Making the most of online music fandom

The two-day MidemNet conference in Cannes, dedicated to the digital music business, brought up a lot of insightful discussions to the means of monetizing the artist-fan relationship. Of my particular interest was Nancy Baym presentation about the social activities that motivate fans to interact to one another, and how the internet transformed those activities in ways that empower fandom. Hypebot caught the main points of her presentation.

Important behaviors:

Sharing emotion
Building social identity
Collective intelligence (set lists, fan reviews)
Sharing interpretations (analyzing lyrics)
Creating for each other (fan videos, remixes, playlists)

How the net empowers and changes fandom:

Transcends distance and extends reach
Provides group infrastructure
Supports archiving
Lessen social distance

If It Doesn't Spread Its Dead

But with so many choices how do you know where to put your effort? Baym, always a big supporter of widgets, showed some examples featured by Reverb Nation.

Mutually beneficial ways to connect with fans:

Make personal connections
Use multiple platforms, but only as many as you can maintain well.
Provide social resources
Encourage their creativity

A&R Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourced music financing site Slicethepie will launch today a new web service called SoundOut. Apparently the service will crowdsource the A&R-type ratings of music. SoundOut is aimed at labels and artists who want to test a song prior to release in order to understand what the audience will like. For $20 to $50 users can upload a song and have it rated anonymously by Slicethepie users. 24 hours after uploading the song the uploader gets a detailed report that rates how various target markets reacted to the song (screenshots of a report are available to see here via Wired). The founder ambitiously claims that SoundOut should enable labels to efficiently test the market prior to signing/recording/releasing an artist.
From the report, labels should be able to understand whether a song caught on with listeners, measure the market potential of an artist as well as get an objective view on which songs work with which audience. According to wired, no major label has committed to use SoundOut program yet, but TuneCore plans to offer SoundOut to its users. Artists will have the option to invest TuneCore revenue in a SoundOut test without dealing with the withdrawal process. We will have to wait and see if labels will embrace the service. Wired says:

Record labels desperate to cut costs while still signing the occasional new
artist have ample reason to try Slicethepie's SoundOut service. Whatever's left
of their A&R departments can almost certainly use the help. And if they need
further evidence that A&R can be crowdsourced, they need look no further
than American Idol. By listening to the crowd before investing, American Idol
creator Simon Fuller has consistently outperformed "experts" who rely solely on
their own ears.

Creating, serving and monetising the artist-fan relationship

MidemNet 2009 conference will take place in Cannes the 17-18 of January brining together leading experts from all over the world discussing opportunities and solutions to enhance the artist/fan relationship. The conference will try to address the following issues:

"What are the most promising ways to foster this relationship further? What are the most up-to-date organisations, services, social media and digital platforms for artists to better connect with their fans? How can the music industry create value and generate new revenue streams out of this relationship? " The full program is available here. Nancy Baym will also participate with a master class called “Making the Most of Online Music Fandom” in which she will talk about the social activities that motivate fans to interact to one another.

Bloggers, the new Digital Gatekeepers?

In a music world were artists increasingly find themselves competing for attention and listeners have endless opportunities to discover new music, bloggers are gaining trust and credibility among other fans in recommending new music. Most bloggers are true music fans who want to discover great new music and share it with other fans. They can serve a very crucial role of promoters and filters, becoming, in fact, real taste makers and directing new listeners toward new music. Acknowledging the fact that bloggers can truly help bands to get attention is the first step for artists and labels toward a less hierarchical relationship with their audience. Bloggers are also more approachable then most print journalists. Fans respect bloggers because they are passionate about music and they write for love instead of a paycheck. Hypebot confirms this opinion in this recent post and in another post of a while ago where they mentioned about a study made by New York University's Stern Business School which monitored blogs chats for 108 albums for four weeks before and after their release dates. According to Hypebot the study showed that the volume of blog posts led to future sales, but that large increases in an artist’s Myspace friends had a weaker correlation to sales. You can access the whole report here. It would be interesting to know to which extent bloggers are receiving any sort of pressure from record labels to talk about their artists.

Happy New Year, Just Like the Old Year!!

2009 begins with the news that album sales are down, and iTunes sales are up. Move along people, nothing new to see here :-)