Archive for April, 2006
Learning from labels
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Why can’t brands be more like bands…or at least labels?
This is the last day of Music Week here and at Knowledge Problem. My "guest artist" has been John Galvin, a friend from Boston. John and I have been emailing back and forth, and a couple of days ago, in a longer message, he talked about about one way he keeps track of music.
[M]ore than, I think, at any time in the past, LABELS are fine ways of keeping up on music these days. [...] Pick the label that covers music you like, get all the bands from the label, and you’re doing OK in terms of covering a certain slice of music. Labels [serve] as music consultants, [we] pay to "cover the waterfront" ….
Interesting! With a plenitude of musical choices, we are forced one level up the production hierarchy. We go looking not for individual acts/artists/bands/projects but for the "long tail" labels that represent them. (John mentions several including Kill Rock Stars, Blood Shot Records, Matador Records and Secretly Canadian. Lynne Kiesling at KP mentions Polyvinyl, Kitchenware Records, and Merge Records.) The number of these studios is roughly equal, I expect, to the number of acts/artists that existed 15 years ago. So we stay about even in our search costs. (Of course, we sacrifice acuity for coverage, but in a culture as innovative and profuse as our own, it’s a good, or at least a necessary, bargain.)
These labels are acting as aggregators and editors. They act a little like favorite radio stations. We choose them to do the choosing for us, and a stream of new music pours through our lives as a consequence. People like me will still people like John but people like John will be well served by Kill Rock Stars. (My place in the hierarchy of knowledge is probably one of the magazines that John suggested this week, Magnet, perhaps. Or maybe I’m kidding myself. Perhaps Blender or Rolling Stone is more my speed. There are levels higher than this. I think the system scales right up to American Idol, and God help you if this is your cultural conduit. Talk about a Knowledge Problem.)
I found myself thinking whether brands could be more like Blood Shot Records. The trouble with brands is that they are still much too static and too broad. Most of them are still caught in a mass marketing game. They are trying to be "one thing to many markets" and this becomes increasingly implausible as the markets splinter ever more finely. Some brands do stream with design novelty. But this is devoted mostly to positioning tags and tactics: "good source of whole grain," "helps lower cholesterol," "dipped in peanut butter coating and bursting with peanuts."
One way for the brand to speak to long tail markets is to open themselves up to the product and the stylistic innovation of lots of little teams. These might be in-house "skunk work" teams of innovators. Or, in an ambitious act of cocreation, they might be teams of consumers working feverishly in suburbs around the country. The brand would work a little like Blood Shot Records which, I assume, does not direct the creative efforts or outcomes of the bands they represent. They merely corral them, give them the blessing and the distribution, of the Blood Shot brand, and send them out into the world.
The label strategy would have the advantage of allowing the brand to survey a vast amount of innovation and, on a just-in-time basis, choose the formula and look that works best for the market and the moment. The brand remains stationary but a river runs through it.
There was an influential book some years ago called "Learning from Las Vegas" in which Robert Venturi argued that architects could learn something from the great sprawling iconographies of a gambling town in the middle of the desert. I’m wondering whether marketers couldn’t learn something from another of the far margins of capitalism. Marginal markets have something to teach mainstreams one, because, well, they have seen the future, and it’s time we learned to see with their blood shot eyes.
References
Galvin, John. Personal Communication. April 5, 2006.
Kiesling, Lynne. Has the death of the music label started? Knowledge Problem. April 3, 2006. here.
Venturi, Robert, Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown. 1972/1977. Learning from Las Vegas. Revised edition. Cambridge: MIT Press. available here.
A briefing service for contemporary culture
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Today, I have three problems: American Idol, Second Life, and Yellow Arrow.
Last night, thanks to American Idol, Fox triumphed on the airwaves. Triumph is not too strong a word. AI voting has assumed immense proportions. Thirty-five to forty million votes are common place.
Certainly, there are some idolators who are voting, like, 40 times, ok? But that’s what I mean, Stephie. You voted 40 times!
As an extensive or an intensive measure, 40 million says this little show has taken contemporary culture by storm. (Everyone has to have their favorites and here are mine: Elliott Yamin and Katharine McPhee, Yamin because he looks like George C. Scott and McPhee because she does not.)
So American Idol is a problem I have to solve. This show is telling me something about contemporary culture but I’m not sure what. I took my own stab at it here a couple of days ago. American Idol may be the last gasp of a mass culture, popular because it defies the long tail markets and the plenitude that has transformed the music industry. Actually, AI should be both a last gasp and fresh air for the mass culture proposition. The more we fragment, the more we will embrace mass shows like this, the better to sustain our we-ness.
But I have to do better than this, and in a more perfect world, I would be attached to a social network of commentators who could give me the 411 on American Idol in say 400 crisply worded words. Or I would subscribe to a room full of really smart people, who track everything of interest in the contemporary world and who have 400 crisply worded words on all the things I need to know about. As my briefing team, this group keeps me posted. According to my subscription level, they know who I am and what I care about. And according to my subscription level, they feed me briefing notes that help explain among other things why the new show Heist is so disappointing and Thief is so good. (Actually, the magic words "Andre Braugher" are all the explanation I really need.)
And what about Second Life? I joined. I got a name (Moral DaSilva). I got an outfit (plaid shirt, jeans, sandals and a really stupid hat. My second life is a hippie life, apparently.) I learned a few gestures (I think my best is the "shrug.") I got a back story (I am a Marrano, a Sephardic Jew concealing religion and identity, who has been living under deep cover for so many generations that I have forgotten my cultural traditions, and now hunt the Second Life to rediscover or reinvent them.) I got a house (though frankly that turned into a disaster and I haven’t spent so much as a single night there). And I go to SL from time to time, but usually I run into people who are just standing around. "What are you doing?" I ask and usually they say, "Oh, just standing around. I’m new."
The marketer in me is horrified. Much of Second Life is like a ghost ship. There is plenty of evidence of intelligent life and activity but not many signs of life. All I see are beautiful houses, interesting shops, and little else. What I need here is a guide, someone who can give me an illuminating tour. I am told there are such creatures on Second Life, but I can’t find one to save my life. Here too I am prepared to pay handsomely for the insider’s guide. We have seen every kind of commerce spring up in Second Life. We have seen the in-world economy draw in real world wealth. So where the hell are the guides? They surround every real world hotel. Why are they so scarce in Second Life?
Even with a guide, there’s a good chance that the larger significance of Second Life will pass me by. Perhaps my briefing team could help here too. Tell me about Second Life in the context of the virtual realities that have existed in the last 15 years and perhaps the pre-virtual realities (movies, novels, plays) that Second Life may or may not supplant.
Yellow Arrow is an amazing experiment. I learned about it today thanks to PSFK. Here’s the way they describe themselves
I think of this as an wikipedia invisibly attached to the surfaces of the city. Everywhere you see a yellow arrow, you are given a number that allows you to get more information about the place in question. If you go to "secret New York City" and click on "traffic in souls" you get the video version of this feed. An account of Ellis Island and a glimpse of what it was like to arrive as an immigrant at the turn of the 19th century. Brilliant, now the city tells its stories. Yellow Arrow has managed to turn the city into its own museum. (Splendid. Museology was too important to be left to museologists.)
The trouble with Yellow Arrow is that it is way too much information. I had a quick look around this morning and ended up with the feeling I get in Second Life. There is just way too much here here. Millions of points of data. Thousands of interpretive possibilities. Hundreds of larger "take-aways." Goodness, but I need a guide here too. (And of course it turns out that the Second Life people can solve their problem with a Yellow Arrow solution. The place should be plastered with yellow arrows and lots of information about who did the building and what they were thinking and conversations that happened there…and so on.)
Information Exchange
So when does the marketplace step up and supply this kind of intelligence that makes American Idol, Second Life, or Yellow Arrow manageable realities. I don’t doubt that if I wanted to devote myself to any one of these I could have it mapped it in pretty quick order. But like everyone I am interested in all of them, and many more things besides, so I just don’t have the time to make myself a devotee.
I need a briefing system. (And it’s not just me. Every marketer, educator, politician, cultural producer, and retailer, needs this too.) This would supply me with a steadily supply of intelligence on what is happening on TV, on line, and in the world. It would give me advance notice of the forces shaping my world. And it would give me early warning of the things that are going to change the way I make my living, raise my family, live my life. It would be nice to have a little notice. I mean, come on.
This could be a briefing exchange that would allow me to trade insights with other suppliers (using some kind of credit system). I would also allow me to sell new insights to clients for cash. Where would I fit in the system? Oh, I guess an anthropologists chattering away as I do could create something useful, if only by bundling all these daily posts into aggregates of illumination. (Hah!)
I am grateful to know of the magazine subscriptions suggested a couple of days ago here by John Galvin and I will subscribe to one or two of them. But what I really need is John Galvin or someone like him, supported by a subscription system, patiently sifting through the great mass of music that appears each day in our culture, giving me clips of this and clips of that, and a voice over or a video iPod treatment that lets me see the bigger picture.
We can imagine what a model might look like: how many subscribers, at what subscription rates, with what level of customization. Maybe it’s 10 first tier subscribers who for $300 a year generate $3000. The second tier might be 100 subscribers who come up with $60 and this gives $6000. Then 1000 consumers who get the newsletter at $60.00. This brings in $60,000, and all together we have $69,000 and that’s not enough. Time to get out a spread sheet and figure how many tiers are called for and the best pricing per.
One of the questions here is how many people are capable of scaling down to the fine detail and up to the big picture. It would extraordinary elasticity to manage this movement. Actually, to shift metaphors, it would take the nimbleness of a mountain goat. It looks like this market should have an over supply of supply, open to everyone with an enthusiasm for popular music. But in fact I think it will prove to be a relatively small group of people. (As I got to know popular music better in the 1990s, I noticed that my ability to describe it to newcomers began to deteriorate.)
This is a market waiting to happen. Why is it taking so long? Who will build the exchange? Who is going to enjoy first mover advantage? There is no money to be made at this level of the blogging world. At least, I haven’t managed to make any. With millions of us producing posts each day, content is free for the asking. Actually, it’s free without the asking. The value opportunities lie, plainly, in aggregation and pattern recognition. And there are relatively few of us who can actually do this. Time to band together, build an exchange, and make some dough.
References
The Yellow Arrow website here.
The "Secret New York" project of Yellow Arrow here.
Look for "traffic in souls" in the right-hand column for the page in question.
Fawkes, Piers. 2006. Access To cool. PSFK. here.
For a Canadian experiment that looks a little like the Yellow Arrow enterprise, see murmur Toronto here.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Piers and PSFK for the head’s up. This part of the briefing system is already in place!
Thanks to Suzanne Stein for the Murmur Toronto connection.
Sony storms the future (again)
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From a Sony Corporation press release:
Mr. Stringer [Sony CEO] focused on the increasingly personalized nature of entertainment and the importance of recognizing and accommodating the needs of the individual while providing choice and convenience in the ways that consumers use Sony products.
From a Sony Corporation website:
We appreciate your interest in the Connect music store, but our store currently only works with Internet Explorer 5.5 and above. You don’t seem to be using that particular browser at the moment, so, unfortunately, we’ll have to part ways until we support the browser you’re currently using or you upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer.
References
Anonymous. 2006. Sony Corporation Press Release: "Howard Stringer, Sony Chairman and CEO Presents Sony’s Vision for Entertaining the Future at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada January 5, 2006." here.
The Sony Corporation website "Connect" here. (I provoked the message above by visiting the Sony site with Firefox.)
Music Week for the “culture and economics” world
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Unofficially, this is music week for bloggers interested in culture and economics. Over at Knowledge Problem, Lynne Kieslinghas some thoughts on implications of the long tail market for the music industry, and Mike Giberson contemplates format changes in Washington radio (refs. and links below).
This Blog Sits At is eager to make itself useful, and on Friday, I offered thoughts on Pink’s new album. Today, I want to share an email I got from John Galvin. I had been wondering what magazines I should be subscribing to in the music category, and in matters of this kind I do nothing without advice of counsel. John has more than once wowed me with his command of popular culture in general and music in particular, so I turned to him.
Here, by kind permission, is the email with which John laid out a couple of music magazine subscription options.
Hi Grant – Your request is both flattering and well-timed: I have recently (for about the fourth time in my life) embarked on a get-back-in-touch-with-music campaign, energized by the recent (and far-too-late) addition of an iPod to my life, and a realization that I’ve been living in the land of ‘new releases by bands I already know I like’ for too long. I’ve re-subscribed to magazines, forced myself out the door to shows at local clubs, and have made music sites and bit torrents part of my daily internet regimen.
Musically, I was raised on mostly American mid-80s through early-90s alterna-indie-rock, and so my suggestions reflect that. That said, I think you should subscribe to, or at least monitor, the following:
Magnet (www.magnetmagazine.com) – this magazine, more than any other, covers the music I like/love. Some of the regular contributors piss me the holy hell off (especially Jonathan Valania), but it’s usually in a productive way (except Jonathan Valania). Their most frequent sin is a "hipper than thou," "oh you don’t know that already?" tone…but that’s to be expected, and perhaps desired, in one’s music journalism. (And anyway, they don’t violate as egregiously in this area as my next suggestion.) Comes out of Philadelphia, with a CD in every issue, and LOTS of album reviews. Short, one- or two-page sections on other genres (e.g., folk, jazz) – just the right amount for this reader – are at the back. When you subscribe, online or by subscription card, you get the current issue in the mail about 3 days later, in a hand-addressed envelope. No “please allow 6-8 weeks”: this isn’t a big corporate mag. While they put together a top-rate, slick publication with great cover photos, it’s obvious even from the transaction of the subscription that there’s a room somewhere in Philly, filled with guys (sic) who love this music and want other people to love it, too. To be read to understand and keep current with the enduring indie-rock-loving, alt-country-loving rock critic culture. For the music I like, Magnet is the best one-stop place to keep up-to-date with new bands and developments and (re-)releases for established acts.
Paste (www.pastemagazine.com) – Only on its 20th issue or so, this magazine covers more than just music. Comes with a CD/DVD every issue. Has an artsy orientation and is more concerned with what’s intellectually hip in white alt.culture than with what’s good music, per se (cf. the recent cover of Philip Seymour Hoffman…mind you, this is only a problem if you want your music magazine to be a *music* magazine; nothing wrong with Philip Seymour Hoffman on the cover of a magazine). Paste comes from a "why everyone you know who’s smart likes this already" rather than a "why *we* like this" perspective. (The latter of which better describes Magnet, which is why I like it more.) I use it to make sure there’s nothing major I’m missing, and because they write about so much of what I like – but their coverage of artists I already know about often irritates me, leaves me feeling condescended to, that they’ve missed something, that they were too ‘meta’ about the ‘significance’ or ‘importance’ of their topic. If NPR was a music/arts/culture magazine, it’d be Paste. Don’t get me wrong: it’s beautiful, slick (er, matte), and always engrossing; the DVD material alone is usually worth the price of admission.
Fader (www.thefader.com/blog) – I’m personally not all *that* enthused by this magazine but I think it’s still useful and pick it up on the newsstand now and then. It covers (from a very "white" perspective) an intentionally wide range of musics…always 2 different covers for every issue, usually of conflicting music styles (the current issue is available with either Ghostface Killah or Sweden’s Love Is All gracing the front). Black music is frequently covered but from a music critic point of view, never a hip-hop culture point of view. That’s just a for instance; they are intentionally "multi-cultural" so I use hip-hop as merely an example. Fader is always super-hip: hey, here’s that Brazilian band you’ve just *got* to know about.
And for a website to know what indie/alt-music culture is up to on a regular basis: www.pitchforkmedia.com. This is where I go, daily, to make sure I know about upcoming tours of bands that I’ll want to see, new albums, etc. There’s culture here, but it’s my culture, so it’s invisible to me – I go here to learn about stuff and routinely say to friends, "Did you see on Pitchfork that….?"
The British mags Q and Mojo are worth keeping tabs on if your inner music fan has any anglophile in him at all, and maybe even if he doesn’t. American music journalism treats its heroes with an awestruck reverence, saving irreverence only for fans, and those artists “we” have all agreed to find silly (e.g., Britney Spears, Kenny G, Courtney Love). British music journalism refreshingly channels its irreverence toward great and crappy artists alike, and that reason alone makes Q or Mojo a good occasional purchase.
Hope that helps.
Very helpful indeed. Thank you, John, for that superb survey. I am placing my subscriptions now.
References
Giberson, Michael. 2006. Washington Area Radio Reshuffles the Deck Chairs. April 4, 2006. here.
Kiesling, Lynne. 2006. Has the death of the music lapel started. Knowledge Problem. April 3, 2006. here.
The Experience Exchange
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Thorstein Veblen invented the term "vicarious consumption" some hundred years ago. Look, he said, the consumer choices exhibited by one person sometimes work to the credit of another. When we see a butler in a tuxedo, a benefit accrues not to the butler but his "master." The butler is consuming vicariously for his boss.
Great. Splendid. Veblen was ahead of his time. One day we who loiter at the intersection of anthropology and economics will get serious about the issue here: how the value called money can be turned into the value called status by the intermediary called clothing, display and ritual. How do capitals of one kind become capital of another, performing certain kinds of social work in the process? What conversion processes are at work?
Some day. But for the moment, I want to appropriate Veblen’s term for another purpose. In this case, vicarious consumption is something I purchase not to expand my display of wealth, but my breadth of experience. Now, my agent is not a status advertisement, but as an opportunity for experience.
I have a new demand as a consumer. I want to hire people to live my life for me. I want to hire lots of them. I want to send them out into the world. I want them to report back. I want to be able to live my life, and several others to boot.
Two things are driving this.
The world got smaller. I now know about aspects of the world that were simply invisible to my great grandfather. I know for instance a little about the politics and the culture of South Africa. I think to myself, "wow, that must be interesting." Chances are my great grandfather didn’t know anything about South Africa and if he did, it came to him through the lens of a sensationalistic journalism that encouraged a sense of difference, not one of sameness.
I got bigger. Well, not me, personally. All of us. All of us are the beneficiaries of an education and a culture that does not tremble at the appearance of cultural difference. No, we say, ok, so how is it different? Differences used to scare the pants off us. It used to provoke the worst kinds of xenophobia (including racism and genocide). Now, it’s regarded as a sort of stimulant. (Food is a good example. Our great grandparents were inclined to say (adjusting for ethnicity), "I’m not ever giving up my beans and chips. Not me." Their descendants now say stuff like, "I thought the Pad Thai was a little bit rubbery. Next time, let’s try that new Tibetan place?)
A new product category
I am suffering deficit I never had before. I don’t have enough lives to capture the world out there. If I’m lucky, I have what’s left of a 75 year incumbency, and the substantial liberties that come with being a creature of privilege in 21st century North America.
But it’s not enough! I can see many things in the world that I would love to experience. It would be really, really interesting to live in many parts of the former Soviet union. Any part of China would now be deliriously interesting as would any part of India. I would like to know what the world looks like to David Brooks or Mitch Hurwitz or George Stroumboulopoulos. (Their experience is of course not accessible, but I could spend enough time in Washington, Hollywood and Toronto to get a clue.)
A concession: I don’t actually want to raw, unmediated access to the new domains that beckon. As a member of my generation and this time and place, I am thoroughly spoiled and expect to be thoroughly cosetted. This means I do not actually hunger for a glimpse into the life of someone who is illiterate, abused, and tuburcular. Misery, I can imagine…and the misery I cannot imagine, I am deeply, deeply grateful for. (We need to reverse the polarity of that famous line about each family being unhappy in its own way. I think misery is probably the true universal. It’s in happiness (or at least engagement) that makes things unpredictable.)
But I do want things that are very much less mediated than they used to be. And this means that the old suppliers in the marketplace (journalistic treatment, documentary filmmaking, Disney, Club Med, fictional recreation on page and screen) are not enough. I need information that is more voluminous, less managed, and more personal than anything they can supply.
I figure there are going to be lots of new suppliers for the "alternative lives" product category. One of the natural options here is a kind of "experience exchange" that allows me to contract with, say, a Southern politician and work out some way of giving the two of us access to one another’s lives. My friend Craig Swanson and I have been talking about how tourism might be reinvented along these lines. I recently met a Baptist minister on the train, and we have been corresponding life events back and forth by email. (I am able to report this much: his life is amazingly interesting.)
But let me stick with the notion of the vicarious consumer for the moment. I can imagine a college student headed off to the far east with three clients in mind. William, let’s call him, will be going for his own purposes, to seek adventure, to skirt disaster, to make himself more worldly. But he will also have consulted with his three clients, and he goes off "to the field" with a sense of what would most surely engage their curiosity. This is a pretty good way of making up for the parties’ respective deficits. I don’t know enough about Asia. William, like every college student, will never have enough money.
The technologies are there: blogging by word and video, cell phones. Personally, I’m happy if William writes a public blog. That should be one of the values he can extract from the opportunity. I just hope that I can induce him to engage with the world with a curiosity and an intelligence that resembles my own. I have to hope, and this is interesting to ponder, that the kinds of things William does and notices to appeal to his clients will prove to be the kind of thing that will broaden and or deepen the potential appeal of his website to others.
Somebody now needs to build the exchange, a kind of Craig’s list that allows experience seekers to find vicarious consumers plus some way of mediating between buyers and sellers. All we is need exchange experience, some managerial capability, some test cases, a little research, not very deep pockets, a website, and Bob’s your uncle, as the English say.
I wonder if this isn’t an industry waiting to happen. You, too? For God sake, call me.
