Fan sites RIP?

Andy Aldridge, who created one of my favourite fan sites, and whom I interviewed for the book (notes to appear here when I get round to it), is asking whether such sites are on the way out.

The fan site was the baby of the dedicated individual who lovingly hand-crafted huge lists of tour date archives and setlists, photos and audio, reviews and interviews painstakingly transcribed by hand from magazines and newspapers, and a discography that included the most obscure and pointless of releases just for the sake of being complete — only a real fan could possibly care that the album version of Superfreaky Memories was given away on a Mojo coverdisc…

I hope he's wrong, and here's why I think he may be.

As Andy explains, the means of production on the web have changed in the 12 or 13 years since he started his site. The fan sites that he sees on the wane are the labours of love by dedicated individuals like himself, the artisans. Web authoring these days is less the province of master craftsmen, and more the home-assembly flat-pack ethic of YouTube, MySpace, and, yes, blogs like this one that don't require too much knowledge and skill to run. (There are still as many, if not more, master craftspeople around, but they're less visible relatively speaking.)

My prediction is that the next phase of fan site development will see the development of more collaborative projects, whereby fluid groups of fans work together complementing each others' skills and filling in when someone drops out.

There are two big challenges facing the individually-driven fan site. One is the range of areas that one person has to cover and keep up with, from graphics to databases, and from coding to being able to write well and manage the online contributions of others. Not to mention the pleasurable graft of researching material to put on the site. All of these areas have seen big changes since the early days of the web (apart from writing well, perhaps), and its difficult for any one artisan to keep on top of all the issues.

The other challenge is that fan sites depend on individual commitment: having the time and tenacity to stick with the project and keep it evolving continuously. You do it for love, not payment. And without payment, any activity is at risk from changes in your life, like getting promoted into a job with longer working hours, bringing up a family, or just developing different interests. Over a decade or more, every individual feels the impact of these kinds of pressures at some time or other. The fact that Andy has kept A Head Full of Wishes going for 13 years without any break that I've noticed (and his son was born a few years into that period) is just the exception that proves the rule.

I think we're going to see that as wiki and workflow technologies mature, more fan sites will become group endeavours, managed by fluid, self-organising communities of fans. This Might Be a Wiki, the fan site for They Might Be Giants, is the kind of thing I have in mind.

A lot of the individually-developed fan sites have now grown communities of supportive fans around them. It's a matter of opening up the architecture of these sites to facilitate wider participation, which will make them more robust in the long term, and less prone to attrition from corporate competition in the ways that Andy describes. This will come about not just from the maturing of the technology, but of what I call the 'fan economy' as well.

Comments

[Andy]

Reading back my post it seems like a sad yearning for a past that probably wasn't that great, or maybe a groan of frustration at seeing the value of my website on the wane. In reality it's hard to find fault with way the web has developed over the last couple of years, and I agree that the fan run site of the future will need to be ready to collaborate and aggregate its way into this bright new world.

The need for a resource like A Head Full of Wishes, as it currently exists, is diminishing, the once unique content will soon be available (and maybe more accurate) elsewhere - the discography will be from Musicbrainz and probably will include those UNCUT coverdiscs, the news will be pulled in from feeds, the tour dates from last.fm, pictures from Flickr, the lyrics maybe from something like LyricWiki (assuming the rights holders allow it to exist), and the reviews will be pulled in from blogs all over the place...

Maybe I'll just be correcting the spelling mistakes on Wikipedia! I love what the Internet is becoming but it doesn't stop me from feeling sorry for myself occasionally!

[David Jennings]

Andy, I agree completely with you about the value of collectively-reviewed resources like MusicBrainz and LyricWiki. But I think you're selling yourself very short if you perceive fan sites like your own as being nothing more than an aggregation of feeds from these sources. You're missing the human elements (love, attitude, charm, exaggeration etc) that breathe out of every pixel of a dedicated fan site.

Example: compare Sleevenotez on Galaxie 500 (complete with biog from Wikipedia, product links from Amazon, discography from Musicbrainz and amusing photos of Galaxie 500 cars from Flickr), or Last.fm's profile with your own at A Head Full of Wishes.

Even as the boilerplate profiles get richer in their information and slicker in their design, the difference is pretty clear as soon as you spend three minutes or more exploring the site.

It's not an either/or decision we have here. Fan sites can coexist with the feed-based automated sites. Maybe the crappier fan sites will be discouraged and wither away -- we won't mourn their loss much -- but the great ones will continue to offer something to fellow fans that boilerplate profiles will never match.

[Colin]

Thanks for the interesting post. I'd certainly agree with David's comment that it doesn't have to be either/or. However, I'm very aware that the golden days of protacted (and sometimes all too fiery!) debate on artist-related mailing lists seems to have died a death, but again suspect that it's just a case of the discussions moving into other areas (MySpace, Last.fm, message boards, blog and YouTube comments, etc). Aggregation I think will be the key. Reading your post prompted me to finish off my own post about FoxyTunes Planet and MusicMesh which had been lying dormant in my drafts folder.

[David Jennings]

Yes, since the early 'golden' days, there's much more entropy as there are many more fans on the net and they spread their contributions liberally around the web -- and, yes, aggregation will be key to bringing them all back together again, making them coherent and as complete as possible.

I think there's an opportunity there for someone to offer fan groups some kind of community-building software (is that what they call 'middleware'?) that combines the functions of (a) aggregating feeds of 'wild' content out there on the net, (b) enabling new 'farmed' content (wiki-style), (c) chat and comments on (a) and (b) in a mini-/niche-social network style, and (d) the collaborative admin to maintain all of the above.

Also I've been thinking more about the kinds of things that fan sites offer that you don't get through MusicBrainz, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, LyricWiki etc. Is anyone aggregating setlists for different bands? (To answer my own question, there is setlist.com, but it's a tad, errr, eccentric.) I think the setlist may be one of the last bastions of the fan site. Unlike videos, lyrics or photos, there's no serious investment or revenue potential from setlists. No one really cares about them except fans -- but fans sure as hell do, and as long as there is 'artist metadata' like this that has little commercial value, fans will trade it via their own routes. Won't they?