower your f**king voice when you’re talking to me…”

After a VMA’s after party Sean “P.Diddy” Combs got into an altercation with a undercover police officer. Temper arose from both parties press play to check out the TMZ footage.

With the success of her past album “Good Girl Gone Bad” which sold 8 million copies worldwide with  three #1 singles, Rihanna purchased a  Hollywood Hills mansion valued at $10 million. The 10,000-square-foot home has 8 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, 30-foot high living room, a home theater, a pool, fitness room, a library, sauna and steam room.

I guess she’s been hiding her stacks in that umbrella ella ella a a a…

For aerial views of the home check below.