Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Traditional media is haemorrhaging its lead as music discovery platform

I'm emerging briefly from hibernation again, as I'm astonished at how this Myxer report's findings on music discovery are being reported. The research is based on a US sample of people who download mobile entertainment.

"We think some of the responses will surprise you, especially when it comes to user preferences regarding traditional media channels (such as… live concerts, radio, and television) and how they influence the consumption of digital media," say the report's authors. Elsewhere MusicWeek's spin is that "social media trails behind traditional media as a music discovery platform."

Well, yes, social media (and new media like Pandora, which is less social) is behind radio and TV. But the word "trails" seems to imply that social media is underperforming. Far from it. Compare these figures with a survey from a few years ago — admittedly with a different sample, and different way of putting the question — and you start to get a sense of how fast social and new media are catching up on the traditional platforms.

First point. If you'd presented the same question and the same options eight years ago, the aggregate for radio, TV and live concerts together would have been 100% — because the other options didn't exist. Now the aggregate is 62%. That's a big decline in a few short years. (And no longer does any platform have more than 50%, showing the fragmentation of discovery channels.)

Second point. In terms of market share, or "attention share", the figures are actually worse than that. I assume the survey asked people what their principal or preferred discovery platform was. The published report doesn't make this clear, but I can't see any other way that the total of all the figures in the graphic above would come out at 100% — because we almost all discover music via multiple channels. So even the 62% figure hides a lot of other diversion of attention and influence away from traditional media. Chances are that many of those who rely principally on radio are now supplementing that with social media channels, which they couldn't have done in 2002.

So the surprise for me in these responses is not that social media is still behind traditional media, but how close behind it is, and how quickly it's catching up. That's what I think justifies my use of "haemorrhaging" in my title.

One last thing. Let's remember that music radio has been around for the best part of a century now. It's a mature form, and generations of experience have taught us what works well and what doesn't. (Despite that, a lot of it still sucks — especially, I'm told, in the US.) But when it's done well, radio can be an extraordinarily good platform for music discovery. If pushed to choose just one platform, radio is almost certainly the one I'd pick.

iTunes, MySpace, Facebook, Pandora, Twitter — these services are all in their infancy, and we're all still adjusting to them, learning what works well and what doesn't. If these services can persuade 38% of listeners that they're the best music discovery platform while they're still in proverbial short trousers, imagine how big a bite they will take out of traditional media when they grow up and become good!

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.

University of Death by Sean McManus: A Review

There's a pivotal scene in University of Death where the muso-technology geek at the heart of the story struggles to persuade the venal record industry boss to buy-in to a groundbreaking new scheme that will change the industry forever. To accomplish this, the geek plays the boss a new composition, which has been engineered to embody the latter's favourite musical tropes — to push his buttons, if you will.

Without giving too much away, it works. The boss, called Clive in a knowing nod to a well-known industry mogul [Sean assures me no such nod was intended and any similarity to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental…], takes the bait and employs the geek to create more of these personalised sure-fire hits. Not just to create them, in fact, but to seed them virally through targeted online discussions.

I felt an uncanny doubling of the impact of this scene. The book touches on so many of the themes that interest me, and which I wrote about in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, that I began to wonder if a very clever geek had written it for the express purpose of pushing my buttons. It had, after all, reached me via a well-targeted email from a software bot claiming to be a writer called Sean McManus, who comes complete with a convincing back story.

Here's a couple of examples of how this canny piece of Artificial Intelligence works. It has taken my old blog post about listener behaviours and reframed it in part of the caustic portrait of record company cynicism:

Steve Lawson on social media for independent musicians

I went to London's Vortex Jazz Club on Monday to catch the launch gig for the new Lawson/Dodds/Wood album, Numbers (pictured left, with guest sax player, Mark Lockheart). The thing is, I'd already had the album in digital form for a month or two — and not (a) because I nabbed a leaked copy off the net, or (b) because band member Steve Lawson (centre of photo) is a friend of mine. I paid the advertised price.

In a move reminiscent of the recent David Byrne & Brian Eno album, a digital download version was available in advance of the CD release. Advance buyers of the download were also entitled to the CD — I picked up mine at the Vortex — and got a further 45 minutes of exclusive material (the unedited improvisations from which the album was constructed) into the bargain. Anyone who's just curious can stream the album in full on Steve's site (via Last.fm).

Byrne & Eno got support from Topspin Media, one of the new wave of net-savvy, post-label music intermediaries, in managing the album release. Steve Lawson, however, adds the roles of label owner, social media man-about-town, and bass teacher to that of musician. I think I'm right in saying he's never put out an album other than on his own label, and generally aims to break even, at least, by the release date. He's put more thought into the uses of Twitter for building an audience than anyone I know: follow him @solobasssteve. In fact his ideas are so good that he once, after drinking a few beers in a famous producer's studio, claimed that I'd plagiarised them. Judge for yourself by checking his Social Media Principles for Musicians Parts 1, 2 and (I think?) 3 (hint: check the dates on these posts).

Mufin.com: content-based recommendations

I get a fair number of people approaching me to tell me that their music recommender system is the best because of [insert special secret sauce here]. Usually this doesn't go much further: after all, the sauce is secret and can't be shared; so I say I'll be interested to keep in touch with their progress, and I bite my lip to resist repeating my sceptical view that any recommender system only has to be good enough to keep people coming back for more recommendations.

In the case of Berlin-based mufin.com, launching in private beta today, the story is slightly different, as they sent me all their publicity release information, and Petar Djekic was willing to talk to me on the record as it were. They even gave me an invite code to give away — that's my disclosure out of the way!

Mufin.com grew out of the Fraunhofer Institute, also the birthplace of the MP3 format, and the technically interesting part of what they're doing builds on that strong research base in audio and acoustics. What mufin.com does is known as content-based filtering rather than collaborative user-based filtering. In other words, rather than saying "people who like this artist/song also like this artist/song", it says "this song is similar in important ways to this song, so if you like one, you may like the other". Or in other words, think more like Pandora than Last.fm.

Fan culture and public service: media versus broadcasting

All through last week the smart people at BBC Radio Labs published a series of research summaries under the heading "fan cultures in radio".

The research projects covered different forms of fan participation around radio, from message boards, listeners to an avuncular breakfast DJ, and a long-running soap opera. The one I was waiting for — and which will possibly be of most interest to readers of this blog — was the relationship between 'specialist' music programmes and fans, by Andrew Dubber and Tim Wall.

The published summary doesn't give us much reporting of the actual behaviour of specialist music fans (any chance of a fuller account being made available, I wonder?), but focuses on the range of orientations of the BBC to meeting the needs of these fans:

Drawing on our examination of the fan activities of specialist music enthusiasts, and the way BBC staff who serve their interests conceive their professional practices, we think such a shift would allow discussion of the difference between a 'one-to-many', centre-to-receptive-audience model and the 'many-to-many' forms of communication that are more typical online. More to the point, the term 'broadcasting' pretty much just means radio and television, when in fact recorded popular music is a media form in itself.

Plugging Claire Tchaikowski's new album

Please excuse a brief promotional post on behalf of a friend. I first met Claire Tchaikowski  almost exactly a year ago after she agreed to  give a response to my talk at the RSA.  I gave her a copy of my book; she gave me a copy of her still unmastered first album. Claire was  originally signed to Sony-BMG, and has had 'interest' from two other major labels. But for now she's going it alone, and her album is released today on iTunes (256 kbps, no DRM) via Artists Without a Label. You can also hear one of the tracks in full on Last.fm. I'm not under any illusions that this blog is on the radar of music tastemakers, but am just chipping in my personal recommendation to anyone who might lend an ear. Quote me on this: you'll like Claire more than Dido. And if you're in London, she's supporting Luka Bloom in three weeks' time.   

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.

Streaming versus Downloading: What are they good for?

I have a theory that the way we get to know music is a bit like the way we get to know potential mates. After the initial attraction, there's a flirting, getting-to-know-you stage; and then there's a going steady stage. One difference is that, with music, polygamy is fine, and it's OK to be going steady and promiscuous at the same time!

I'm interested in how these stages relate to discover-versus-ownership and to streaming-versus-downloading. It's too simplistic to say streaming = discovery = flirting (= the new radio?) while downloading = ownership = commitment (= the new record collection?), but nevertheless it seems plausible that there might be some connection between these behaviours.

According to one British ISP, the last year has seen streaming traffic almost triple, while volumes of peer-to-peer (P2P) downloads have actually fallen.

The social life of a playlist

Last November Patrick Dax of ORF, Austria's public service broadcaster, interviewed me in Vienna about Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll. It was the best set of interview questions I've ever had (taking nothing away from Patrick here, but I have to admit it's not like I've done hundreds of interviews) and a great discussion on a miserably rainy day — if you read German, here's the interview.

Yesterday Patrick sent me a handful of questions about online playlist service in general and muxtape in particular. Here's the article he's written (in German). And here, for non German readers, are my full responses to his questions:

How do you like muxtape?

I think muxtape did for playlist sharing what the original Google did for search: it seems to strip away all the complexity and just focus on doing the core things really well. In the case of playlists that means letting people easily hear full-track versions of all the songs on the list.

Muxtape doesn't have social networking features or anything else built in (apart from being able to 'scrobble' to Last.fm) — it relies on the users to supply their own social context, just by passing around muxtape URLs in emails and twitterfeeds etc.

Some people might wish it were possible to embed their muxtapes in their MySpace profile/blog/etc.