Words fail me. Occasionally, I come across a website that speaks with such sweet directness to my aesthetic that I just swoon. I fall in love with the web all over again. I've recently acquired one such 'web crush'. It's called BigThink, and the good Lord will forgive you if you spend the rest of the day in its arms.
BigThink presents simple videos of intelligent people discussing subjects they know quite well. Authors talk about the act of writing and the life of someone who dedicates themselves to the craft. Physicists talk about the universe. Economists talk Game Theory. It's really great stuff. My favourites thus far have been novelist Tom Perrotta, who is personable and direct, and author Michael Lewis, of Moneyball fame.
Since neither of my favourites are available to embed, check out Princeton Emeritus Professor Michael Walzer, talking about the same topic as Lewis, The Free Market + Morality:
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Collecting the Reins
So what is 'hype'? When a band has it, every blog that covers music seems to be talking about them. When a band doesn't, well, they receive only cursory lip service. At times, the concept of 'hype' has felt completely binary. On or off. 1 or 0. Hype or no hype. Pitchfork would tell their readers what was cool. Metacritic would tell their readers what the critics thought was cool. And the blogs would froth and bark their own opinions. It has been a gloriously functional mess for at least the last five years.
But for a band trying to make decisions about their future (read: do I quit teaching kindergarten in order to tour, or similar), hype was frustratingly hard to quantify. 'Do we even have fans in Raleigh? Will anyone come out to the show?' It is this doubt that Band Metrics aims to remove.
Read Write & Web's recent piece on the new application caught my attention with the sheer simplicity of the idea. For some bands, their entire existence amounts to a MySpace or Last.fm page. They can see the download counter going up, up, up, on their mp3's, but have no way of knowing just who is doing the downloading. Or what those people are saying about them on the blog/message boards. Or where those people live, what else they like, etc. It is analytics for the grassroots music business. And its a very cool idea.
The questions that remain, however: How many bands will be comfortable enough with the practicality of the service to buy in? Once the information is collected, how are bands going to leverage that information? How does one mobilize a following that exists purely on the web?
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