Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

The professionalisation of amateur fan production

Fans are themselves major producers of resources that aid discovery — for both committed and casual or new fans. This a theme that I've returned to a few times on this blog (example). In the published version of my book I wrote about the tensions that might arise if this 'amateur' fan production continues to get more 'professional':

[S]ome fan economy endeavours are approaching the status of cottage industries, and have a high profile in their niche areas. They may play a significant role in charting parts of the Long Tail that mainstream media fail to reach. Commercial interests may want to license the materials that fans have curated and created. If this happens, or if what fans have built directly helps to lift artists and creators… out of the Long Tail to reach a larger audience, they may be justified in expecting a non-trivial share of the earnings that result.

This is the point where the fan economy bleeds into the traditional media economy. There may be opportunities for some… fans to go semi-professional if they show that they can build a credible audience or network of other fans, sufficient to attract sponsorship or merchandising deals. This could become a popular route to starting or building a career in the wider media sector, but it will also cause friction and disagreements where it is perceived to threaten the non-commercial ethos of hard-line blog culture.

The first draft of the book had an extended scenario to illustrate both the creep of professionalism and the tensions it brings. I can't write narrative or dialogue well enough to pass muster for publication in a book, so that's why this ended up on the cutting room floor, along with my other fictional scenarios. But in the hope that it might still be of interest to some, here it is.

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.

Promoting events and festivals in a 2.0 world

It's been a while since I posted one of the future scenarios that got cut out of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll the book, so here's the fourth in the series.

The premise is that social networks, customer relationship management and audience profiling will converge, creating new opportunities for obscure and niche events to develop a good audience.

As with my earlier TV listings scenario, this one is presented in the form of a fictional interview. I must thank my friend Eric Namour, who, among a wide portfolio of jobs, is half of the London experimental music promoters [no.signal]. Eric took time to have lunch with me and explain a bit about how he works and builds relationships with performers and audiences. The speculative projections from his experience, and any lack of plausibility in them, are my responsibility.

The photo is of Tony Conrad performing at one of [no.signal]'s biggest events to date last summer, and is licensed under Creative Commons by Yeled.

---

How did you get into this line of work, and how have you seen it change?

Live performance is the arena where you get to see an artist evolve before your eyes, as they experiment or improvise. They interact with the audience, and there's an adrenalin rush you get from being in that moment. You don't get that from recorded media, and there's a demand for it: I don't think it will ever go away. So that's what attracted me to working in this field, and what I've tried to do throughout is create the right circumstances where that chemistry between performer and audience can happen.

Sonic youth: ambassador fans of the future

The third in my series of future scenarios from the first draft of my book imagines a situation where pocket music players with better-than-Zune sharing features have become so cheap as to be almost disposable (like cameras).

It is also partly inspired by the story three years ago of Universal encouraging schoolchildren to act as ambassadors for bands like Busted and McFly. Universal suspended the initiative when it was exposed, but the principle will doubtless continue to be applied — and is being applied — as long as it is implemented more sensitively. I've been speaking to Ken Thompson at Swarmteams, and he talks about 'alpha fans' (comparable to the Savants and Originators in my book) building a reputation as trusted influencers with their network of contacts, and thus being able to act as ambassadors for bands (and brands?) — more on this in a week or two.

This scenario plays out as a dialogue between mother and daughter, as the former is at first suspicious of the latter's hidden motives, but they are reconciled by the end. I know I'm no Raymond Carver, and so, with hindsight, it's no surprise that this story ended up on the cutting room floor, but the idea of the scenarios was to stimulate ideas about future possibilities, and I hope it serves this purpose.

The Radio Times of the future

This is the second of the excerpts from the first full draft of my book that I think it is worth rescuing from the cutting room floor. As I explained for the first one, there were a bunch of fictional scenarios that I devised imagining possible futures for consumers and for media organisations of different kinds. Some of them, including this one, were written in the form of interviews with media professionals.

This one is for a TV listings service. I was thinking specifically of Radio Times, which must be one of the longest-established services (see the Wikipedia entry) dating back to before the days of television, but now offers a website with radio and TV downloads as well as interactive listings software for your PDA. Andrew Collins, with whom I'm discussing digital discovery tomorrow, is its film editor.

---

You started out as a listings magazine — what are the most significant changes you've seen in recent years?

Since long before I took this job, we’ve been seeing ever-increasing competition in providing the basic listings service which is at the core of what we do. And the listings were once a fairly comprehensive menu of the entertainment and information you could get in your living room. Now the range of what’s available is so vast that it makes it impossible for any browsing-orientated menu to cover it, so we already have a potential editorial headache in terms of what to include. That's one big change.

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.