Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Three strikes struck off?

Four months ago lots of people were getting worked up about the possibility that the UK Government might somehow enforce a "three strikes and you're out" policy for Internet filesharers. I was asked to write an opinion piece about it myself, but more about that in a bit. At that time, the BPI — the organisation that represents major record labels in the UK — was quoted as favouring a "we do the policing, you send the letters" deal with ISPs, and as saying "we've been asking ISPs for more than 18 months to introduce a system to warn their customers (twice) before pulling the plug on them. But we haven't had much success and our faith in negotiations is running thin."

Four months on, and it's interesting to see how a BPI deal with the Virgin Media ISP is being reported. The deal is for an "education campaign" that will see users who share files illegally receive, not a warning or a disconnection notice, but "practical advice on how to prevent internet account misuse, links to legitimate sites and the potential dangers… of viruses and spyware." This last quote is from Music Week coverage [subscription required], which hails it as "a giant leap forward in [the BPI's] efforts to stop illegal file-sharing on the internet by signing a landmark deal" (my emphasis). I don't know about you, but after all that sabre-rattling, sending out letters politely informing criminals (in heavy quote marks) that there are alternatives to crime seems like quite a comedown.

Clearly the game isn't over yet, and — to mix my metaphors — one creates hostages to fortune by projecting that the winner of a battle will be the winner of the war. But that's perhaps my main point, because there is a lot of pressure both in mainstream media and in blogs to get worked up into a lather and over-react to minor or short-term skirmishes. I wrote about this under the title of slow blogging on my DJ Alchemi blog recently. As with the Radiohead hoo-ha that I referenced there, I suspect that the whole three-strikes ruckus will, with hindsight, seem like a minor skirmish in the broader sweep of events. (The fuss was whipped up over the implication that the Government, not just the BPI, was in favour of regulating for three-strikes — but firm evidence of this support didn't exist then, and hasn't appeared since.)

With that preface, here is what I wrote on 12 February, trying to anticipate the different ways the scenario might play out, and to analyse the deeper trends that this skirmish brought to the surface. It was commissioned by the Daily Telegraph though they didn't run it in the end.

Fans will be the most comprehensive curators

There's a section in my book called "Creating and Curating the Archive" where I wrote,

In future, if they’re not already, fan communities will quickly become the most authoritative archivists for the artists they follow. They collect memorabilia and ephemera — from ticket stubs to magazine interviews and amateur bootleg recordings — that most people would dismiss as tat… As well as memorabilia, these items will include what are currently rare and hard-to-find audio and video recordings, which will be collected by both human foraging and automated 'sweeping' of the Net. Expert fans will catalogue them and record their digital fingerprints, to help identify whether further discoveries are duplicates or new additions to the archive.

Many of my projections in this area were based on observing the way Andy Aldridge has developed the Head Full of Wishes fansite for Galaxie 500 and associated 'downstream' acts. I profiled Andy in the book and also in this interview.

Yesterday Andy posted to the Head Full of Wishes mailing list about a new tagging framework he's created for the site. This enables him to ensure that his site is able firstly to collect details of everything that's out there on the Net and is connected to Galaxie 500, and secondly to organise and present that information in a coherent way. As he wrote,

I did this because I was finding interesting stuff "out there", tagging it in delicious and it was quietly getting lost now I can "catalogue" everything — if I find a video on youtube of Dean & Britta doing Tugboat [a Galaxie 500 song] in London (I wish) I can tag it with the relevant show and track tags and it will always be available of the page of that show (and that track)…

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).

The myth, science and craft of music discovery

Marc Cohen writes a challenging post on The Myth of Music Discovery. Citing a Digital Music News report of two venture capitalists agreeing that "the next big thing is going to be music discovery", Marc says this ought to be enough evidence that it won't be.

Having written a book which takes music discovery as a pointer to the changes in the forces shaping our cultural lives, you wouldn't expect me to be disinterested, or to be able to avoid rising to this bait. Perhaps that's just more evidence to support Marc's argument. But let me try and engage with his points anyway.

Marc reports evidence that radio remains the main route to music discovery, but online channels are growing in their influence. This is now a fairly well-established trend (here's one previous post supporting this, and another). He concludes from this:

people don't seek to discover new music — it just happens. They don't listen to the radio, watch TV or talk to friends for the purpose of discovering new music. This is a byproduct of the intended object of the interaction.

For some — actually I'd concede it's the majority — this is true. But sweeping generalisations about what "people" do or don't do are not helpful to our understanding here. There is a minority who do seek to discover music. These are the 'savants' and 'enthusiasts' in the classification I use. The thing is that a minority within this minority are quite influential for the rest of the "people". They are the first movers in the interactions from which discovery is a byproduct. And they're proud of it. They take kudos from people reading the blogs in which they assiduously document their new finds, and from the buzz they build on social networks.

The dynamics of discovery include a whole ecology of social recommendations, automated recommender systems, happenstance and serendipity — and the interactions between all of these influences.

[Update, 26 April 2008: Marc has posted on the reaction and I have commented, so see there for further discussion.]

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.

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.

Songkick combines recommendations and buzz measures

Earlier today I recorded some comments about Songkick — who have just announced some new features and funding — for PM, BBC Radio 4's main afternoon news programme. You can listen to the three-minute broadcast feature, including my edited comments, below.

Songkick could be described as Last.fm for gigs. There are important differences between gigs and recorded music, however. Gigs are one-off events; they aren't available on-demand 24 hours a day. You can't try them out with a 30-second sample to see if you might like them. Crucially, the timing of recommendations can be critical for popular gigs. Previously I gave the example of Bandsintown.com recommending the Led Zeppelin reunion show to me on the same day that it was due to happen — not much use when all tickets had been allocated by a complex registration process months before.

Another feature that has attracted comment is Songkick's measure of the 'buzz' for each band, giving a means of comparing who's on the way up and who's star is on the wane.

Discovery, dating and profiles

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Lynne Sandler, creator of the A Sound Match dating site, following up Paul Lamere citing my categorisation of music listeners at the SanFran MusicTech Summit. As her site explains, Lynne "stumbled upon her music-matchmaking theory over 15 years ago after a painful first date with a man who listened exclusively to 80's hair bands". Ouch.

A Sound Match profiles its users on the basis of questions about their music listening habits and then classifies them as either a Diamond in the Rough, a Heart of Gold, a Shining Star or an Unchained Melody. As you can see from the graphic, I came out as a Diamond in the Rough — "devotee, fan, music lover, you've heard it all…" — which seems more or less equivalent to the 'Savant' category in the Project Phoenix classification that I use. Lynne does not claim to have used rigorous scientific methods (and I don't know how the Project Phoenix methodology would stand up to serious scrutiny), but there seems to be a reasonable mapping between the two classifications.

Let's not get hung up over whether there is a proven link between music taste/listening and emotional compatibility between two people. (My view: the two areas are not independent of each other, but the exact nature of the link depends heavily on context, making it hard to predict.) The main point of A Sound Match, as I see it, is extending the role of music as an ice-breaker and help, errr, lubricate the first exchanges between strangers. If music be the food of love… and all that.

Recommender systems meet festivals

In the first of my scenarios from the "cutting room floor" I described a festival where friends clustered around their interests and discussed what they would go and see. Part of this was a portable recommender system that already knew your cultural preferences and matched them against what was on at the festival. Now, with its Last.fm goes to Austin feature, there's exactly that kind of service for the South by SouthWest festival next week.

Does anyone know of other applications of recommender systems for festivals?

As a regular gig goer Last.fm's mapping of events to my listening habits and friends is one of the most valuable and truly social functions that it provides. It's about connecting with culture through people and connecting with people through culture.

Latest discussions on music discovery, recommendations and social networks

There have been a couple of interesting panel discussions this week, on opposite sides of the US, about how people discover music and the growing role of, respectively, recommender systems and social networks in helping them do this.

At the SanFran MusicTech Summit on Monday Paul Lamere led a discussion (pictured right) between two techies who build automated recommendation systems and two 'curators' who make recommendations based on human skills and knowledge. Paul has provided his own summary and reflections on the discussion, as well as a video of the full proceedings — which runs for just under an hour from 14 minutes in. And thanks, Paul, for mentioning my book in the course of the discussion: here's more on the categorisation of listeners that Paul attributes to me (though I took it from Emap research).

In New York yesterday, the Digital Music Forum East ran a session on "Social Networks and Music Discovery: What It Means for Music Businesses". I can't find any recording of this, but Eliot van Buskirk of Wired has blogged the contributions of the panellists, who included people from US National Public Radio, the iLike social network and peer-to-peer monitors BigChampagne.