Reconsider

Maybe I am moving a little off topic, but this post has been building in me over the last week and I just had to let it out. I previously wrote about the publishing industry's resistance to their changing marketplace- traditional newspapers and other publishing entities railing against lost advertising dollars and emerging troublesome internet journalism -but, I perhaps should have noted that they are far from alone in their fight. Traditionalists in the film, television and software industries are all struggling to come to terms with the horrifying openness of their new world.

And then there is music.

The big music labels and the RIAA were among the first to show their unwillingness to adapt when they started dropping lawsuits on twelve year olds in Wisconsin and old grannies for downloading a handful of mp3s. I don't intend to comment on their litigiousness, however. Rather, I am taking issue with their product launch model.

Grizzly Bear are a relatively 'big' band, by most standards: they opened for Radiohead on their last stadium tour and are capable of headlining large shows on their own, they make the standard talk-show television appearances on a regular basis, and each new album is met with a swarm of hype on and offline. They are a very good band with a substantial popular and critical following. Cool, right? They also have a new album due out on May 26th.

Want to hear it? No problem! Just google it. Veckatimest leaked two weeks ago.
... Three months before its drop date.

The current method of release is ridiculous. The band probably finished work on this album early in the year, handed it in to the label and were told to sit on their hands for awhile. The label then sent out a few copies out for review purposes and let one or two mp3s hit the Hype Machine, through bloggers or official downloads. Those lead singles sounded great and the fan got excited. Anticipation was high. The first reviews were glowing. Did the label honestly believe this album would stay under wraps until May?

This leak, like the other hundreds of leaks in the last five years, highlights the inadequacy of the music industry's business model. The Radiohead experiment proved that online downloads will not necessarily cannibalize later in-store sales, so long as the band has strong brand equity and the released product is high quality. So why not stagger the releases? Lead with online, hit the brick and mortar stores at the scheduled date. Even if the label is not comfortable with that idea, now that their consumers are downloading a poorly ripped, unofficial version of the album from torrents, why not provide them with a legitimate alternative? In my opinion, Veckatimest should have been up on iTunes, or the band's website or anywhere(!) as soon as the leak occured.

You can either rail against the internet, or you can learn how to make it work for your business. The music industry cannot expect its old models to work the way they did fifteen years ago.

Just as a bonus, here is Grizzle Bear performing 'Deep Blue Sea' during a show with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Check it:

Look Down The Nose

I think most people would admit that we don't really know what to do with social networking, just yet. I mean, people have figured out how to use the devices personally, but using the business models behind them and their advertising potential is still in the learning stage. One ex-hacker seems recently suggested some fun ideas to stir up the conversation.

His name is Virgil Griffith, and he's a PhD student at Caltech. Griffith is really into data-mining on a a massive scale. He's devised a project where he compares the books listed as 'Favourites' on a user's Facebook page with the average SAT entrance score to the University they are currently attending (so, obviously, this is limited to the US). Based on which books score the most hits in schools with lower/higher standards he has created a graph entitled, Books That Make You Dumb.

Not a great endorsement for Alice Walker's The Color Purple or S.E. Hinton's The Oustiders. They are both pretty standard reading for middle school/early high school English classrooms, but I suppose if you're tastes stopped developing then...... well, its hard to prescribe much value to the graph. There are the issues of correlation does not mean causation and the fact that book taste may not indicate intelligence per se. But, of course, that is not the point. It is meant to be a conversation starter. This is Griffith's way of getting people to think about the different ways researchers/marketers/whoever can use the massive amounts of data being created by social networking users.

So what do you think? With Amazon releasing a terabyte of public data this week, where is data mining headed? And what are we going to be learning about ourselves?

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?