Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Building cross-platform fan communities: the SwarmTribes pilot

"My biggest asset is not cash — it's a large, growing, devout fanbase," Imogen Heap was quoted as saying recently. She has nigh-on 1.5 million followers of her Twitter feed at the time of writing, and is often held as an example of how engaging with your audience can keep them interested and, as a happy by-product, keep them buying (though as the article makes clear times are tough even for her).

Can such fan-engagement and community-building strategies work for bands and artists aiming to establish a fanbase, or indeed for entertainment and sports properties more generally? If so, what technology platforms and services can best support these strategies? In particular, can mobile messaging encourage greater trust and intimacy among fans, or might it seem like an intrusion on a more 'personal' channel?

It's two and a half years since I first wrote about Swarmteams, the cross-platform messaging service that combines high tech with high touch. Its design is based on the way insects and other organisms self-organise with short, timely updates. And it's two years since I announced that I was evaluating a pilot project, SwarmTribes, which aimed to adapt that service for working with music bands and fans. Both the SwarmTribes pilot and my evaluation of it were supported by funding from NESTA.

Finally I am publishing the report of that evaluation and some audio interviews. In a nutshell, the project didn't go quite according to plan — as pilot projects are wont to do — and my challenge became one of explaining the reasons for that. I summarised the lessons in the report.

1. Test, revise and keep communicating the proposition
2. Keep the branding low-key until it has momentum
3. Keep platform options open
4. Explore multiple positions in the market
5. Build experimentation into planning and resourcing
6. Ease of use is critical to building momentum
7. Prioritise exemplars where concepts are hard to explain
8. Understanding the ecology of a new sector takes time

Or, as Nancy Baym put it, more pithily, "top-down planning of bottom-up phenomena is a trick!" The report elaborates these lessons in greater detail, together with case studies, analysis of the theory underpinning Swarmteams, and Ryan and Nancy's review of how the research literature on fan culture maps on to the theory.

Fan communities interview: Andy Aldridge

Chapter 3 ("Fans as Creators") of my book uses fan activities around Galaxie 500 as an example of the dynamics and evolution of a community of listeners. In particular I portray Andy Aldridge, who has played the central role in catalysing the community, as both a 'Savant' — one of the tier of super-fans (outlined here) — and an 'Originator' — one of the 1% of online community members who create original content off their own bat. [In the photo: Andy Aldridge (right) with Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500, Luna and Dean & Britta — used with permission, see original.]

I've been a member of the Galaxie 500 mailing list since 2000, but I'm very much in the 90% of 'lurker' members who just 'listen in' to the conversation without contributing. Since I moved to London four years ago, Andy and I have met at a few gigs (and Last.fm now lets us see each other's gig diaries), and he kindly spared me an hour or so over a drink in a West London pub last October, when I was writing the book. Below are my notes from that discussion.

Sun Labs 'Search inside the music' interview

Here is my third interview. I spoke to Paul Lamere (pictured left) just an hour or two after my chat to Zac Johnson. Some of their points overlap with each other: for example, Paul's Green Day/Weezer/Radiohead argument about collaborative filtering is pretty similar to Zac's, which he illustrated with the Beatles/Bob Marley/James Brown. However, there are also minor differences and nuances of emphasis, reflecting, perhaps, the perspectives of their employers.

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Paul Lamere works for Sun Labs in Boston, where he's the Principal Investigator for a project called Search Inside the Music. Unusually among industrial research labs, Sun's are funded from the corporate treasury, rather than product groups, which gives them greater scope for blue sky thinking, while still focusing on the needs of Sun's customers, who include a variety of high-profile music service providers.

Paul is interested in the whole music discovery process. Citing the long tail effect, he sees the challenge as providing the link between a million songs in the backroom and the mobile device in your hand. The ideal would be to have an option on that device that just says "play me music I like".

AMG Tapestry interview

Here's the second in my series of interviews for the book, with many thanks to Zac Johnson for his time and insights. As these interviews are not the primary source of research for the book, I'm not aiming to be comprehensive, but I'm very open to talking to anyone who'd like volunteer their views and describe work relevant to the book's themes, especially if these are different to the ones I've documented. I guess what I'm saying is that if you read this and think, "Hey, I've got something to say about that, so David should speak to me", please don't wait to see if I contact you, because I may not — please just get in touch.

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Zac Johnson has been working at All Media Guide (AMG) for six years. His focus is mostly on AMG's music site, AllMusic.com, though AMG also publishes the All Movie Guide and the All Game Guide, and Zac also has a view across the three sites. Recently his focus has been on what he calls "intelligent playlisting", through the Tapestry service (which I covered in part on my other blog).

Zac sees two main applications for intelligent playlisting. The first is music discovery: where you provide examples of the music you like and ask, "play me more stuff like this, but which I haven't heard before". The second is soundtracking, where you say, "I want to go driving/fishing/to the gym — give me a bunch of music that fits this activity (and which I may already know)".

Classic.tv Case Study

I'm doing a handful of interviews relating to different ways of discovering music, and how they fit into the overall new media ecology. I'm not sure yet how, or even if, these will be reflected in the book. But in the meantime, I will make a few notes available on this blog, starting with an interesting case study of an in-development initiative to provide a specialist on-demand classical music TV channel. Here are my notes, with many thanks to Frances Maxwell for the time and input she gave me.

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Will interviews with composers and performers, and other DVD-extra-style content, encourage people to find out more about areas of classical music that they don't know? Can on-demand videos of concert performance draw in an audience that might be wary of attending concerts themselves, safe in the knowledge that, with the video, they can always 'leave' if they don't like it? Frances Maxwell, Channel Producer at Classic.tv, which is currently in its development phase, is staking her time and energy on the answer to these questions being Yes.