I am a lazy activist. Often, people think that talking about an issue or blogging about an issue is tantamount to taking action on an issue. After seeing all the pleas on LJ, Pandora, BAGel Radio and Wired’s Listening Post this morning I finally went to SaveInternetRadio.org and used their tools to call my congresspeople. Since I live in New York, one of my Senators is Hillary Clinton, whose office seemed super busy since they left me on hold for 10 minutes, hung up on me, and then put me on hold for 8 minutes. I finally got through. Anyway, the person who answered the phone for my rep, Nydia Velazquez, was super informed and knowledgeable about the entire internet radio debacle and said that Rep. Velazquez had gotten so many calls about it that she has cosponsored H.R.
3015, which would “delay the applicability to webcasters of rates and terms determined by the Copyright Royalty Judges”. Her (intern?) explained it to me as a way for Congress to spend more time thinking about the issue.
My concern with all of this is that the RIAA and SoundExchange will temporarily not enforce rates, wait until everyone forgets about the issue, and then go after them with a vengeance. We need legal protection to allow internet radio to continue broadcasting, fair royalty rates that take into account the profit of the radio station (that’s what H.R.
2060, in essence, does). Velazquez’s bill, while well-intentioned, has only 2 co-sponsors rather than HR2060/S1353’s 135 in the House and, ugh, only 6 in the Senate (that doesn’t bode well).
Anyway, call your congresspeople! And can someone please tell me how to prevent Firefox from being such a memory hog (It’s currently the only application running and is using 99 percent of CPU). Kthxbye.
2. You can only report Music Status through the standalone client, not the Gmail version.
3. Music Status doesn’t automatically update this chart. Rather, you have to opt-in to share data. From a privacy perspective (not to mention PR), I fully applaud this decision. From a data-gathering decision, this means that Music Trends is measuring some absurdly small percentage of 44,000 users.
Which is why you get stuff like this (apologies for image width)
For those of you who don’t remember your hott 80’s hits, “Shattered Dreams” was a one-hit wonder by Johnny Hates Jazz (“You’re giving me, giving me/ nothing but shattered dreams, shattered dreams”) which isn’t likely to have a resurgence any time soon, let alone in the new hot “Gym” remix format.
If one person’s mistagged Shattered Dreams can get to #8 on the Google chart, how hard can it be to skew it? I downloaded Google Talk, opted in, and have been playing MSTRKFT all afternoon in an attempt to thwart its careful collection of analytics. I urge you to do the same.
The chart apparently updates once a day, so tune in the next few days to see if this did anything.
(For a decent collection of online listening analytics, I recommend Last.fm’s charts; although these are similarly skewed towards highly technical, highly dorky, highly OCD internerds, who appear to listen to middle-of-the-road soft alternative rock.)
Music has been an enormous part of my social life for as long as I can remember. In high school, my friends and I spent a lot of time refining our musical preferences until they accurately reflected who we wanted to be (goodbye, INXS and Billy Joel; hello, Ministry, Tori Amos, Concrete Blonde). In college, I was the music director of my college radio station and spent a huge amount of time being a snot about bands on major labels, shopping for 7″s, and going to shows every week for free with my co-DJ Kara Flyg. Post-college, I moved to Seattle at least partially due to the music scene and immediately became part of the ecosystem of bands, DJs, promoters and club owners that permeates the social structure there. Anyway, the point is that music plays a really important part in social networks for young people; it provides a hook for identity (I listen to hip hop vs. I listen to underground hip hop vs. I listen to new bay hip hop / hyphy), it provides a commonality for friendship, and it provides social capital in the form of knowledge.
We’ve all had the cool friends who introduced us to the cool music. In high school it was my friend Arielle, via her older sister. In college it was my friend Chrissy, who knew all about the Olympia music scene. Post-college it was usually various boyfriends. Nowadays, music blogs fulfill that role for many people, and then the people who read the music blogs fulfill that role for their friends. But even among the bloggers, the person who first writes or breaks a particular band is going to be considered way more important than a me-too writer.
For bands, this is great because it means that there’s a vested interest for lots of people in finding out about relatively unknown bands and promoting them. And, unlike in 1993, nowadays that process goes on via digital publics rather than via offline networks of mix tapes, listening to tracks on car stereos, reading about bands in zines, and watching opening bands.
There are a host of services that have grown up around the social aspects of music. (Everyone reading this knows Pandora and Last already, so I’m not going to bother going into functionality specifics, just social practice).
last.fm lets you track all the artists you listen to and generates charts based on the data. It also has lots of community/friend features that facilitate recommendations. Last will recommend stuff to you based on your preferences, and you can send your friends recs for things you think they’d like. In a lot of ways, Last’s charts (which people display on their MySpace profile or blog - see sidebar) function in the same ways as “now playing” on LJ or My Favorites on MySpace: as a way to show off your musical taste, therefore your identity or simply how cool you are (and of course, more underground = more cool. I’m not sure how my love for Kelly Clarkson works in this model). I really don’t bother using the friends feature on Last because, well, whether or not I’m friends with someone has very little to do with whether I’m going to like the same music as them or not.
Pandora is more effective at recommendations since it generates streaming radio of artist suggestions based on songs or bands that you input. There’s a nice little hack that feeds your Pandora listens into Last so you can keep track of what you’ve heard, which points to the fact that Pandora has no way to broadcast or otherwise announce your preferences to the world. If you listen to some super cool, super obscure, super amazing artist before all your friends but none of them know about it, does that diminish the value?
Mog is a music blogging network. I have no desire to blog about music and I find Mog’s little audio tracker (which works in the same way that last.fm does) very intrusive, but I can say that Mog is a nicely designed site with some nifty 2.0 features. It’s highly community based, and rather than friending your RL friends, Mog emphasizes meeting new people with similar tastes. This is very smart, as I’d rather get recommendations from a hard core music junkie who I trust but have never me than some random college friend of mine on Friendster (must start using that as an example again now it got 10mil in new VC.. must be that there patent!).
SonicLiving is a music calendar app that mines your iTunes , Last and Pandora logins, creates a database of your preferred artists, and lets you know when and where they’re playing. This is a very beta site, so don’t expect perfection, especially if you don’t live in SF or NY. But the idea is great. Particularly when artists are having to come up with new monetization strategies that aren’t “sell albums” or “get on MTV” (see my last post on this). Since going to shows is an inherently social activity, and finding out about shows takes quite a bit of effort sometimes (esp. living in a giant, music-heavy city like NYC), this is a genius idea. It’s not quite there technologically, but the guy running the site is super responsive. Definitely one to watch.
(Another interesting site to watch is pocketfuzz, which is basically a peer production marketplace around mobile content. Pocketfuzz partners directly with artists (5000 of them!) who create ringtones of their own music and sell through the site. Disclaimer: my friend Danny is one of the creators of this site).
Finally, we have MySpace, which I’ve already talked about in some detail with regard to the changes it’s made in fan-band interaction. Expect to see lots of auxiliary market sites popping up that provide tools for bands to use to promote themselves on MySpace; the basic feature set for band pages is super low (music player really being the only differentiation from the regular user pages) and a smart young company could definitely find a niche there.
On the other hand, all the zillions of MySpace multimedia player companies should probably find a different model unless they are taking advantage of the network features of the site. Why have music information on a social networking site unless it taps into the network in some way? What are my friends listening to? Who’s changed the song embedded in their profile? What’s popular in my network? What’s new? What’s hot on MySpace? MySpace has such crap functionality compared to the other sites I’ve written about in this post that it’s almost laughable– unlike Last or SonicLiving, MySpace has no way to tell what you’re listening to, and the only ways you can update your profile music-wise is by changing the single song you’re allowed, or by changing your “My Favorites” music manually. If MySpace had better, cooler, more automated music tracking tools, it could really be useful for finding out about music, promoting music, and tracking music. Right now, though, the big advantage MySpace has, music-wise, is that lots of bands use it. That’s it.
Expect to see a lot more in this market space. The cool thing about social music software is that it tends to be written by people who are really super passionate about music– Mog and Pandora reflect this especially– which makes it more interesting than contenders in the, for example, YAVVS (Yet Another Viral Video Site) space, most of which look generic, boring, and desperate to grab YouTube ad dollars. I’m looking forward to watching these sites as they mature.
Coolfer had a nice piece on OK Go this morning. You may remember them from such indie rock hits as “Get Over It” [wmp link] and, well, nothing else. Unless you’re the kind of person who gets most of her music news from MySpace and YouTube. Being 29, I’m personally not. I get all my music news from mp3 blogs.
After the band’s brief mainstream success, their record label made it pretty clear that they weren’t going to bother giving the band money to make any more videos, or even releasing another single to modern rock radio. So OK Go took matters into their own hands and shot a home-made video for “A Million Ways.” And when I say home-made, I mean budget of zero. It’s the four band members dancing around in their backyard. I’ve seen Google Idol videos that were more elaborate.
Nevertheless it’s hilarious. It’s on YouTube in atrocious quality so I’d recommend watching the WMP or QT versions (I won’t even dignify RealAudio with a link). Lazy? Here:
Anyway, this video got the band way more notice than any of the boring ass street team/fake viral marketing/MTV Beach House appearances that their record company might have garnered them. So they released another one. Coolfer writes:
Last week the band OK Go unleashed another homemade video, this time for “Here We Go Again” (see it in WM, RA or Quicktime). It’s already got the band an incredible amount of attention. The video was played on CBS’ “The Early Show,” entered into rotation at Fuse, debuted at #11 in the VH1 Top 20 Countdown and has received write-ups in The LA Times, Spin, Pitchfork and Entertainment Weekly.
This video features the four band members doing synchronized dancing on 8 treadmills. Yes. (This YouTube link is much better quality).
I think this is all totally cool.
1. The overall aesthetic of these videos (home-made and no-budget) is totally aligned with the general YouTube/vlogging I-taped-my-friends-with-the-record-feature-on-my-digital-camera DIY ethic that harkens back to the 80’s video underground, etc. etc. In other words, you too could be a music video director! If the 90’s DIY ethic was all about starting a band even if you couldn’t play any instruments, the online video “revolution” (I use that word with the most pleasant irony possible) is about making movies, music videos, and video diaries even if you know nothing about film and have no money at all.
2. And shows that if you have a great and fun idea, that’s more important than cash.
3. I always like when major label bands admit that their labels are screwing them over and take matters into their own hands. This is the direct band-to-fan communication that people expect these days. Recently, I read something from a member of a popular indiepop band commenting on an LJ friend’s journal. I’m quoting this from a locked post without any sort of permission at all so I’ve removed the band’s name:
over the 7 years of bandname to date we’ve gathered a few thousand email addresses to our band mailing list and have had maybe a hundred thousand listens/downloads of mp3s of our site.
in the 18 months we’ve been on myspace we are closing in on nearly 1,000,000 listens, and 370,000 people have checked out our page. in a single bulletin, i can reach 27,000 people and tell them about shows, new music, whatever. that kind of access is super amazing and priceless. we sit next to ladytron on the electro chart nearly every day. the fact that that’s even feasible is amazing, given the resources they have and the resources we have.
now, the downside is true that the amount of work that band’s have to do now to get known is pretty astounding. we maintain our own 2 sites, a yahoo group (although that’s pretty much controlled by fans), a livejournal group, the myspace page, and a purevolume page. we design all our own artwork and merchandise, we book all our own shows, we recording, produce, and manufacture all our releases as well as staying on top of getting remixes made, getting tracks on to compilations, licensing songs to dvd’s, wrestlers, trapeze artists, spa’s, science fairs, videogames, radio spots. oh yeah, and we write music somewhere in there as well. no manager, no label, no booking agent. but the flip side? we have 1000% percent (i hyperbolize) control over our music, image, and destiny. i’d take that a million times over than losing any sort of control.
This is a totally different skillset than what’s traditionally needed to be a successful band. I read an interview with Lady Sovereign in the (cheesy) Nylon MySpace issue where she talked about how she puts together her MySpace page herself in order to have better access to her fans. Someone who’s creative, motivated, net-savvy, outgoing and organized is going to do better with MySpace and self-promotion in general than someone in the Rolling Stones/Makers vein who likes to sit around and get drunk and live the rock-n-roll lifestyle. I’m all for the rise of internerd band success, but it does limit others who may not be as computer savvy.
This is the post filesharing economy. While majors sue their customers and try to force DRM protected mp3s down everyone’s throats, smart bands will engage in participatory and collaborative creative projects and promotional efforts that will create a feeling of closeness between them and their fan base. I also like how this sort of breaks down the “rock star” mentality (Kathleen Hanna wrote a very eloquent essay about this) and levels the field between artist and fan. Which again, is very similar to the mid-90’s ethic about how the band down the street/your best friend’s band can be your favorite band.
Yesterday, the Center for Media Research released a report on radio ratings. NPR is now the fourth most listened to radio format. That’s more popular than rock, dance, R&B/Urban or talk. The most popular format is News/Talk, with an audience of 19.4 million adult Americans, which is like, nothing. Second is country, and third is CHR, which is “Current Hit Radio” or Top 40. (See radio station format guide).
Since NPR isn’t advertiser supported, it is generally ignored by the general mechanisms to measure audience share. What’s interesting is that NPR is very high in the “most listened to” statistics, and it has a very high conversion rate– once you start listening to NPR, you generally continue.
The age of Big Media has not been kind to radio, mostly due to media consolidation. Media conglomerates have gobbled up locally owned stations, replacing their local DJs/morning shows/program directors with cheap syndicated content. The lack of actual people programming actual radio has caused problems during emergencies, as automated programming can’t provide local information (something radio’s very good at, traditionally). The rise in payola can be directly tied to media consolidation as radio station group owners (like Clear Channel) strike deals with independent “promoters” to provide radio time in exchange for kickbacks. And “vertical integration” means that many of the same companies who own radio stations own stadiums, billboards, and promotional companies, meaning they have a vested interest to cross-promote artists and festivals.
Result? A lack of diversity on radio: the same few songs hour after hour, entire formats basically absent from the airwaves, little local content and little of interest to most people. (And of course Clear Channel stalwartly pushing the Republican agenda). Satellite radio (XFM, Sirius) has built an entire business model around providing superior radio content in terms of musical diversity and genre formats.
NPR stations generally play little music, but they do fill the need for superior local content. Our local NYC affiliate covers NYC news in great depth, and consistently interviews New York writers, artists, musicians, politicians, pundits, and citizens. Although NPR is no threat to the advertising revenue of traditional radio, they are all competing for audiences. Best case scenario is that local commercial radio starts providing local content again.
It’s also interesting that in all the hubbub over Air America (which hasn’t been super successful, although my mom and the guy who sells me jewelry in Union Square both love it), people forget that we have a liberal radio network already.
More at Mediageek, a nice blog on the media landscape.
I wrote a really fun paper last semester for Faye Ginsburg’s Anthropology of Media class on Google Idol (see some of my del.icio.us links here). I got really into Henry Jenkins’ work on participatory culture and ended up heralding these types of sites as examples of new fan-created content that moves beyond derivative works and towards entirely creative and interesting new types of media.
1. The lipsynchers obviously already own the song if they are lipsynching to it.
2. They are obviously fans of the song.
3. They are basically doing free promotion of the song.
4. Nobody in their right mind would *not* buy a Backstreet Boys CD because they had a copy of the Two Chinese Boys lipsynching to it.
5. Everyone already hates the RIAA, and even Hilary Rosen has stated that she thinks suing customers was a bad idea (no!! you think??). At a time where forward thinking companies are starting blogs to talk directly to their consumers, holding remix contests (see the Pretty Girls Make Graves video contest on YouTube), working with Google Idol to promote their songs, and the like, cracking down on fifteen year old girls lipsynching to Little Mermaid lyrics is stupid, counterproductive, and just plain mean.
I will be glad to see these companies crumble and die. They deserve it.
I was studying at a coffee shop in Williamsburg this weekend. It’s a really small place where you usually end up sharing a table (and an outlet) with a stranger. I was puzzling over several hundred pages of printed PDF’s and my table-mate asked me if I was an editor. Turned out that he’s a novelist.
We got into a long discussion about how much more difficult it is to get published today than it was even ten years ago. Big box retail and media consolidation has made it extremely rare that a publishing company takes a chance on a completely unknown author. They want to publish a novel that they know will sell. So my friend’s agent told him to start a blog to get an audience. If he can get ten thousand readers, it’ll be a clear message to the publishing industry that he has a built-in audience.
The current goal, according to Wired, is to use the internet to attract attention to get a major-label deal, but I’m not convinced that the marketing machinations of the majors are needed. It’s hardly new for an indie band to break out without the industry muscle behind it.
But with publishing this gets tricky because there isn’t a similar infrastructure where someone can self-publish and get their book to book publishers. I had the extreme privilege of meeting Cory Doctorow on Thursday when he lectured to Siva’s undergraduates, and he maintains that within the next decade, there will be some sort of technological development that makes e-books as pleasurable to read as physical books. And I’m not talking about early-adopter stuff like reading your book on a Treo or an iPod; I’m talking Diamond Age-style digital paper.
Once that happens, and people start buying ebooks online, there will no longer be the physical advantage of having your book stocked in the display tables at Barnes and Noble. So it makes sense for authors to try to find out how that alternative model works now, so that they can take advantage of it later. This is why Cory publishes all his books under a Creative Commons license and provides them for free in digital formats.
My new friend maintains that fiction is going the way of poetry, composition or playwriting: a niche market that is no longer economically sustainable as a career. Very few authors make Stephen King money to begin with, but it would be a shame to think that so few people were reading fiction that it became a micro-market that appeals only to New Yorker elites.
The current model allows for a handful of authors to get hyped beyond hype - my neighborhood is covered in wheatpasted posters for the new Paul Auster book, The Brooklyn Follies (although I do live in Brooklyn). The future model would see many, many authors self-publishing ebooks, with some of them selling a few thousand copies, some of them making it big, but most of them just providing pin money for their authors. The ones who are best hooked into their fan base may work on a patronage model (raise PayPal donations to finish a book or write a sequel), get asked to write op-eds or keynote conferences, or create for themselves a livable income through other means than just selling books.
I can’t see fiction itself dying out; it’s too popular for that. And there have always been huge, sweeping bestsellers that dwarfed better works. But it’s the role of blogs, self-promotion, and building one’s own fan base that is interesting to me about this go-around. It’s the “Brand is You” strategy. Good authors don’t necessarily make good marketers, but good marketers can make good sales. And it really does seem that being good at marketing yourself is the numero uno value in these type of marketplaces.
1. What should I read next? - Plug in the name of a book and it generates recommendations. If you enter a book that it doesn’t recognize, it’ll prompt you to sign up and make recommendations of your own. How does it generate recommendations?
WSIRN produces recommendations based purely on collective taste: when books are entered into the same favourites list, they become associated with each other. The more often particular books appear on different lists, the stronger that association becomes. Purely and simply, WSIRN represents mass opinion about books. Over time the recommendations should get better and better as the database grows.
I’m not actually sure whether this works or not. Entering Dickens pulled up Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (author of Dr. Zhivago), Robert Louis Stevenson and Olivia Goldsmith. It would be hard to find more disparate authors. Similarly, Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City, which I’d probably group with fellow Brat Pack authors Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and pomo lit like Delillo, instead lists Jonathan Ames, P.G. Wodehouse, and Inga Musico.
OK - so this is a new service and it doesn’t have a huge amount of data to draw on and so that’s why the recs are so screwy. But I question the entire recommendation model. If I’m going to write a big list of all the books I like, it’s going to range from Brenda Laurel to Judith Butler to the Gossip Girl series to Tolstoy. Individual taste tends to the quixotic, especially for avid bookworms. Plus, I’m not sure what advantage this site gives over Amazon or Barnes and Noble, both of which have huge databases of customer data informing their recommendations. You’re better off trolling the chicklit.com forums for ideas.
Simple, stripped down, easy to use interface for Wikipedia. Useful for kids and non-power users, but was Wikipedia that difficult to use to begin with? It’s open-source, so I envision this changing quite a bit in the next few months, but it would be good to incorporate some accessibility features if you’re going to muck around with alternative ways to view web content.
3. Streampad, which is a super-cool in-browser mp3 streaming server… thing. You install the helper app on your home machine and you can listen to your entire iTunes library from work, the internet cafe, your friend’s machine, whatever. Nice integration of faddish web stuff to learn about new music: listen to whatever mp3’s people are posting to del.icio.us or to mp3 blogs (through The Hype Machine) and through the Internet Archive’’s concerts. (There’s also a completely unnecessary Google Maps mashup stuck in there, just for fun.)
The problem? It doesn’t work. This just isn’t ready for primetime yet, although I would very much like it to be. I couldn’t get a single track to play; the problem is that heavily linked content like songs on mp3 blogs are usually stuck on usendit or on some server that’s down or something and they just aren’t conducive to being quickly streamed to sample them. Too bad.
(This would be really interesting if linked with audioscrobbler, which I still can’t forgive for merging with last.fm and mutating into worst. interface. ever. )
Sony/BMG CDs secretly install rootkit level DRM software, everyone pissed. Genius move, guys. You’d think after five years of desperate schemes to prevent the inevitable, record companies would finally figure out that treating their customers like thieves and implementing hair-brained DRM has the dual effect of doing nothing about privacy and making customers angry. Installing super-sekrit shady software that only power users can uninstall (and with many rootkits an XP reinstall is the only safe removal method) is not exactly the way to get people clamoring for your product. Why not channel all that technological innovation into finding out a way to make money in the current business climate? The changes you guys fear have already happened. Did you hear Apple sold a million video downloads in the last ten days or so?
For the billionth time: dinosaur business models are extinct, these ridiculous tactics are counter-productive, and treating users like criminals is bad PR.
I’m so glad I haven’t bought a CD in a year (what I’m listening to: leaked Madonna advance, DFA1979 remix album, Tammy Wynette’s Greatest Hits and Wolf Parade).
About tiara.org
Alice E. Marwick (alicetiara) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. This summer I'm interning with danah boyd at Microsoft Research. I study social technology. This blog focuses on that, pop culture, communication, and media studies. Click on "About Me" for more blathering.
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