Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Steve Lawson on social media for independent musicians

I went to London's Vortex Jazz Club on Monday to catch the launch gig for the new Lawson/Dodds/Wood album, Numbers (pictured left, with guest sax player, Mark Lockheart). The thing is, I'd already had the album in digital form for a month or two — and not (a) because I nabbed a leaked copy off the net, or (b) because band member Steve Lawson (centre of photo) is a friend of mine. I paid the advertised price.

In a move reminiscent of the recent David Byrne & Brian Eno album, a digital download version was available in advance of the CD release. Advance buyers of the download were also entitled to the CD — I picked up mine at the Vortex — and got a further 45 minutes of exclusive material (the unedited improvisations from which the album was constructed) into the bargain. Anyone who's just curious can stream the album in full on Steve's site (via Last.fm).

Byrne & Eno got support from Topspin Media, one of the new wave of net-savvy, post-label music intermediaries, in managing the album release. Steve Lawson, however, adds the roles of label owner, social media man-about-town, and bass teacher to that of musician. I think I'm right in saying he's never put out an album other than on his own label, and generally aims to break even, at least, by the release date. He's put more thought into the uses of Twitter for building an audience than anyone I know: follow him @solobasssteve. In fact his ideas are so good that he once, after drinking a few beers in a famous producer's studio, claimed that I'd plagiarised them. Judge for yourself by checking his Social Media Principles for Musicians Parts 1, 2 and (I think?) 3 (hint: check the dates on these posts).

Participation and influence in social media

This post is a little update on one of themes I explored in the book concerning how people are different in the levels of commitment, participation and influence they bring to discovering culture. I started out with some market research about different kinds of music fans: "Savants", "Enthusiasts", "Casuals" and "Indifferents" (see full post about this classification). It doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that some similar gradation of interest occurs in most, if not all, other fields. But then I speculated that this classification might map onto the different kinds of participation in social media proposed by Bradley Horowitz, where he distinguised

• Creators — 1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
• Synthesisers — 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
• Consumers — 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

And then I went further and speculated about mapping that onto the distinction that some marketers make between advocates/influencers, 'brand adorers' and 'brand adopters'.

I mentioned in the book that it was questionable whether a pyramid is always the right way to represent these classifications. It implies a very top-down, one-way dynamic of influence. Intuition and everyday experience suggests that life isn't like that, and I gave examples of the most committed music fans being influenced indirectly by the more casual fans (Lord save us from being thought to share mainstream tastes!). But everyone seems to use pyramids to show influence, and that's the bit that stuck, while my nuanced caveats got forgotten. It still haunts me, which is why I have to write blog 'updates' like this…

But what prompted the return of this spectre was a couple of recent blog posts on participation and influence. First, Jay Cross shared the six levels of participation — represented as a ladder this time — identified by Jeremiah Owyang, a Forresters analyst:

Mufin.com: content-based recommendations

I get a fair number of people approaching me to tell me that their music recommender system is the best because of [insert special secret sauce here]. Usually this doesn't go much further: after all, the sauce is secret and can't be shared; so I say I'll be interested to keep in touch with their progress, and I bite my lip to resist repeating my sceptical view that any recommender system only has to be good enough to keep people coming back for more recommendations.

In the case of Berlin-based mufin.com, launching in private beta today, the story is slightly different, as they sent me all their publicity release information, and Petar Djekic was willing to talk to me on the record as it were. They even gave me an invite code to give away — that's my disclosure out of the way!

Mufin.com grew out of the Fraunhofer Institute, also the birthplace of the MP3 format, and the technically interesting part of what they're doing builds on that strong research base in audio and acoustics. What mufin.com does is known as content-based filtering rather than collaborative user-based filtering. In other words, rather than saying "people who like this artist/song also like this artist/song", it says "this song is similar in important ways to this song, so if you like one, you may like the other". Or in other words, think more like Pandora than Last.fm.

Fan culture and public service: media versus broadcasting

All through last week the smart people at BBC Radio Labs published a series of research summaries under the heading "fan cultures in radio".

The research projects covered different forms of fan participation around radio, from message boards, listeners to an avuncular breakfast DJ, and a long-running soap opera. The one I was waiting for — and which will possibly be of most interest to readers of this blog — was the relationship between 'specialist' music programmes and fans, by Andrew Dubber and Tim Wall.

The published summary doesn't give us much reporting of the actual behaviour of specialist music fans (any chance of a fuller account being made available, I wonder?), but focuses on the range of orientations of the BBC to meeting the needs of these fans:

Drawing on our examination of the fan activities of specialist music enthusiasts, and the way BBC staff who serve their interests conceive their professional practices, we think such a shift would allow discussion of the difference between a 'one-to-many', centre-to-receptive-audience model and the 'many-to-many' forms of communication that are more typical online. More to the point, the term 'broadcasting' pretty much just means radio and television, when in fact recorded popular music is a media form in itself.

Plugging Claire Tchaikowski's new album

Please excuse a brief promotional post on behalf of a friend. I first met Claire Tchaikowski  almost exactly a year ago after she agreed to  give a response to my talk at the RSA.  I gave her a copy of my book; she gave me a copy of her still unmastered first album. Claire was  originally signed to Sony-BMG, and has had 'interest' from two other major labels. But for now she's going it alone, and her album is released today on iTunes (256 kbps, no DRM) via Artists Without a Label. You can also hear one of the tracks in full on Last.fm. I'm not under any illusions that this blog is on the radar of music tastemakers, but am just chipping in my personal recommendation to anyone who might lend an ear. Quote me on this: you'll like Claire more than Dido. And if you're in London, she's supporting Luka Bloom in three weeks' time.