Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Finding the sound that fits the vision

Here's a short story — the fifth in my series of future scenarios from the first draft of my book, which got edited out of the published version — about a casual music listener trying to find some music to go with a home video, and being led through the minefield of finding music that you can use legally on your soundtracks. [I found the picture on the left on Flickr: it's by quasimime, and used under a Creative Commons licence.]

There were several things I was trying to combine in this scenario, aside from the licensing question.

• I wanted to describe the experience of someone who doesn't care a lot about music, and just sees it as a means to an end. Most of us who write about music discovery are pretty fanatical about it ('savants' in the classification I use), and have to remind ourselves that not everyone behaves like us.
• The idea of building up a collection of digital music almost by accident: the download-era equivalent of acquiring lots of promotional CDs and the ones they stick on the covers of magazines.
• Having a search tool that sorts through this slurry of inconsistently tagged music files and returns something reasonably coherent from this Everything is Miscellaneous mess. Of course, the tool could equally well have been searching the miscellaneous grab-bag of music files online, as SeeqPod does, but for this story you perhaps have to imagine that the Englobulators have won and closed down SeeqPod and its siblings.
• Finally I wanted to show search and recommendations for using music instrumentally as an accompaniment for other activities. My hunch is that recommending music for specific purposes — whether as a video soundtrack or for a gym workout — is going to be more effective and more widely used than for the general, and more ambitious, purpose of finding your next favourite band. This doesn't apply only to music: I wish Flickr and iStockPhoto had better search and recommendations to help me find images to accompany presentation ideas.

End of introduction. Continue reading for the story.

Film festival rendez-vous

In the early thinking and drafts of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll the idea was to feature some specific scenarios (or fictional use cases — call them what you will) that showed how new types of discovery might take place in new social and technological settings. These speculative scenarios provided "possible futures" — that is, not firm predictions. The stories didn't work so well in the context of the book, but, retrieving them from the "cutting room floor" so to speak, I hope they might work on this blog.

The social element is central to most of my stories: how tastes and preferences influence who we hang out with, and how who we hang out with influences our discoveries of new material. This is the other side of the coin from highly personalised automated recommendations, and the idea that everyone will have their own individual media cocoon with little shared experience.

As services like Twitter and Facebook integrate mobile social networking with other online data, we should see more spontaneous smart mobs forming. My hope is that these will make concerts, film screenings, gallery viewings and even lectures more exciting and attractive by adding the scope to make new friends. Through Last.fm's events, I can already see which people are attending many of the same gigs as me. Current research is exploring ways to use Bluetooth so that we can find each other, if we want to be found, inside the venue.

So here is a scenario I wrote for the first draft of the book that envisages the possible uses to which such services might be put, and the concerns people might have about them. It's based on a tourist visiting a film festival — there is an annual Tallinn film festival, but I've never been there, and this story is entirely fictional.

I have several more future discovery scenarios that I'm happy to publish here. Please let me know if you find this useful, and suggest how I could improve the presentation of such stories.

Earning commission on word-of-mouth recommendations: Amazon aStores

Word-of-mouth is a powerful and effective way of promoting products. You can't control it, but can you encourage it and harness its energy?

One of the things that makes word-of-mouth effective is that it's perceived to be based on authentic and commercially disinterested opinion. So, as soon as you sense that I stand to profit from you acting on my recommendation, you become more wary of my recommendation and less likely to act on it. (I've written about this in the context of blog marketing on my DJ Alchemi blog.)

In the music area, a couple of initiatives have started, with mixed receptions. Weedshare has been running a scheme for several years now, which encourages you to share digital music files with your friends by email, instant messenger or your website. They can listen to each file three times for free, but then have to pay to enable unlimited plays. If they do pay, you get a commission. It seems like a transparent model, and fairly simple in broad outline (though I think it gets complex in the details). The Digital Music News blog and associated comments give a mixture of opinions. It's fair to say that Weedshare hasn't exactly taken off and hit the mainstream, but that's possibly because (a) it has no major label music, (b) it uses Windows Media files (incompatible with iPods) with DRM, and (c) on the receiving end, illegal peer-to-peer sharing is more attractive, because there's no payment.

Music and movies: cross-content recommendations

The latest prototype from the prolific MusicStrands labs is a tool for recommending music tracks and artists, based on a movie title, as described here. So you type in your favourite films, and MusicStrands gives you a list of tracks and a list of artists that it thinks you might like. And if there are any photos on Flickr that are linked to the film, it shows you them as a bonus.

The first things I try to do with any prototype are figure out how it works and test its limits to breaking point.

Behaviour patterns in collecting music and video

I'm looking at patterns in how people collect different media, and how collecting relates to repeat listening/viewing/using. In the UK, estimates of the average number of CDs in a collection vary between 126 and 178 for men, 135 for women. Are there any similar figures for DVDs or games, or for US markets? I'm still looking.

I'm also doubtful about whether reliable figures exist for the number of digital downloads in collections. There was a report last year indicating that the average number of tracks on an MP3 player is 375, with 50% of players having fewer than 100 tracks. But this is a fast-moving, unstable area, clouded by allegations that 'most' tracks on players are 'stolen', which can't make it any easier to get reliable reports from users. [Update, 22 May 2006: Paul Lamere has just posted some interesting stats on the average size of iTunes collections, and the (high) proportion of tracks that have never been listened to.]