Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

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.

Hypocrisy that gives music bloggers a bad name

I've tried to define some of the characteristics that make up 'blog culture', including the ethos of a gift economy, where people are rewarded by recognition and 'in-kind' returns rather than cash, and the focus on the "individual, authentic voice". I've also been one of many to be wary of attempts to undermine this authenticity by marketers.

Now — prompted by an example of pretty crass behaviour by a blogger distributing bootleg recordings — I'm beginning to wonder if my belief in that authenticity may have been a little naive in the first place — a bit like the old white bicycles schemes that started with great intentions only to be undermined by the unscrupulous.

We all know that some artists and bands give explicit or tacit support to fans trading live recordings for profit. I guess the publishers may not always be happy about this, but that never seemed to stop the Grateful Dead. So far, no problem. But some artists make it clear that they object to this, and ask audiences explicitly to refrain from recording live shows.

So here is a blogger that has posted a recording of Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists, with photograph, including a recording of the "statement of policy regarding no photos and no recordings". The "spread the love" text above is taken from this same blog site.

Fripp responds in his online diary:

Mr. Blogger seeks to present himself as a provider of music, a supporter of music & of particular musicians, unconstrained & unmotivated by commerce. This is a lie. He does not have the authority to give away our work. He attracts attention to himself, not for & from his own work & efforts, but by taking & using the work of others, not only without consent but with knowledge of their disapproval. Mr. Blogger is using our work as currency in a scheme of trading & attention-gaining, commerce of a different guise. He demonstrates an example of dishonesty dressed up in fine clothes, and presents himself for public commendation.

The architecture of digital discovery

This graphic is a draft from a presentation I'm preparing on the themes of the book, showing how Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll provide a kind of architecture of digital discovery.

• The Net is the stuff that goes on under the surface: things like the algorithms that generate Flickr's "interesting" page, creating some order out of chaos just by tracking patterns of viewing and interaction.
• Blogs are the human level of personality, conversations and word-of-mouth: how people discover culture through their friends' opinions, and how tastes 'rub off' as they make new friends and eye up potential partners.
• Rock'n'roll is the attitude that keeps things fresh and ensures that, just as mass opinion is swarming towards the latest Coldplay or Kanye, an influential minority are breaking from the conformity of the crowd and uncovering new and more challenging areas.

As publication of my book approaches, I've put together a reviews page to collate all the comments about the book that I'm aware of. If you know of any that I've missed, please let me know. And if you've read the book, please add your own reviews via the comments or via one of the Amazon pages (amazon.co.uk, amazon.com).

IODA PROMONET support for bloggers

Music bloggers have developed a code where they post a track from an album they review, usually without permission, but on the grounds that (a) the track is available for download for a limited period only, (b) links are provided to stores where you can buy the album, and (c) if rights owners object, the track will be removed. Distributor IODA is aiming to work with the grain of this bloggers' practice by making it easier to blog their labels' music with consent. I've registered as a blogger on IODA's PROMONET. I haven't found a lot of music I want to blog about, but first impressions are pretty good. Here's an example from a recent Tom Zé album. PROMONET gives me all the code for the column on the left, which I just had to cut and paste. As a registered member, it also enables me to listen to 30-second samples of all the tracks on the album. Of course it's not quite as liberal as Creative Commons licensing for these tracks, and IODA retains some control by virtue of the tracks being hosted on their server. But you can't really begrudge them that, since they are bearing the bandwidth costs and understandably would like to be able to monitor volumes of downloads and conversion to sales. And the downloads are unprotected MP3s.

Download "Cara-cuá - Revolta Nagô-Oió 1830" (mp3) from "Danç-Êh-Sá" by Tom Zé Tratore Buy at iTunes Music Store Buy at eMusic Buy at Rhapsody Buy at Napster Stream from Rhapsody More On This Album

Rise of the artist site

The flipside of sites run by fans is of course sites run by artists, and yesterday the New York Times ran a feature — Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog (hmmm, not a bad title; I wonder if I could adapt it…) — about what it refers to as 'B-list' artists and how they communicate with fans online. Leading with the story of Jonathan Coulton's successful DIY singer-songwriter blog, the feature reports,

Along the way, [Coulton] discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the "you rock!" variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton's love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he's now feeling guilty about being rude.

I'm interested in the different ways artists have of lifting the veil about their work and their creativity. Seven years ago I worked with the theatre/performance company Forced Entertainment on an educational CD-ROM they were making about their work. I asked them why they had decided to put so much time and effort into this: why not just create another performance work instead? The answer I got back was something along the lines of "if we don't create a discourse to frame and explain our work [which can at times be 'difficult'], no one else will."

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.

Bandwagon blogging

I think we're going to see more of this kind of thing. Bandwagon is offering free accounts to bloggers who post their logo (see left), link to their site (see previous sentence), and send a trackback to their blog. This offer lasts until 22 February, so if you're a blogger and want to take advantage of it, be quick about it. (I found it via cityofsound.)

In my book (sorry, you're going to get sick of that phrase if you keep reading this blog, but it's part of the deal here: I have to promote it) I speculate about a scenario where, instead of gig promoters handing out flyers saying "£1 off with this flyer", they will blog on MySpace etc saying "£1 off with a trackback to this blog". It's a handy and easy way to enlist your audience as co-promoters. In fact, I suspect this may not be a future scenario; it may well be happening already. Does anyone have any examples they could point me to?

I'm also interested in how these kinds of blog promotions affect the much-vaunted authenticity of 'blog culture' — something I've written about before here and here. The you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours deal offered by Bandwagon is not quite as directly commercial as, say, PayPerPost (which only recently started requiring bloggers to disclose the payments they receive), but it clearly introduces the scope for bias and dilution of authenticity.

As for Bandwagon's service itself, it's a useful model. I'm not sure whether I'll use it, as it requires iTunes 7, and I've avoided upgrading to that since my creaky old iMac struggles even with iTunes 6. I use an MP3tunes locker, which works for backing up your music files from any version of iTunes and any platform.

Buzz vertigo from music blogs

There's a nice article in last Sunday's LA Times about blogging and buzz in keeping tabs on the best new music. It's right up the same street as my book:

My daily perusal of MySpace and the blogosphere, not to mention the piles of CDs under my desk, was seriously threatening my ability to focus on any one new release. There were just too many to absorb, all with tags attached declaring them the most downloaded, most discussed and most anticipated hit of the minute…

It's become difficult to distinguish between real critical interest and the momentary attention of Web surfers. And it's hard to tell when real fans, not an intern clicking a button, are upping the numbers on interactive websites like MySpace and YouTube.

To get some perspective on my own buzz vertigo, I consulted with pop geeks of all kinds, from the solo bloggers to major-label execs. The conversations left me feeling that, while everything in pop is new, it's old again too.

I actually got a new album sent to me, unsolicited, a few weeks ago, presumably in the hope that I would blog about it. It's the first time that's happened, and I have to admit I was rather flattered. Many thanks to Colin Donald of Futurescape for tipping me off about the article.

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.

Jazz blogs curate a 'lost' period

(image © Lars Klove for the New York Times)

There's an interesting article on jazz blogs in yesterday's New York Times (registration may be required shortly), which touches on several themes that I cover in the book:

• the use of blogs to articulate fan opinions and enthusiasms about music;
• the use of wikis to collate multiple perspectives and provide a collective view;
• the combination of these 'bottom up' media to re-animate neglected works (the Long Tail);
• obsessions with lists.