05.24.07
Posted in arg, business, community building at 9:25 am by Matthew Reinbold
Yes, I’ve referred to Trent Reznor as an intellectual ‘Captain Dreamy’. And I’ve mentioned the alternate reality game (arg) that he deployed for his latest album, ‘Year Zero’. However, a recent interview with him ‘down-under’ has surfaced on the Lefsetz Letter (the email counterpart to the Lefsetz blog) and their are just too many great details not to share. It details a clash of cultural norms brought on by shifts in technology pitting corporations against their customers – with the artist caught in the middle.
It must be an odd time then to have a new album, Year Zero, out?
It’s a very odd time to be a musician on a major label, because there’s so much resentment towards the record industry that it’s hard to position yourself in a place with the fans where you don’t look like a greedy asshole. But at the same time, when our record came out I was disappointed at the number of people that actually bought it. If this had been 10 years ago
I would think “Well, not that many people are into it. OK, that kinda sucks. Yeah I could point fingers but the blame would be with me, maybe I’m not relevant”. But on this record, I know people have it and I know it’s on everybody’s iPods, but the climate is such that people don’t buy it because it’s easier to steal it.
You’re a bit of a computer geek. You must have been there, too?
Oh, I understand that — I steal music too, I’m not gonna say I don’t. But it’s tough not to resent people for doing it when you’re the guy making the music, that would like to reap a benefit from that. On the other hand, you got record labels that are doing everything they can to piss people off and rip them off. I created a little issue down here because the first thing I did when I got to Sydney is I walk into HMV, the week the record’s out, and I see it on the rack with a bunch of other releases. And every release I see: $21.99, $22.99, $24.99. And ours doesn’t have a sticker on it. I look close and ‘Oh, it’s $34.99′. So I walk over to see our live DVD Beside You in Time, and I see that it’s also priced six, seven, eight dollars more than every other disc on there. And I can’t figure out why that would be.
Did you have a word to anyone?
Well, in Brisbane I end up meeting and greeting some record label people, who are pleasant enough, and one of them is a sales guy, so I say “Why is this the case?” He goes “Because your packaging is a lot more expensive”. I know how much the packaging costs — it costs me, not them, it costs me 83 cents more to have a CD with the colour-changing ink on it. I’m taking the hit on that, not them. So I said “Well, it doesn’t cost $10 more”. “Ah, well, you’re right, it doesn’t. Basically it’s because we know you’ve got a core audience that’s gonna buy whatever we put out, so we can charge more for that. It’s the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy it. True fans will pay whatever”. And I just said “That’s the most insulting thing I’ve heard. I’ve garnered a core audience that you feel it’s OK to rip off? F— you’. That’s also why you don’t see any label people here, ‘cos I said ‘F— you people. Stay out of my f—ing show. If you wanna come, pay the ticket like anyone else. F— you guys”. They’re thieves. I don’t blame people for stealing music if this is the kind of s— that they pull off.
Where does that extra $10 on your album go?
That money’s not going into my pocket, I can promise you that. It’s just these guys who have f—ed themselves out of a job essentially, that now take it out on ripping off the public. I’ve got a battle where I’m trying to put out quality material that matters and I’ve got fans that feel it’s their right to steal it and I’ve got a company that’s so bureaucratic and clumsy and ignorant and behind the times they don’t know what to do, so they rip the people off.
Given all that, do you have any idea how to approach the release of your next album?
I’ve have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it’s done in the studio, not this “Let’s wait three months” bulls—.
When your US label, Interscope, discovered the web-based alternate reality game (ARG) you’d built around Year Zero, were they happy for the free marketing or angry you hadn’t let them in on it?
I chose to do this on my own, at great financial expense to myself, because I knew they wouldn’t understand what it is, for one. And secondly, I didn’t want it coming from a place of marketing, I wanted it coming from a place that was pure to the project. It’s a way to present the story and the backdrop, something I would be excited to find as a fan. I knew the minute I talked to someone at the record label about it, they would be looking at it in terms of “How can we tie this in with a mobile provider?” That’s what they do. If something lent itself to that, OK, I’m not opposed to the idea of not losing a lot of money (laughs). But it would only be if it made sense. I’ve had to position myself as the irrational, stubborn, crazy artist. At the end of the day, I’m not out to sabotage my career, but quality matters, and integrity matters. Jumping through any hoop or taking advantage of any desperate situation that comes up just to sell a product is harmful. It is.
Is the Year Zero ARG something labels will copy now?
Well, their response, when they saw that it did catch on like wildfire, was “Look how smart we are the way we marketed this record”. That’s the feedback I’ve gotten — other artists who’ve met with that label ask ‘em about it: “Yeah, you like what we did for Trent? Look what we did for Trent”. They’ve then gone on to try to buy the company that did it to apply it to all their other acts. So, glad I could help them out. I’m sure they still don’t understand what it is that we did or why it worked. But I will look forward to the Black Eyed Peas ARG, that should be amazing.
Permalink
05.17.07
Posted in community building, mobile, social networks at 8:47 am by Matthew Reinbold
As you may remember I was pretty bullish about Twitter. It seemed like a fantastic way of staying in touch with like minded people and staying motivated throughout the day. I even won business for Vox Pop Design because Twitter made me available, helped me network, and become fast friends with others. A quick scan of Twitter’s traffic the last couple months shows that I’m not alone.
Lately, however, Twitter users are much more likely to see the dreaded ‘network kitties’ than they are their social chums. The site has not been able to successfully scale to the demand of users (as one peer pointed out, ironically enough on Twitter, that when one update could potentially kick off hundreds of SMS messages the technical curve to support it becomes very steep).
As Duncan Riley, speaking on TechCrunch, says (my emphasis added)
It’s not just down time on Twitter lately that has made the service sit somewhere between frustrating and useless. Even when Twitter is up, updates/ refreshes fail, pages don’t load and third party tools can’t connect. There has been a lot of downtime.
I’m already noticing that there are decidedly fewer posts among my inner circle since the outages became worse. The disruptions cause a breakdown in what made Twitter so good at – spontaneous, geography free discussions. For many, one to many views of the kitty at work and they’ll be off to something that works. It would have been much better for Twitter to have capped their users (ala GMail when it was starting out). Limits not only allow the technology to scale gracefully on its own measure. It also provides a sense of exclusivity that can create additional demand.
Unfortunately, its too late to implement something like that for Twitter. The best we can hope for is that Twitter fixes their problems before any more people leave for functional pastures.
Permalink
05.03.07
Posted in business, community building, crowd sourcing, engaged crowds at 7:54 am by Matthew Reinbold
For quite some time (like the last two years) businesses have seen crowd sourced websites as something akin to the Golden Fleece: for nothing passionate users would populate your website with rich content in volumes far greater than anything your own team could do (and they’d work for nothing more than the opportunity to have their account name at the top of a ‘best of’ list).
While some have been warning about the woes these site would suffer if they would bite the hand that feeds them things have worked out pretty well – until now. Digg is a ’social news website’. Users submit news stories and then vote the pieces up or down. In theory this is supposed to create a ‘democratic’ approach to the news.
Things got out of hand this Monday and Tuesday. As Pete Cashmore of Mashable recaps:
The backstory: a story including the number got to the front page, but was quickly pulled by a moderator. That led to another user reposting the story with the number in the description – “Spread This Number. Again”. That story was also pulled, at which point the mob piled in.
Clearly, they’ve now lost the fight over the key: almost every single story on the homepage, and 100% of the popular stories in the technology section are links to sites that aim to propagate that number. This key, for those who don’t know, is a series of numbers which will unlock copy-protected High Definition movies. The MPAA hates this of course, and there’s no one Diggers hate more than the MPAA and RIAA. DRM has met its match against a single-minded army numbering more than one million strong.
Late on Tuesday the public face and founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, threw up his hands in defeat on his blog:
after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
A reader of Om Malik summed the situation up perfectly:
I think the real story here is user-generated content biting back when it’s actively censored by the site generating revenue from it.
Does this mean that crowd sourced efforts are inevitably doomed to have the serfs charge the castle? Why hasn’t this already happened with other aggregated news spots, like SlashDot?
Permalink
05.01.07
Posted in business, community building, engaged crowds at 10:36 am by Matthew Reinbold
Bob Leftsz, in the music world, has incredible reach. His newsletter not only is straightforward and laced with insights but it commands the attention of major music industry movers and shakers. The best posts are those that spur responses from those he’s questioning.
Recently Bob openly asked if online ’stars’ could really sell music. He used Tila Tequila (her MySpace homepage link probably NSFW unless your workplace encourages Pussycat Doll-like ambiance), one of MySpace’s more popular members, as an example (he’s referring to Tila having nearly 2 million MySpace ‘friends’ but only being able to sell 13,000 singles of her new album on iTunes):
Code doesn’t manipulate. And Web statistics don’t lie. Oh, the ones on YouTube and MySpace can be manipulated, but is iTunes hiding pressing reports?
And the fact that social networking numbers can be faked only speaks to the underlying point. Is what is being exhibited any good? So, Tia Tequila is a massive star online. Does that mean she’s going to sell records?
Apparently not. Some hypothesized that the reason the sales were so dismal was because most of her online entourage was of the autonomous sort:
Anybody with the cash can get a lot of “friends” but it doesn’t mean squat if the quality of the music isn’t there. So the next time you visit a page, you have to wonder are these really fans or were they just bought? Somebody with some deep pockets is backing Tila, but they forgot about good songs sung well.
In the following comments was this little gem of an insight:
I recently worked at an indie where interns sat at computers all day, every day, on myspace and “friended” people for the label’s bands. The company didn’t shell out money for it though, since the interns were unpaid! Why pay lots of money when you’ve got an endless supply of people willing to work for nothing doing menial tasks?
That being said, I also worked at another indie where interns managed bands myspace accounts and accepted friend requests, never sending any out. The bands on this label weren’t huge but they had talent and a core audience, and were certainly not at a loss for myspace friends. (The interns were a lot happier there too.)
Other’s posited that it wasn’t a matter of fake friends but poor usage of those friends she did have:
Brian L. Klein:
I was asked to put a proposal in to Renshaw’s office to promote Tila’s single online. It was designed to set up the release in a “super distribution” plan that I came up with. I’ve been very successful with this technique with the artist I manage named Joe Purdy. We’ve sold over 250k single downloads worldwide this past year and a half with no label. I’m doing this with all of the artists I manage. I’ve been working with majors and indies for years. I’m done with them. We are actually making money on record royalties this early in the game and reinvesting it!!
Renshaw’s office decided not to hire me. They f*ked up. With the traffic Tila gets every day and her reach she should have done much better. Her music isn’t amazing but neither is a lot of s*t that sells. They had one tiny buy button on her front page leading to itunes. NOTHING viral besides the video.
The reason I was excited to work on the project was her reach. 1.6 million “friends” should have had a bigger impact if executed properly. It was embarrassing to see what happened. They ended up hiring the same old “new media” marketing company every label hires. Her traffic should have been used to create thousands of front doors to her Itunes page. There was NOTHING forward thinking or exciting about what they did.
The whole discussion raises a slew of mutednoise talking points:
- Are ‘management’ an artist’s number of friends manipulative or just necessary way of establishing legitimacy?
- Does prove that MySpace is or isn’t a good place to launch a music career?
- Is this a validation that it still takes true talent to succeed online? Or was it just botched marketing?
- Would any of this have come to light if Bob hadn’t thrown the topic out for debate in a public forum?
Permalink
03.28.07
Posted in blogs, community building, privacy at 8:30 am by Matthew Reinbold
If you follow any of the prominent tech or development bloggers chances are you’ve heard of Kathy Sierra and the harassment that lead her to pulling out of ETech. The software usability expert came forth and shared some shocking news on her own blog: that she had been receiving disturbing death threats both in her comments and on other sites. She places much of the blame firmly on the anonymity that the web provides – that the bullying and misogynist hate speech she has endured is an outgrowth of modern communication.
I do not want to be part of a culture–the Blogosphere–where this is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough to not have their “widdy biddy sensibilities offended” when they see their own mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish. (And of course all coming on the heels of more explicit threats)
Mitch Ratcliffe, commenting on ZDNet, has a different perspective:
It is awful that people write hateful mysogynistic comments on Kathy Sierra’s blog, in email or about her on other blogs, but she seems to have taken very little evidence of the involvement of prominent bloggers as the foundation for damning a lot of folks who, apparently, rub her and are rubbed by her the wrong way.
This behavior is not a reflection on blogging, on anonymity or the Web, rather it is the same old human tendency to be abusive toward one another written in a new form. Anger as often as compassion is the product of speaking publicly about any issue.
…and a bit later…
Bad behavior doesn’t reflect on the medium or the whole audience (or the people formerly known as the audience). It reflects on the people who behave badly. Individuals show how rude, low and disgustingly inhuman they can be. Unfortunately, Ms. Sierra takes these examples and damns everything about the medium
Unfortunately, I believe any meaningful debate about whether this is the ugly side of human nature or a new artifact of digital tools will be lost as soon as the next viral video pops up. There have always been trolls, griefers, and a-hats who entertain themselves by making life miserable for others. But in this moment while our attention is focused can we definitively say whether the medium is doomed? Or is the human condition?
Permalink
03.16.07
Posted in community building, engaged crowds, terminology at 8:32 am by Matthew Reinbold
Would you be more likely to buy something if friends recommended it? What if we lived in a economy where any good or service could be purchased as easily as hyperlinking to a webpage? Fred Wilson is a venture capitalist that I’ve mentioned a few times before on mutednoise; he’s extremely active in technology stocks (although I first came across him because of his frequent music posts). This morning he lays out the concept of SuperDistribution. Is it a vapid terminology christening to win a book deal and land speaking engagements? I don’t think so – he might be onto something:
It’s word of mouth marketing, referral marketing, but with one important difference. The consumer is the retailer.
I’ve wanted to be a superdistributor ever since. When I talk about music, books, politics, Sonos, Blackberry, MacBook, or anything else, I want all of you to be able to click and buy. When I buy something, I want to be able to pass it along to everyone else and get paid for doing that. And I want the people who created the thing I pass along to get paid too.
A lot of people who read and comment on this blog think I am anti content creator, that I want to eliminate property rights. Wrong. The thing I want to eliminate is FRICTION. I want to supercharge commerce. I want to turn everyone on to Arcade FIre. I want to them to sell 100 million Arcade Fire mp3s. And I want to get paid for doing my part.
My friend Steve calls me anti establishment. He’s right. I am done with the old way of selling goods. I don’t want to buy from an institution. I want to buy from my friends. And I want to sell to them.
The part about ’selling to my friends’ is a little strong – we see this behavior already with services like LinkedIn: people connecting to others not because of the strong relationships present but because of the initial perceived ‘value’ a large number of connections has (i.e. “John Doe is connected with 3000 other people! Golly, he must be the popular kid”). Right know that value is only in reputation but when friends become nothing more than wallets to appeal to insincerity will go through the roof…
…or am I making too big of deal of how relationships work anyway? Do we band together with those for whom its mutually beneficial? Or does friendship entail admiration without expectations of a return?
Permalink
03.13.07
Posted in community building, social networks, tools at 5:46 am by Matthew Reinbold
As you might have read in my original post I was kind of disappointed with Twitter. Despite it being the darling app of the SXSW conference I was really unsure how sharing brief, one line statements as to what I was doing could be useful – especially when the time tracking is extremely generalized and the reporting lackluster.
It didn’t make sense to me until I had linked to a few friends. Once I began seeing other active people’s daily lists of accomplishments and activities did I see the real value of Twitter – a personal motivator. Working by oneself can be extremely satisfying but it can be hard to be disciplined – the only one keeping you from knocking off early or sneaking in a few rounds of Pirates Online is oneself. By not only seeing what others are doing but reporting back what you’re up to it creates a kind of active community – a friendly competition of productivity. Its similar to when I used to jog in college. Getting up early in the morning and running a few miles is extremely hard when you are the only one doing it. However, toss in a few friends who agree to run together and you find yourself making an extra effort – nobody wants to be seen as the ‘lazy’ one of the group.
If you’d like to add me as a friend my Twitter user name is ‘libel_vox’. Has anyone else picked up Twitter yet? How are you using it?
Permalink
03.07.07
Posted in arg, community building, engaged crowds at 7:15 am by Matthew Reinbold
Nine Inch Nails (NIN), the band fronted by Trent Reznor, have a new album coming out in April. The problem, however, is that the number of alternative radio stations to help spread the new stuff have been diminishing since the mid nineties. How do get the publicity in this age of dispersed media attention? For NIN, the answer is an Alternative Reality Game, or ARG.
An ARG was used to great effect with Halo 2’s ‘I Love Bees’ launch campaign. There, clues found on a website lead to mysterious pay phone calls, an intergalactic plot, and mounds of press. A recap of the NIN ARG for the album ‘Year Zero’ includes:
On the back of a new NIN tour shirt, some letters are highlighted. These highlighted letters all come together to form the clause “I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE.” This directly leads to other things, as iamtryingtobelieve.com is an actual site. This website and many others popping up with the same theme depict a very tortured, dystopic world.
Much more is on the recap site. After hearing the first single (Survivalism) I was pretty cool on the new album. However, given all this backstory, I’m now looking forward to hearing the entire thing.
Are there other examples where an ARG has been used to turn the mundane into the interesting?
Permalink
02.26.07
Posted in community building, engaged crowds, net neutrality at 10:26 am by Matthew Reinbold
In recent years we’ve seen an explosion of grassroots campaigns built around the web’s strengths: the low cost of production, the ease of distribution, and ability to build community. But while there are a host of worthy causes I feel like I’m spread too thin. The most insidious is the call to actions; while each organization may only rally the troops on an occasional basis when totaled it seems like there is a constant barrage of time requests. If it’s not DownHillBattle.org (music activism) then its One.org (the campaign to make poverty history), or DefectiveByDesign.org (a campaign to eliminate DRM), or IPac (defending culture and technology at the policy level), or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (defending freedoms in the digital world), or SaveTheInternet.com (fighting for net neutrality). Thankfully the mid-terms are over so I no longer feel guilt when I don’t have time to stump for my chosen political candidates. But the 2008 race is already so contentious that I fear I may be compelled to do something there.
In the old days (say, oh, even ten years ago) it would be very likely that I’d only have heard of one or two of these organizations – much less be called on repeatedly in an efficient manner to take some kind of action. Today, however, it seems like not a week goes by without pleas for calls to a congressman or letter to the editor. How does a person battle this compassion fatigue? Does anyone else have this problem? What do you do about it?
Permalink
02.09.07
Posted in blogs, community building, video at 3:10 pm by Matthew Reinbold
ZeFrank is a compelling video blogger. Sure, some times he digs up news stories and spins them with all the comedic sophistication of a sophmore poop joke. Other times, however, he is a master of metaphoric meaning. Example? A recent entry about ‘communities’.
Do you surf or do you build castles on the beach?
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »