Pet Shop Boys Artist Sandbox
Pet Shop Boys are Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe and they are the UK’s most successful pop duo with 12 Top Ten studio albums and 40 Top 20 singles, including four number one records.
Their musical collaborations have included duets, productions or remixes for Dusty Springfield, Liza Minnelli, David Bowie, Elton John, Blur, Yoko Ono, Electronic, Rammstein, Madonna, Lady Gaga and The Killers. They have written or co-written songs for, amongst others, Shirley Bassey and Girls Aloud.
Pet Shop Boys’ visual presentation has always been strikingly original. Their record sleeves, mostly created in collaboration with designer Mark Farrow, would, in their early and influential use of white space, lead to a re-evaluation of the art of record and CD design. This keen visual sense informs everything presented under the group’s name, from books to tour merchandise to newspaper adverts.
The Pet Shop Boys want you to push the boundaries with an application that combines striking visual design with their cultural heritage and music catalog. Soundscape is a watchword... there are no other rules.
The assets available to you include a wealth of audio, video, artwork and imagery. Be inspired.
Read the developer pack.
Available Assets
- 71 audio albums, EPs, compilations, and multi-track singles including remixes, 2 live concerts, the Christmas EP and more.
- 52 official videos, including all iconic official music videos, album trailers, and more.
- 128 promotional videos, including behind the scenes footage, making-of documentaries, interviews, 30sec clips of official videos and more. Each promotional video comes with dozens of video stills.
- High resolution album and single artwork for all releases
- 8 sets of promotional photographs including archive photos, live performance shots, on-set photos, and more.
- 5 biographies and 29 news press releases detailing the history of the band.
- A plethora of webtools including logos, web games, web banners, postcards, posters, press ads and more.
Rights & Responsibilities
Working with the Pet Shop Boys Artist Sandbox provides a developer access to unique content, but this access comes with some rights and responsibilities.
As a developer you are free to use this content to hone and test your ideas, but the content may not be used in any commercial or real world application without permission from EMI and its partners. There is an approval process that must be adhered to for any application or service. Please do not invest your time building an application or service without first understanding this approval process. For more information, see the FAQ.
Access to Sandbox
To gain access to each sandbox, you must request it from The Echo Nest. After requesting access, we will contact you both to ensure that we have valid contact information, and to ensure that you understand the rights and responsibilities of using this data.
You will need to agree that you will not redistribute any assets you are granted access to. You will not be allowed to use these assets, in either commercial or non-commercial fashion, other than to develop prototypes, mockups and betas to be reviewed and approved by The Echo Nest and EMI.
Once access has been granted, you will receive a special key that can be used to retrieve the Sandbox assets described above.
This key grants access for prototyping use only.
Once you have access to the sandbox, you can review the API documentation, make calls to view the contents of the sandbox, and begin building your application concepts. We have an EMI Sandbox Developer Guide that will help you understand the API.
Approval Process for Application Development
Before you begin developing in earnest, you must provide a Product Brief describing the particular product you'd like to build. It is incumbent on you to provide this before spending too much time; application concepts will need to be reviewed by The Echo Nest, EMI, and in some cases by the artist themselves. This review and approval must happen before a product can be brought to market.
To sign up for a sandbox, you must first register for an Echo Nest API key.
To begin the approval process, please apply for access to the appropriate sandbox. You should then prepare a proposal, and submit it to emi-proposals@echonest.com.
Please keep your proposal to no more than 2 pages of 10 point text.
In your proposal, you need to detail:
- Sandbox/artist
- Description of application or service
- Specific content to be used
- Proposed platform(s)
- Target market (age, demographics, geographic-location, etc)
- Business model, and proposed price point if applicable
- List any similar applications or services already available/your competition
- The Echo Nest APIs to be used
- Other APIs to be used
- Estimated build time
EMI and The Echo Nest will need to review application concepts, betas, and final launch. Once your application is approved, EMI will be the publisher; you will need to make your source code available to EMI for review.
Commercialization
Applications or services that are created using EMI content should be commercial in that they should provide revenues for the partners involved; this includes you as a developer, along with The Echo Nest, EMI and other rights holders. This is the way you will be paid for your work. The business model is up to you, but make sure it is viable.
