The Chemical Brothers

In 2007 we were given our first attempt at developing the official site for The Chemical Brothers. We decided to embrace the UGC trend, integrating Youtube, Flickr, and a special shoutbox… I think we were the first people to publish UGC tags for a specific gig – something now practiced by the lovely people at Last FM. We put some stuff onto a Google map, following which we received a phone call from Google who wanted to feature our work in their marketing. That was a good phone call. The same year we won the BT Digital music award for the site.

We conceived and developed a Facebook app for the track ‘The Salmon Dance’ which managed to make it into the Facebook top apps – it was all about throwing one of your friends into a fishtank – all very silly. For the single Midnight Madness we developed a mashup using Google Earth which was then turned into a video. This was featured on the Google Earth Blog.

2010 sees the launch of the new Chemical Brothers Album ‘Further’ and with it a new website. Launched in April 2010 this one takes it to the next level. Aside from working for such an awesome band, one of the best things about working on sites for The Chemical Brothers is that we aren’t really given a brief. We know what the site has to do and as such we know the best way of making it happen.

There is a new section on the site called “chemmunity” which includes a realtime UGC map so that you can see what UGC is being added, where, when and by whom. The site publishes tags for each release and allows users to comment on releases via Twitter. The new live section integrates with Last FM and allows users to add themselves to each gig through their Last FM account. The chronicles section has been completely reworked and now resembles a sequencer view, displaying content that spans the past 17 years.

The forum needed to be migrated to a new one – we are now using this super new forum called IP Board – which is very customisable and loads better than anything else out there. The reaction from users confirms this – they love it!

There’s loads more to discover, so check it out! Essentially the whole site is one almighty mashup that loads almost entirely over AJAX and works perfectly on an iPhone too, we are happy with it.