AUGUST 11, 2009

The Future Of Media - Public Funding?

Ever since I was a teenage kid with snobby taste in music, I’ve loved the Canadian indie rock band Metric. (OK, “rock” is a bit of a strong word for the group, but “emo” reflects poorly on me, so that’s what I’m going with). After a two-year layoff, the group recently came out with a new album called Fantasies, which is pretty good but nothing to write home about. Much more interesting, though, is how they funded the album - rather than putting themselves through another onerous major label deal, one that dictates creative direction and only nominally compensates artists for record sales, Metric decided to start their own label and build their own studio with the help of grant funding from the Canadian government.

To me, this speaks volumes about where, exactly, paid media is heading. As I’ve written before, plummeting-to-nonexistent distribution and publication costs have ended major media companies’ role of “gatekeeper” - one that they held solely due to the scarcity of space on record store shelves, or column inches in a newspaper.

But even more notably, I think the Metric experience points one viable way forward for media outlets struggling with the competition of the web - government and/or nonprofit funding. Canada, for instance, has decided that to a certain degree, cultural protectionism is preferable to a completely free market. They’re fine with having a somewhat distinct Canadian culture that exists with government protection and subsidy - a goal that’s accomplished in a number of ways, including “Canadian content” laws that require 35% of content broadcast by radio stations be of Canadian origin, as well as the grant system. Of course, this priority is made a bit more urgent by the presence of a culturally and linguistically similar behemoth on the southern border, but many western countries have similar laws.

Like the Canadians, who have decided that it’s worth sacrificing free market efficiency for a little diversity in culture, I think it’s worth exploring a similar model for journalism. We’re quickly finding that in an age of cutthroat competition for journalists, bloggers like Perez Hilton (who commands $72,000 for a full-day sponsorship) are rising to the top. Far be it from me to criticize a guy making money, but I think we can agree that celebrity gossip won’t fill the void left by the increasing unprofitability of investigative journalism. This is a place that I think a well-targeted government grant program, or an equivalent non-profit organization, might be able to step in and cover the significant costs of hard-hitting journalism - recognizing that a vibrant but protected press is superior to the alternative of no press at all.

Enough seriousness - let’s rock (kind of). Here’s “Gimme Sympathy” from Metric’s Fantasies.

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MAY 29, 2008

Music And The Hivemind

I go through cycles when it comes to music. I’ll take a particular genre and wear it out for about a month, until I can’t stand it anymore, then move on to the next one. This is not a particularly healthy way to enjoy music, but it’s what I do.

So when mid-May rolled around, and I got tired of listening to depressing indie rock from Portland and Omaha, I decided to trade in my Elliott Smith (RIP) and Bright Eyes MP3s for something a little more upbeat - in this case, first-wave and New Wave punk. I’ve loved the Clash since I was a little kid, and my teenage years were pretty much defined by The Ramones, The Police, and The Minutemen. So I changed my ringtone to “Rock the Casbah” and my alarm clock music to “God Save the Queen“, but I quickly found that my selection of songs was limited to what I had grown up with and discovered in high school, and I wasn’t satisfied.

Luckily, in recent years a whole host of social media and other internet tools have sprung up, with the purpose of educating music lovers and allowing them to find new artists they might like. Knowing these tools existed, I took my search to the Web.

The first place I looked was Last.fm, where I’ve had a profile for almost 4 years now. Last.fm is a service that works with the music player on your computer (such as iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media Player) and exports data on the songs you play to their website. The result is an exact record of your listening habits, data from which the service generates music recommendations and personal charts. For instance, I can look back and find out which artist I listened to most in the second week of February, 2005 (for the record, it was the Dismemberment Plan, an erstwhile DC indie rock group). Almost every artist with a recording history has a page on Last.fm listing biographical details, charts, and similar artists, and users can add tags to artists and songs for easier categorization. Going through the Clash’s page on Last.fm, for example, you learn that other Clash fans also enjoy the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks and the Dead Kennedys. I used Last.fm’s popularity charts to find a band I’d never heard of before - an Irish group called Sticky Little Fingers - by listening to the most popular songs among Last.fm listeners.

I also turned to Pandora, which is a personalized radio service based on an ambitious open-source effort called the Music Genome Project. The Project is an impressive effort to quantify music based on 400 individual qualities like key, tonality and tempo. The result is that every song in the database has a unique identifier based on the song’s qualities, similar to a strand of DNA for humans. Pandora Radio allows users to input artists or songs, and a personalized radio station is generated from a pool of music with similar genomes. I put in several groups in the early punk genres and the result was a radio station with a lot of old favorites, but several artists I wasn’t familiar with at all.

So this time, while I’m on my 70’s and 80’s punk kick, I won’t be stuck listening to London Calling and Synchronicity on repeat. My roommates and cubemates thank you, social media.

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FEBRUARY 20, 2007

The Lyrics They Are A’Changin’

Listening to the radio over the weekend, I heard two songs - both #1 hits in their times - that struck me as a perfect example of how women have come a long way. 

The first song was Gloria Gaynor’s 1978-79 hit "I Will Survive"  about a woman who barely made it through the first breakup with this man.  Now he’s back and she’s telling him to get out. She proudly declares:

Go on now go walk out the door
just turn around now
’cause you’re not welcome anymore
weren’t you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye
you think I’d crumble
you think I’d lay down and die
Oh no, not I
I will survive
as long as i know how to love
I know I will stay alive
I’ve got all my life to live
I’ve got all my love to give
and I’ll survive
I will survive

Now, I don’t know about you, but simply surviving doesn’t seem like the best goal for a woman to have.   

Move forward 28 years to 2007 - to Beyonce’s "Irreplaceable." Here’s another woman telling her man to get out.  But the tone has changed:

So go ahead and get gone
And  call up on that chick and see if she is home
Oops, I bet ya thought that I didn’t know
What did you think I was putting you out for?
Cause you was untrue
Rolling her around in the car that I bought you
Baby you dropped them keys hurry up before your taxi leaves
Standing in the front yard telling me
How I am such a fool - Talking about
How I’ll never ever find a man like you
You got me twisted

You must not know about me
You must not know about me
I could have another you in a minute
matter fact he’ll be here in a minute - baby

Okay, so now the woman is in complete charge.  She owns the house, the car - she’s not  only going to survive, she’s going to live well and be able to replace him in a minute.  Now that’s a woman who thinks highly of herself. 

So what’s my point?  We’ve gone from women struggling to even say "I Will Survive" to a woman making sure her ex knows just who’s calling the shots.  Gloria’s song showed the beginnings of women speaking up for themselves.  And Beyonce’s demonstrates a power shift - the woman in control.  You’ve come a long way, baby.

I sort of feel that Beyonce’s song is about as far as you can go without becoming a callous, self-centered person who only uses the other sex - in other words, a man - so it makes me wonder what’s next. 

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MAY 3, 2006

Customers Tell Their Story

Customer World points me (via John Winsor) to this post on Room 116:

Came across this over the weekend at Rockefeller Center. JetBlue setup this area with a booth that records people’s experiences and thoughts about JetBlue.  The theme is based on the new JWT/NY campaign that launched with a spot from the JetBlue CEO.  If you’ve seen it, you’ll recognize it by the funky animation. ..There was also a booth with postcards that visitors can send to their friends about Jetblue.   

Jet Blue based their booth on NPR’s StoryCorps, which has a booth in Grand Central Station and a mobile one that goes around the country collecting stories.

I love this idea.  I had this idea.  A couple months ago I tried to convince a client to do this very thing.  Oh well, great minds and all that.  The reason this is such a good idea is that it puts the customer in control, gives them a fun experience, and allows them to share who they are with the company.  The company is passive here, just listening - a reversal of traditional roles.  It also goes beyond that one day experience.  The tapes can be used for marketing and advertising - and since we’re paying more attention to peer reviews these days, that makes sense. 

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