Experiential Product Design

Music 2020 — Transmedia Storytelling in Music

I'm beginning to plan my MA thesis for 2014 and these are my first ideas about what I'm doing. As this feels a long time in the future, and doing this will take me a long time, I'm betting on some of the most visible macro trends to hold true for the next 2 years.

I am assuming that in the attention economy, a single type of media (just an album, just a video) is no longer sufficient to capture the full attention of a viewer for a prolonged time. A media product needs firstly to be present, but also high quality and attractive across channels, be it the music store, the app store, or the movie storie. A single brand, best memorable as a character, because people relate to people. Music as the tentpole, because music creates the deepest emotions of all media. I propose a transmedia album that spans the audio, the visual, and the textual, and the participatory, where viewers can play a thematic song themselves, complete with a social network, that facilitates fans to connect with each other.