Nancy Baym

The Viral Power of Fan Communication: A Case Study On Fleet Foxes - MTT - Music Think Tank

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:45:14 -0400

It’s always exhilarating finding cases like this that validate the lessons we so often, teach, learn, and debate here on MTT. This story in particular, highlights the power of conscientious direct-to-fan (D2F) communication on the part of Fleet Foxes’ front man, Robin Pecknold.

If Grammy awards were given to artists DIY’ing it each year, Pecknold would win the award for “Outstanding Performance In D2F Communication”. Pecknold’s proclivity for treating fans like friends recently went viral when a fan of his enthusiastically wrote the following post on reddit:

via musicthinktank.com

Twitter sucks… three years later | Rhythm Changes

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:43:46 -0400

Three years almost to the day after I interviewed Steve Lawson about Twitter for musicians, we thought it might be appropriate to update and reflect. Here’s the original video: Twitter Sucks, So Change Your Friends.

via rhythmchanges.net

From Young Adult Book Fans to Wizards of Change - NYTimes.com

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:43:18 -0400

Perhaps the most effective practitioner of fan-fueled social change is Andrew Slack, the 32-year-old founder of The Harry Potter Alliance and the force behind Imagine Better. Since Slack, who started out as a comedian, founded the Harry Potter Alliance, he has motivated Potterphiles to send five cargo planes with $123,000 worth of relief supplies to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, donate more than 88,000 books across the world, raise awareness about net neutrality and genocide and make forays into politics — taking on Maine’s 2009 ballot initiative that sought to repeal same sex marriage.

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

Fan Friction - How The Internet is Failing Artists by Adam Bernard - MTT - Music Think Tank

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:42:44 -0400

The way things are set up now with Facebook and Twitter, very few artists have fans. Artists have plenty of “likes” and “followers,” but they don’t have the artist-fan relationship that’s needed to be as big as the acts of previous generations. Fans buy albums, concert tickets and t-shirts. Fans tell their friends about artists. The person who “liked” a Facebook page, who are they in relation to the artist? Are they really a fan?
The internet has a million ways to communicate, and a million ways to sell things, but it’s failing when it comes to creating fans. The reason for this is that there are very few fan experiences on the internet. There’s no waiting in line at midnight at the record store for the latest release from your favorite artist when you’re downloading it on iTunes. There’s no gathering all your friends up into your car and going to a concert when you’re watching a live stream of the show on YouTube. There’s no anticipating your favorite artist appearing on your favorite music video show when you have access to them 24/7.
These are the fan experiences the internet hasn’t been able to, and probably will never be able to, replicate, and they’re exactly what artists, and labels, need if they’re going to reach their previous heights.

via musicthinktank.com

Nimbit.com | How to Win & Engage Fans on Facebook - SXSW Presentation

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:42:01 -0400

I was invited to give a presentation on Best Practices for Musicians on Facebook last week at SXSW and thought it would be helpful to share my slides from the talk and some audio excerpts that were posted online for those who couldn’t make it to the conference.

I tried to tailor this talk toward practical things that you can do today. In particular, I spent a bit of time on how to optimize your page using the new Timeline view, now that Facebook is changing all Band/Musician pages to this format on 3/31/2012. I also spoke about the three voices you can use in your status updates to keep things interesting, and some strategies you can use to grow your fanbase both in the realworld at Gigs and using Facebook advertising.

via nimbit.com

Carl Jacobson from Nimbet’s slide deck.

Twitter for Musicians and Artists | Twitter Developers

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:41:03 -0400

Twitter for Musicians and Artists

Sound and vision

For music fans, Twitter is the next best thing to being backstage. And for performers, connecting with your fans in an authentic way is one key to your success. A Twitter connection tells fans how much you appreciate them, and it also enables you to tailor your messages. The fact is, Twitter provides more authenticity and creative control than any other online medium. Tweets come straight from you, and go right to your followers all over the world, in real-time.

Twitter styles are as varied as the people who use Twitter. Whatever your goal, Rule #1 is that your Tweets should reflect the things you’re passionate about. And you won’t be surprised to hear us say that practice makes perfect— just like learning an instrument or writing music. That’s why we’ve put this guide together: to help you and your fans get the most out of every single Tweet.

Whether you’re a mega-pop star or a self-funded indie band, here are some examples that will work for you.

via dev.twitter.com

Official advice from Twitter.

simonlindgren.com » The subpolitics of online piracy

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:40:17 -0400

The subpolitics of online piracy

March 7, 2012

Convergence just published my article The Subpolitics of Online Piracy: A Swedish Case Study which was co-authored with Jessica Linde. Our presentation of this research at ISA2010 in Gothenburg is available here [slides+audio]. The article will go into an issue of Convergence later this year, but the OnlineFirst edition can be found here. For the copyright-free final draft version go here.

ABSTRACT ‘Pirates’ and ‘anti-pirates’ have become common concepts in the cultural political debate, as the file-sharing phenomenon is a delicate and disputed subject. The fact that people organize in networks to share data with each other has led film and music companies from all over the world to initiate a number of anti-piracy organizations, assigned to protect the property rights to culture and information. In Sweden, the industrial organization The Swedish Bureau of Anti-Piracy on the one side, and the network The Bureau of Piracy together with The Pirate Party, on the other, play important parts in the prevailing conflict. The purpose of this article is to apply a sociological perspective on the collective act of file sharing. By focusing on the distinctly organized part of file sharing activities as well as on the everyday practices of users, the goal is to describe how the collective action and the production of knowledge, taking place in relation to online piracy, can be understood.

via simonlindgren.com

If I don't get pants, nobody gets pants by *Theamat on deviantART

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:40:17 -0400

via theamat.deviantart.com

Awesome fan art.

24 Hours » The Kickstarter Blog — Kickstarter

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:39:16 -0400

There are crazy days and then there are days like yesterday. Kickstarter has experienced some frantic hours but nothing like what happened in the 24-hour span between Wednesday at 6:54pm and Thursday at 6:44pm. Two million-dollar projects, a major political speech involving Kickstarter, an amazing band launching a project for a comeback 20 years in the making… the list goes on. Here’s a minute-by-minute breakdown of the day’s events.

via kickstarter.com

Eden | kristin hersh

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:38:37 -0400

We all know what the World values: things that makes noise, “expert” opinions, sales, charts, hype, lists, awards, trends, tap dancing, self-promotion…it hangs high price tags on what it says the herd wants. And it is true that there are people who only like to look at what they think other people are looking at, who only want to live where other people want to live, who watch, read and listen only to what they’ve heard that piles of other people are watching, reading and listening to, who buy the voodoo, who never stop asking, “What’s happening? What’s the best?” They suck down that Kool-Aid.

Sometimes we try to keep up with this by making noise, by tap dancing, pointing at what we’ve done, trying to get people to turn around and look…show it off. But passionate work and showing off are not in the same sphere. Passionate work is private, focused, contemplative and selfless. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that showing off is the opposite. No one should be asked to do it. If you never stop tap dancing, when do you do the work?

Believing in showing off is when you lose Eden, whether you are the creator or the consumer. It’s the first clue that you’ve slipped off the path. Billy says, “It’d be much less boring and way more honest if we shared our flaws, frailties and uglinesses.” It seems like a contradiction, but the quiet way is more social. We share what matters, ego-less. The tap dancing ego obscures what’s real.

I don’t care who you are, the World is not your world. Movie stars imitate you, not the other way around. Movies and books and songs are about small worlds because that’s where real life happens. You have passions, your loved ones are your stars, your stories are true, your opinions are valid, you are the only expert when it comes to what you love. That’s what’s happening: your life. It’s what’s best. Because it’s the only thing that’s real.

And like that little bimbo Tinkerbell, fake comes to a crashing halt when we stop clapping.

via kristinhersh.com

Quit Whining About SOPA and PIPA. Where's the Public Outrage Over Internet Piracy? - Seattle Music - Reverb

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:46:28 -0500

Bad for business. Anti-piracy legislation could be bad for the Internet business. It almost takes my breath away. Internet piracy has claimed half of the recorded music business, and made the prospect of making a living as a musician harder for artists of all rank and file. Why didn’t Google, or Facebook, or Wikipedia ever stand in solidarity with musicians, actors, and writers - most of whom have never known fame and fortune - as their works were stolen with no recourse on their sites?

Where are the “fans,” the lovers of music? Why have they never stood up and taken a stand for the men and women in front of and behind the microphone? Yes, yes, this is all boring, right? It’s typical that the “rich rock guy” would be spouting from his golden pulpit. But let me tell you something, the working stiffs at recording studios and record stores that have had to close thanks to rampant internet piracy never were rich, but they are out of a job.

via blogs.seattleweekly.com

h/t Stephen Mason

the clatter of keys | an open letter to washington about SOPA (from me and some other amazing creators)

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:43:43 -0500

As creative professionals, we experience copyright infringement on a very personal level. Commercial piracy is deeply unfair and pervasive leaks of unreleased films and music regularly interfere with the integrity of our creations. We are grateful for the measures policymakers have enacted to protect our works.
We, along with the rest of society, have benefited immensely from a free and open Internet. It allows us to connect with our fans and reach new audiences. Using social media services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we can communicate directly with millions of fans and interact with them in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

via theclatterofkeys.tumblr.com

Trent Reznor, OK Go, MGMT, Zoe Keating, Neil Gaiman, Others Join Anti-SOPA Fight - hypebot

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:43:09 -0500

As creative professionals, we experience copyright infringement on a very personal level. Commercial piracy is deeply unfair and pervasive leaks of unreleased films and music regularly interfere with the integrity of our creations. We are grateful for the measures policymakers have enacted to protect our works.

We, along with the rest of society, have benefited immensely from a free and open Internet. It allows us to connect with our fans and reach new audiences. Using social media services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we can communicate directly with millions of fans and interact with them in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

We fear that the broad new enforcement powers provided under SOPA and PIPA could be easily abused against legitimate services like those upon which we depend. These bills would allow entire websites to be blocked without due process, causing collateral damage to the legitimate users of the same services - artists and creators like us who would be censored as a result.

via hypebot.com

Jonathan Coulton on why piracy is not worth legislative intervention

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:42:40 -0500

So if you can stand me sounding a little crazy, listen: where is the proof that piracy causes economic harm to anyone? Looking at the music business, yes profits have gone down ever since Napster, but has anyone effectively demonstrated the causal link between that and piracy? There are many alternate theories (people buying songs and not whole albums, music sucking more, niches and indie acts becoming more viable, etc.). The Swiss government did a study and determined that unauthorized downloading (which 1/3 of their citizens do) does not create any loss in revenue for the entertainment industry. I remember but am now too lazy to find links to other studies that say the same thing. I can’t think of any study I’ve seen that demonstrates the opposite. If there is one, please point me to it. So I have a lot of trouble with the idea that the federal government is directing resources toward an ultimately ineffective game of piracy whack-a-mole (with some unknown amount of collateral damage to law-abiding citizens), when we are not even sure that piracy is a problem.

And if you can stand me sounding even crazier, here is this: making money from art is not a human right. It so happens that technological and societal blahbity bloos have conspired to create a situation where selling songs about monkeys and robots is a viable business, but for most of human history people have NOT paid for art. I don’t want this to happen again, and I would be very sad if this came to pass, but it’s not up to me to decide. We are constantly demonstrating through our actions what we believe to be the norms for acquiring and consuming content. Right now a lot of us think that it’s OK to download stuff through illegal sites under certain circumstances, and a lot of us think it’s totally fine to use those things to make videos and put them on YouTube even though YouTube profits from it. That’s not ME saying that, that’s US saying that – we’re a nation of pirates and infringers. Based on our behavior, you would not be wrong to deduce that some of us think funny videos on YouTube are more important than honoring intellectual property rights. This kind of thing has happened before. Entire industries rise and fall as the world changes and our priorities shift. Sorry.

via jonathancoulton.com

“Fanthropologist” Kristen Olson Studies Fans for Studios

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:39:27 -0500

Kristen Olson calls herself a “fanthropologist.” The title says it all: she uses the techniques of anthropologists to study fans and fandoms for the Los Angeles ad agency she works for. Olson’s job is to lay bare the inner workings of a given fandom so that studio executives can understand, and communicate with, the people who are passionate about their intellectual properties.

It’s a job made more complicated by the infinite hype chamber that the internet creates around media properties.

“The studios can’t tell the difference between the kind of hype that is economically generated by the need for bloggers to find something to hype,” Olson tells me, “and things that people are generally excited about. Which is one of the things that I do.”

Comic Con in particular has become a thorny issue for the studios over the past few years. As the event has become a giant promotional platform for studio creations, it’s become increasingly hard to tell what is going to be a real hit and what is a kind of summer fling for fans.

“Based on what we’re seeing coming out of it,” Olson says of the excitement generated by Comic Con, “it’s motivated by something more than simple love. [Fans are] looking for something to love.” Unfortunately for studio executives, that kind of enthusiasm doesn’t always translate into big mainstream audiences. The Comic Con audience fell in love with Scott Pilgrim, for example,but the film failed to live up to expectations at the box office.

Olson’s job runs in multiple directions. She likens it to being a plumber, but instead of water it’s information that she making sure flows properly.

“You’re looking at where the information is coming out and what you’re looking at is it traveling to all the places it needs to? What are people getting on the other end? Also another metaphor: telephone. Are people getting the message that you’re putting out? It’s tracing how the information travels and what factors are at play in what the end perception is.”

It’s a strange kind of mental wizardry. Analysts like Olson not only help media executives understand what the fans of their properties want, they help them speak the language of the fandom. To understand at a root level what fans get emotionally out of the property. Because a fandom is more than just a collection of information about a fictional universe, a celebrity, or a sports team. It’s a way of interacting with other people that colors the way fans see the world.

via turnstylenews.com

Digital Music News - Ringtones Still Make Four Times as Much Money as Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody Combined...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:36:49 -0500

But wait: it gets even crazier. Because it turns out that ‘mobile personalization’ products account for more than 1/3 of total digital music sales. That mostly includes ringtones, but also more exotic products like ringback tones (at least exotic in the US).

But how could we have missed this? Looks like if you’re not a shiny new technology, no one cares! Case in point: slightly-less-sexy a-la-carte downloads still account for nearly 60 percent of the digital pie, while even less-sexy CDs are slightly less than half of all recorded music sales (according to the RIAA). Meanwhile, subscription services comprise 8.4 percent of the digital music market.

So when’s the keg finally kicked on ringtones? Somewhere around 2016, at least according to Gartner, a near-eon in ‘internet time’.

(images courtesy of MusicProductionSchools.net)

via digitalmusicnews.com

Cheaper than Free « Bandcamp Blog

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:35:36 -0500

We see these sales as proof that Bandcamp can effectively compete with filesharing and other free distribution platforms by a) giving fans a clear, easy way to directly support the artist, and b) offering them a better user experience. Our favorite recent example of this was an $8 sale that started with the search “milosh flac -torrent.” So here was a fan looking for a Milosh record, wanted a high quality flac, but didn’t want to have to sift through a bunch of torrent sites. And that led them right to Bandcamp, and right to putting money in the artist’s pocket. Beautiful.

A little more uplifting info to ring in the new year:

In the month of December alone, Bandcamp artists raked in more than one million dollars in music and merch sales (bringing the total to-date to $12.6MM).

22% of those sales happened because of Bandcamp, driven by things like tags, the home page, recommendations, and search.

40% of the time, fans pay more than the asking price for name-your-price albums.

53% of all purchases are made by fans located outside the U.S. (Check out the countries in this recent snapshot of the live sales feed.)

When we first launched Bandcamp, the conventional wisdom was that music retail was moribund, and that artists’ futures were all about those terrifically lucrative tours you guys go on, supplemented perhaps by trickle-down advertising revenue generated by millions of listeners enjoying your tunes while doing their best to ignore ads for toothpaste. Fortunately, it appears there’s still a thriving community of fans who understand that the best way to support the artists they love is by handing them money.

via blog.bandcamp.com

Crowd funded film successes

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:34:32 -0500

Kickstarter, the powerhouse crowdsourced fund-raising engine for an increasing number of creative projects, is poised to have a breakout winter as a film funder, with three of its projects on documentary short lists for the Academy Awards and more than a dozen films headed to the Sundance Film Festival.

via gigaom.com

Digital Music Sales Surpass Physical Sales

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:33:24 -0500

Physical music sales have been decreasing every year since digital music offerings have become more popular, finally arriving at this moment – digital music purchases accounted for 50.3 percent of all music sales in 2011.

According to CNN, the boost past 50% was due to a significant increase in digital single sales, combined with a moderate increase in digital album sales.

As far as exact figures, digital album sales numbered around 331 million (a 1.3% increase), with music sales as a whole having increased year-over-year for the first time in 7 years.

via mactrast.com

1/4 of Twitter verified accounts are musicians

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:32:40 -0500

Approximately one quarter of Twitter’s verified accounts belong to musicians, many of them quite famous. The Echo Nest is applying our music intelligence platform to identify which verified accounts belong to recording artists and to deliver that data to Twitter, helping to organize Twitter verified accounts, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We are also adding these artists’ Twitter IDs to our Rosetta Stone ID mapping technology, which helps music services and app developers easily incorporate Twitter into their music apps without having to manually scour through the Twitter API to find musicians. Now, any developer can include these artists’ tweets within their apps. (Developers must comply with Twitter’s terms of service, of course.)

This move strengthens Twitter’s position as a crucial part of the internet’s infrastructure; it allows music app developers to incorporate real-time statements from popular artists into apps of all kinds; and it will help create a stronger bond between artists on their fans on a variety of platforms.

via blog.echonest.com