Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Rough notes: two recent music events

There are a few rules of thumb I use to filter what I write on this site. The first is that it must have some bearing on the themes of digital discovery in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, the book. The second is that I don't really do 'news' items here, unless I come across something that I believe deserves higher profile than it's likely to get from other channels. If you want news, you're better off going to a site that specialises: I use mediaor (built by Jason Herskowitz), which aggregates material from about a hundred music news and discovery sites (including this one!). Thirdly, I always try and add something new to the 'raw data' in terms of analysis or insight — or, when I'm lacking insight, attitude.

But often I don't have time to digest what I take in, or to compose my thoughts. That's life, and we all probably feel that way, so no complaints. But I'm always experimenting with ways to make something useful out of the undigested stuff, to provide a 'light touch' way of passing things on. The 'recently noted elsewhere' stream on the right of this page is one example of that, based on a subset of my Furl archive. Another thing I do is take rough notes at the conferences, lectures and other events I attend. I'm trying out using my Vox blog to make these available in unedited form. The notes are rough, messy and come with health warnings about accuracy. But have a peek and see if you find these two examples useful:

• Music Connected — AIM independent label event last week, including Paul Brindley's state-of-the-digital-industry review and a panel on ad-supported models;
• Celestial Jukebox: free streams or pipe dreams? — Music Tank event yesterday, with keynote from Last.fm and responses from labels, rights organisations and technologists.

If you're feeling nosey, there's also a mix of other personal stuff on the same blog (and if you become a friend of mine on Vox, there's even more embarrassing stuff).

Building swarms of true fans

I wrote last year about Swarmteams cross-platform messaging service, and its application for coordinating networks of fans. Swarmteams is running a pilot project for the music industry this year, supported by NESTA, and going under the name of SwarmTribes®.

For many musicians, getting the first 10 or 20 dedicated fans is easy enough — but when it comes to multiplying this number things become more difficult. If and when their fan base does increase, they're faced with the challenges of managing it.

Musicians need a communication system to interact with their fans, which is adaptable and instantly reactive. They need to engage with their fans, using a means of communication that can be scaled up. This is where Swarmteams can help.

I'm pleased to say that I'll be working alongside Swarmteams as researcher, reporter and evaluator for the project (also funded by NESTA, but as an independent project). And I'm looking forward to working with Nancy Baym of University of Kansas and her colleague Ryan Milner.

The core of the Swarmteams concept is the combination of a "back to nature" communication patterns and the latest cross-platform messaging technologies.

Fans write their own history

We're getting used to the idea that fans create some of the most authoritative accounts of the objects of their fascination. I've cited Andy Aldridge's work as one example of this, and the They Might Be Giants wiki as another. Recently it was reported that fans are more likely to refer to Wikipedia than MySpace as first port of call to find out about a band or artist.

But earlier this month Laura Hale drew my attention to another twist on this, in the shape of a wiki site she oversees, fanhistory.com. If you check the Nine Inch Nails page on this site, you'll get only the briefest history of NIN themselves, but this is followed by a much more detailed historical account of all the fan-led sites, forums, fan fictions and other initiatives that relate to NIN over the last ten years.

I asked Nancy Baym for her take on it, and she told me that this kind of meta-fandom is quite common. Apparently the fanfic people have a highly developed self-reflexive culture that includes a lot of generating databases/analyses as well as a sense of ownership of the term 'fandom'. Nancy herself, I found via this page on Henry Jenkins, is a 'fancademic'… For an introduction to online fan communities, I recommend her account of the Swedish indie fan scene.

Fan History covers not just music, but movies, TV, actors, cartoons, games and sports. The music section is patchy, to say the least, but, as Nancy pointed out to me, these things take a lot of time and work to build. As a small gesture, I've added details of a fan site I created. A couple of days ago, the Fan History site added a blog.

Short notice: speaking about Digital Discovery at EuroBlog 2008

Next week I'll be speaking at the EuroBlog 2008 Symposium in Brussels. The full programme runs from 13-15 March, and I'll be discussing the future of digital discovery on Friday afternoon (though the programme doesn't yet mention my name at the time of writing).

The Symposium is organised by the European Public Relations Education and Research Association and other speakers include David Weinberger, Philip Young, Neville Hobson and Steve Rubel.

How community builds audiences and makes discovery stick

At a music marketing event in London a couple of days ago, Scott Cohen, Co-founder of The Orchard (and on the left in the collage), presented a nice thought experiment that demonstrates the importance of community and narrative in making sure that discoveries stick in the mind of audiences. What if Simon Cowell (on the right in the collage) just cut to the chase on The X Factor and presented only one show in each series, saying "we've done the research, we've done the auditions, we've consulted audiences, and here's the winner"? The result would be the same — a winner like Leona Lewis (middle of collage) — but would this winner sell as many records? Answer: No, because it's the backstage access, the community that grows around the competitors, and the story of the winner's rise that engages the audience interest. They make an emotional connection with the artist and the song, and buy it to help it succeed.

Yet, as Scott went on to say, record labels do all the research and auditioning that X Factor and its equivalents do, but they hide it from view, and just say, "here's the winner we've identified: please buy their records". The solution to this is not to create some contrived competition for every new signing (personally I hate it when art gets turned into sport), but it may be to find other ways to involve the audience and give them "backstage" glimpses of artists that help people engage with them. Even a simple blog is a start.

Further reading: notes and bibliography

At university, my supervisor used to say that he would always read the references at the end of a research paper first. His reasoning was that this gave you an easily skimmable indication of both the coverage of the paper and its influences. I'm not sure that many people share this attitude, but if you do, you'll be interested to see that I've put both of the Notes and the Bibliography of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll online.

It's probably more likely that you'll find these useful if you're one of the growing masses who have read the book, and would like easy connections to the articles and books that I mentioned in it. The notes are all hyperlinked, so you don't have to copy out URLs from the back of the book, just click the link to go there directly. Ditto with the bibliography, which has links to further details of each book on LibraryThing and Amazon.com.

Money making scheme?

In a review of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll (the book) in this week's Spectator, Christopher Howse writes

Jennings, a full-time creature of the net, does not deny the popular delusions and madness of crowds that give some music releases undeserved success, but he comes up on page 64 with a practicable scheme for aggregating trusted criticism that should make him money, if someone takes him up on it.

What's the scheme? Well I could be a tease and say that you have to buy the book to find out. But that's not really my style. If I let you in on the secret, perhaps you can tell me something useful? Here's what I assume must be the paragraph in question:

What I’d like to do is compile my own chart. I’d like to be able to select a handful of my friends with whom I share different tastes plus a few other acquaintances, critics or DJs whom I count as tastemakers, and then see a chart aggregating what they have been listening to in the last week. Such a chart would give me useful, trusted pointers to the kind of music I might find interesting. It would also let me know when my friends and I have been listening to the same thing, which could spark further discussions. It is surely technically possible, and I hope someone will build it before long.

Now my question to you is: how do I make money off this?

Swarmteams: capturing the buzz of trusted fans

If you've read my book, seen my presentation slides, or have just been following this blog reasonably closely, you will know that I'm a sucker for biological metaphors for discovery. I use these metaphors particularly in connection with information foraging and with the idea of people 'pollinating' social networks by spreading the word about their favourites on their profiles and blogs with widgets and playlists.

So I was especially excited to be introduced to Ken Thompson of Belfast-based Swarmteams (thanks to Steve Moore), because he takes biological metaphors even more seriously, and more rigorously, than I do. Take a look at The Bumble Bee, Ken's essays and blog at www.bioteams.com for proof: it's packed with resources and insight into teams and groups in nature (a research theme that goes back at least as far as Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid in 1902).

The extra good news is that Swarmteams have just launched an application of their mobile- and online-messaging technology to help bands tap the energies of their most committed fans. The idea, which also closely resembles some of the themes that Howard Rheingold developed in Smart Mobs, is that the top 'alpha' fans of a band will mobilise other fans and friends by spreading the word about new gigs/promotions/offers via SMS, email or instant messaging. The Swarmteams technology has feedback to establish trust in these fan networks, so indiscriminate spammers will quickly be filtered out. But trusted and proactive fans will get rewards for their advocacy.

This application of Swarmteams is a real world realisation and test of some of the armchair future speculation I posted a few weeks ago, so it's really interesting to see how it will turn out. The alpha fans that Swarmteams aims to appeal to are also almost identical to the Savants and Enthusiasts described in other research I've drawn on. This is definitely a space worth watching.

Advice on Facebook Pages?

When Facebook announced the creation of Pages/Ads I thought this might provide a useful platform to promote my book, as complement to this blog for people who want a lightweight alternative to subscribing to my RSS feeds and suchlike. Maybe it's just a case of teething problems, maybe it's my unwillingness to RTFM, but I'm pretty disappointed with the experience so far.

Yes, I have successfully created a Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll page at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=8223107236, and I've added some content and applications. But I've been frustrated in several respects. Here are some:

Round up of reviews and talks

I've had a couple of nice reviews this month. Writing in the Wired music blog, Eliot Van Buskirk said I was "spot on when discussing how people discover music today" and that the book "is rife with amusing metaphors and nuggets… a comprehensive and enjoyable read." Also in the November edition of Brand Strategy, Macky Drese concluded an in-depth review by saying the book "is invaluable to anyone interested in the science of digital discovery and particularly so for anyone needing to harness that for any business application." (Unfortunately the latter review is only available in full to subscribers, but let me know if you want more details.) I haven't seen anyone really lay into me yet — perhaps I wasn't sufficiently controversial — but let me know if you have! Here are all the reviews I know of.

A text transcript of the MusicTank "Too Much Choice" discussion is now available to MusicTank members. (My reference to Fairtrade has been transcribed as one to the fur trade!) I understand the podcast of the event will appear here imminently (though, again, members only).

Last week's talk in Vienna was a lot of fun, and even survived the PC losing power and shutting down on me three-quarters of the way through (prompting one of Feargal Sharkey's several interventions during the day: "How's your tap-dancing, David?"). You can see my slides, including the ones I was unable to show. My abstract is already online via the project site. When audio (and possibly video) is added I'll update this with a direct link to it. The conference publicity was very well organised, and if you can read German, here are an interview with me (very good questions), a brief mention in Spiegel Online, and a blog account.

Next week I'm talking at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary, University of London — details on Facebook, Upcoming.

Independent versus indentured creators

What kind of deals should creators be striking with publishers, record labels and other intermediaries in an environment where their work is increasingly distributed digitally? What does it really mean to be 'independent' or 'unsigned' in terms of the licences you agree for your work to be copied?

I thought Andrew Dubber made a good distinction at the MusicTank debate here in London a couple of days ago, when he reacted strongly against the use of the term 'unsigned'. As he pointed out, if, as an artist or band, you sign up to the terms for having a profile page on MySpace, Bebo or Facebook, then you have literally 'signed' a licence agreement for the songs you upload there — and you can't strictly call yourself unsigned any more.

Instead Andrew suggest a distinction between the creators who license their work on a non-exclusive basis to multiple intermediaries — these he calls 'independent' — and those who sign over more exclusive rights in return for an upfront advance that they then have to earn back — these he calls 'indentured'. I think this is a useful way of thinking about the choices open to creators.

The New Seekers: article in The Spectator

My article, The New Seekers, is the lead in the Arts Section of this week's Spectator. It begins,

In Version 2.0 of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith will have a 'preferred customer' gold card for Googlezon, the corporation that results from the merger of the internet giants Google and Amazon. Google has completed its mission to organise all the world’s words, images and sounds and make them easy to find; and, once you've found what you want, Amazon sells it to you. By recording everything you purchase, look for, look at, listen to or read, Googlezon comes to know your tastes better than you yourself do. It serves you a personalised programme of recommendations and targeted promotions, all of these backed up with patented One-Click™ ordering. You need never again use your initiative to track down new favourites: the privatised Ministry of Information has anticipated your every need. [read on]

As you may recognise, this scenario, and the image above, are taken from the famous EPIC 2014 film. The article covers some of the same ground as the talk I gave at the RSA today — the podcast and slides from which will be on the RSA's site shortly. [Update, 12 October: Andrew Collins has blogged some great comments on our RSA discussion, dig those links.]

Meanwhile Jon Sobel has posted a meticulous review of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll for BlogCritics magazine. He's mostly favourable (and indeed generous) but takes me to task for ignoring "political matters like net neutrality, privacy concerns, and censorship". He's justified in pointing that out. This latest article doesn't fully address those matters, and could still be accused of having a "sunny disposition" (oh, if only you knew me!) but maybe engages just a little more with the political dimension. See more reviews.

The creative crowd: discovery and anarchy

I'm preparing materials for upcoming talks I'm doing, and my presentation at the Creative Clusters conference — in the Creative Crowd session — requires a 500 word summary of what I'm going to say.

In theory I ought to be able to compile such a summary from stuff I've written before. In practice, in the time it takes to find the right excerpts, then edit them so they fit together and fit the audience, I might as well start from scratch. Plus there is the possibility that, in forcing yourself to improvise, you come up with a better way of expressing an idea that has previously eluded concise articulation.

So that's what I did. I'm not sure how successful it was — feel free to tell me in the comments. Since I'm speaking to an audience primarily concerned with policy and the 'creative economy', I thought I'd emphasise the anarchic nature of discovery and Web 2.0 to see how that grabs people. My summary is below (click the "continue reading" link if you're reading this on the home page).

Meanwhile a quick mention that I apparently can invite two guests for next week's MusicTank discussion — featuring Tom Robinson, Andrew Keen, Paul Brown from Pandora, me and others — for free. If you'd like to be my guest (it's in London), please add a comment or get in touch

Branded discovery?

I just came across a series of events branded by San Miguel called "Hidden Depths", which "aim to target people who like to look that little bit further" — see the website and Facebook group.

There's a sense of both exclusivity and discovery about these events: they're for people who are, or would like to be, in the know. (At first I thought that asking for my date of birth before giving me access to the website was taking exclusivity a bit far, but I think this may be connected with regulations for promoting alcohol.) From the website:

San Miguel Brand manager Anne Morrow said: "We decided to create these events in order to spark people's curiosity about San Miguel, since it's known as a refreshing, premium Spanish beer — but it also has a depth of flavour which consumers really like. By showcasing the hidden depths to these artists, people get to experience a unique night out which also shows the benefits of looking beneath the surface."

Businesses have been branding the routes to discovery for some time — as with Bacardi B-Live Radio and MyCoke, and all the way back to the first commercial radio stations. San Miguel seem to be aiming specifically for the leading edge of discovery, being in the vanguard. Will this work? Given what I call Jennings' Law, that people make most of their discoveries elsewhere, I am not sure how easy it is for a brand to 'own' the experience of discovery. What do you think?

Universal access to all media will kill our culture: discuss

In time-honoured tradition, the final chapter of my book rounds things off by asking where we're heading with the latest wave of technology and how it may affect the prospects for renewal and development in our culture. I quote three white men of varying stripes and ages — Joe Boyd, Noel Gallagher and John Harris — who each give a different take on the "things ain't what they used to be; something has been lost" riff.

In an article last year, John Harris worried that popular music was running out of steam, with the rate of change slowed to a crawl:

Older readers will attest to the fact that 1977 was very unlike 1967: in the intervening years — and this is somewhat crude, but bear with me — psychedelia turned to prog, which was in turn avenged by punk, while glam-rock strutted about and the music industry inaugurated the age of the singer-songwriter. This year, by contrast, isn't that different from 1996: Blur and the Gallaghers are still here, the cranked-up guitar remains king, and it's still just about acceptable to walk around with a Britpop haircut (I should know — I've got one).

Today Harris is back on the same theme, and this time he's blaming the over-30s for not acting their age:

That's right: rock is dead, or it definitely might be. One or other must be true, because Glastonbury wasn't very good. The main problem, to hear some people talk, was the preponderance of those responsible for our Great Rock Crisis: people over 30, who are apparently buying most of the tickets for great musical events, taking the kids and a hamper, and thereby ruining their essential ambience.

The hardest part is getting noticed

I'm always trying to find new, snappy and pithy ways to explain why discovery — the central issue my book addresses — is a "problem" that needs addressing, and why it's particularly become an issue in the last few years. Bob Lefsetz (pictured) is often pretty snappy, and this excerpt, which begins his latest broadside, states the issue as it applies to major labels in the US:

The hardest part is getting noticed.

There are numerous media competing for the audience’s mindspace. And numerous musical enterprises/records as well. So, the plan must center first around getting attention, not getting paid.

In the old days, the major labels controlled a finite landscape. They had what was perceived to be the best music, and they owned both radio and retail, which were the major ways of learning about music. So, there were few companies with few products fighting over little mindspace. Furthermore, you had to buy the product to experience it.

Now we live in a land of abundance. There are tens of thousands of acts and albums emerging/coming to market every year, the majors don’t necessarily have the best, and just about all of them can be experienced at the listener’s leisure, on the Web. The question is how do you get people to listen?

If you’ve got a pop confection, the major labels are the place to go. They control the old outlets, which can reach the most people most quickly. The only problem is the old outlets, the mass media, are only interested in the mass market items, and a great percentage of the public isn’t even paying attention. So, even if you’re the beneficiary of a carpet bomb campaign, a great percentage of America will still be clueless as to who you are, and won’t care that they’re out of the loop, might even be proud of being out of the loop. So, the question becomes how to reach these people.

Later on part of his solution runs, "So, how do you spread the word? You don’t. Your audience does." Read on for the full analysis.

Tools for online discovery

I wrote in my last post about Music of Interest as a tool that aids the process of 'free range' discovery as you roam around the net, picking up clues and pointers about music you might want to explore in greater detail. There's an encouraging growth in these kinds of tools, each of which is modest in the sense that it seeks only to do one or two things, but to do them well.

I find out about a lot of these tools by reading Jay Cross, who has done a lot of spadework in mapping and defining the field of informal learning in recent years. (Jay's focus is on learning related to the workplace, but informal self-directed learning clearly applies even more in relation to our hobbies and leisure interests.) Jay is also an inveterate tinkerer with the latest online applications and widgets and posted recently to demonstrate the use of Trailfire for creating annotated journeys through the web.

Introducing Jennings' Law

At yesterday evening's Music Tank event in London someone who'd just received an advance copy of my book mentioned that they'd seen the heading "Jennings' Law" in the table of contents, and asked me to explain.

Initially I was a little shy about this law (it was the publisher's decision to give it it's own subheading and include it in the ToC); but that's appropriate because the lesson of Jennings' Law is one of humility. The law states simply "people make most of their discoveries elsewhere." In other words, no one is ever going to build a system, a service or a platform that has a monopoly, or anything close to monopoly, as a source of discoveries. Not Apple, not News Corporation, not Googlezon. In some ways you could say that the Net itself is as close as we're going to come to the ultimate discovery platform, but even the Net will never dominate our paths of discovery completely — see yesterday's post about discovery by simply walking the streets.

Cumulative advantage versus the wisdom of crowds

There's an interesting article in Sunday's New York Times about how we arrive at collective judgements of cultural products.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will. And indeed that’s pretty much what they try to do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren’t studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audience.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the "best" of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

It's written by Duncan Watts, one of the Columbia University professors whose research on an artificial market for unsigned bands I draw on at some length in the Wise and Foolish Crowds chapter of the book.

Why I'm writing this

A press release from the Digital Media Association in the US runs as follows:

Nearly 60 percent of consumers report that they are listening to more music since they started using an online service. The 1,008 consumers surveyed enjoy Internet radio, subscription music services, and pay-per-download music services, including AOL Radio, Yahoo! Music, iTunes, Rhapsody, Zune, Urge, Napster, Pandora, Live365 and others.

The vast majority of online music service users report that enjoying music over the Internet has expanded their musical tastes, allowing them to discover new artists and explore new music genres. About 25 percent reported having discovered a lot of new artists, while more than 60 percent of consumers surveyed say they have discovered some new artists. Nearly 7 in 10 online music consumers are enjoying new genres of music since listening to online music services.

According to the survey, online music listening has increased music fans' overall music discussion with friends and co-workers, with more than 35 percent now talking about music more. And, more than 75 percent of online music consumers report they have recommended a particular service to a friend or co-worker.

Phew, that's a relief. Frankly, if any of those trends were not happening, the case for me writing my book would be pretty slim. Discovered via Digital Media Wire.

Wikis versus blogs as cultural commentary

(photo © Robin Holland, 1999)

Two years ago I created a wiki site about 69 Love Songs, my favourite album. I had in mind an evolving resource where people would add new perspectives on each song, so that it would grow in time to become a comprehensive guide to their many allusions, references and influences. At the time I first published the site, I wrote an account of its development and my hopes for it.

I've had a lot of positive feedback on the site in private and in public. However, as a wiki — a collaborative work — the site has been a relative failure. The inspiration I drew on was as much Simon Winchester's story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, involving the co-ordination of the distributed work of several hundred Victorian volunteers, as Wikipedia. But the number of contributors is probably still in single figures, and 95% of the updates over the last two years have been done by one person: me.

This is a practical account of when and how to use a wiki for cultural reference sites, and when to consider other approaches. It accompanies a more abstract article on my main blog.

New book structure

If you've been tracking this site for a while, you may notice that the chapter-based categories for each entry have disappeared. That's because the structure of the book has changed… Well, I did include disclaimers in the original announcement to say that it might change, and how prescient that turned out to be!

When the structure is definitely tied down and the book is nearing publication, I will go over all the entries here and assign them to categories for each book chapter. But it seems daft to do that now, in case things change again.

The Blogs in the title

The title of the book is Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, but the amount of coverage of blogs per se will be relatively small. I use 'blogs' to stand for the more general growth of user-generated content (including wikis, forums, photo-sharing etc) and its cultural implications.

These implications in turn affect the circulation of word-of-mouth recommendations, the development of 'buzz', and thus some of the ways in which people discover new music, films or other entertainment.

User-generated content is also an ugly term, but I think it's useful and important to be as clear as possible about what I mean by the culture of blogging/user-generated content. Here are my suggestions for some defining characteristics. So for 'blogs', please read:

Book announcement

People have access to vastly more music, video and other entertainment than ten years ago. In the case of music, record companies are releasing twice as many new albums per year. Not only that, but some are 'rescuing' old and deleted tracks for release in the digital marketplace.

So how do people find out about all this material? How do they judge what they might like? I'm writing a book that addresses these questions. The title is Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll: Who knows what's next in media and music in the new era of digital discovery and the download culture (the lengthy subtitle may change). It will be published in 2007 by Nicholas Brealey Publishing, UK publishers of John Battelle's The Search and many other titles on digital enterprise and learning.