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.

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.

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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.

The changing role of broadcast and presenters in discovery

There's an interesting feature on BBC Radio 4's Feedback programme this week, which addresses the multiple on-demand means by which young people explore music.

It includes an interview with a 17-year-old who describes how he switches between radio (to which he listens for 1-2 hours per day), online and other media (which consume another 10 hours a day), and what he looks for in a presenter. Then there's a response from the Head of Programmes for Radio 1, whose target audience is 15-24 year olds. He talks about "spread-betting" by making content available by traditional broadcast, podcast, interactive TV, and leaving the audience to choose which of these they prefer. He could have mentioned Radio 1's foray into Second Life, as well. In terms of presenters, he draws a distinction between "mood broadcasting" at specific times of the day, as distinct from "trusted guides" who are filters specifically for discovering new music.

The feature runs for ten minutes, and you can hear it for the next seven days via this link (RealPlayer plugin required). It starts 16 mins 45 seconds in.

Why unsigned bands are the new pixie dust

The announcement of a new Coca-Cola/iTunes partnership highlights as one of the key features that, "In the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland unsigned artists will have a venue to upload songs, giving them potential for broad exposure on the site through artist highlights, European podcasts available on iTunes, and invitations to play at Coke sponsored European festivals."

It's interesting that mainstream services are now featuring unsigned bands as one of their selling points. The BBC aims to be "the destination for unsigned bands and young musicians to turn to for support" (source: official briefing), and already has a dedicated unsigned microsite, including a podcast. The Financial Times interpreted this as a response to the buzz-driven success of bands like the Arctic Monkeys, in which MySpace may, or may not, have played a key part. MySpace's parent company seemed to think so too, being quoted, "That the BBC is openly saying that it wants to create rival [sic] to MySpace shows there is no end to their commercial ambitions." (It wasn't openly saying that, but that's News Corporation's reporting standards for you.)

What's going on here? Shouldn't these major corporate players be focused on providing high-quality filters so that they can guarantee high quality music for their users? Why make a point of featuring unsigned music, when we all know that the bad unsigned music is even worse than the bad music on major labels, and there's quite a lot of it?

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.