The great thing about the internet is that it’s easy to connect to others. For an artist or label, it has never been this easy to talk to your audience and find out more about them. The same goes for people working on the same project; connecting is done in just a few clicks.

So while connecting with (or cyberstalking? ) some colleagues, I stumbled upon the blog of Federico, market analyst at official.fm. He found some tremendously cool applications for our embedded player. I hope you’ll be as inspired as I was when I came across this.

Click the pictures to see it all in action. You’ll need to scroll down a bit, since Fede Le Rico has decided to put a huge pic of a guy smoking a cigarette at the top of his blog.

Artwork blocks

How to do it yourself: take your album artwork. Chop it into 9 pieces (or any number that could make a square). Add the chopped artwork to your tracks in the order you desire. From the embedding screen, choose the artwork player and the size you want. Start copy + pasting! If you’re having trouble with the iframe, click the MySpace button and try it with that code instead (note: using that code, we’ll be unable to track detailed statistics for you).

Why not add a little Warhol to the mix?

How to do it yourself: check out one of the many pop art tutorials on YouTube to learn how to turn your pictures into pop art. Then start chopping and follow the steps from the previous description. Note: Fede put the tracks in a playlist and embedded the playlists (1, 2, 3, 4), so you can click next and you’ll still have the same pop art, but in different colours. Try it out.

Inspired by the Rubik’s Cube, Fede came up with another bright idea. Clicking forward or rewind will cause the blocks to change colour.

How to do it yourself: grab a Rubik’s Cube. See what colours are on there. Create a few images with just that colour and upload them as artwork to your tracks. Create a playlist with the same amount of tracks as colours (like this). Embed the playlist as many times as you want into a cube shape!

That’s it!

The great thing about laying out these players like this, is that it’s very inviting to interact with. For an artist or label, this means more listeners!

Let’s have a little contest here. Get to work, get creative and embrace that do-it-yourself mentality. Share your creativity with us via the comments, via Twitter (@officialfm) or send an email to bas@official.fm.

The best submissions will get blogged!

More from our team? Follow the team on Twitter via http://twitter.com/officialfm/team