Google Earth

The Chemical Brothers have launched Midnight Madness with Google Earth – a strange mashup that takes fan videos and plots them on Google Earth. 

The idea is that you can surf around the world with Google Earth and see what Chemical Brothers fans are up to. 

Here’s the link to view the project (requires Google Earth).

I’ve been impressed by a lot of musicians’ new media projects, but Midnight Madness isn’t that successful. It takes a long time to download Google Earth, and, once you’ve loaded up Midnight Madness in it, it’s cumbersome to use. 

If you give it a try, let me know what you think.

NIN has released another interesting bit of Internet media for its most recent release, The Slip (our review).

They plotted the downloads of the album onto Google Earth, so you can browse interactively and see where the Nine Inch Nails fans are:

We’ve had just over 1,400,000 people download The Slip from our site since its release May 5th (that number represents individual people, and excludes multiple downloads from the same order), and this map displays ONLY downloads that came directly from us.

NIN is doing some pretty geektacular stuff and exploring a lot of interesting ways to use Internet media to promote their music.

If anybody can connect me with their tech gurus, let me know. I’d love to ask them some questions about what they are doing!