SXSW 08 panel: How widgets influence music on the web

You could sense the ‘we’ve got troubles but we’re still way cooler than you geeks’ (or are they?) vibe a mile off. The music biz was already rolling into Austin on the last day of SXSW Interactive 2008 before the full-scale SXSW Music conference kicked-off the next day – and they were out in force at this session on the afternoon of Tuesday 11th March.

PANEL:
John Bartelson – VP New Media , Island / Defjam
Rogelio Choy – VP Business Dev, RockYou
Chair: Liz Gannes – GigaOm
Ali Partovi – CEO, iLike
Jian Chen – Frontend Software Engineer, Meebo.com

After a year of Facebook mania, clearly the scent of widgets – and some massive widget players – was enough to lure artists, and indie and major labels into the room (if not the debate), and so it began…

Ali Partovi explained that they’ve built iLike into other social platforms but have also built a set of artist tools that will enable them to do stuff once, and publish / syndicate across Facebook, Bebo and elsewhere.

Bono of U2 started to write a new song ‘Wave Of Sorrow‘ and developed it through a process of discussion with fans on iLike. Partovi showed a video featuring Radiohead, Linkin Park and U2 and then rolled out the stats for some shock and awe impact (BTW, I haven’t checked these stats):

U2 – 2m fans on iLike / 131,000 on Myspace
Linkin Park – 542k iLike / 343k Myspace
Foo Fighters – 887k iLike / 588k Myspace
Radiohead have 1.4m fans on iLike

Through mediating their song development on iLike / Facebook in this fashion, he continued, U2 increased their iLike follower base from 1m to 1.3 million, and they’ve got nearly 10,000 comments on the video posted on U2′s iLike Facebook app about the creation of the song (also available on Youtube) .

Content everywhere: aggregating a wider audience…

Chen from Meebo described their product as chat room widgets embeddable across sites. They also generate traffic into the site and between sites. All the distributed widgets aggregate together a larger audience. Meebo widgets have totally skinnable interfaces for your brand or band.

In turn, their chat widgets recognize and play certain media URLs (video, audio, photo and URL previews). The media capabilities are not just for UGC, he added, but also media syndication.

Chen saw great potential in syndicating exclusive content from high quality content providers. He cited the Kanye West ‘Graduation’ album release, wherein Kanye’s label worked with Buddylube, a web 2.0 marketing management company who do a lot of customization of widgets. Graduation (released 11th September 2007) has now (March 2008 ) sold 950k albums, and had 330k legal digital downloads.

Widget marketing trends & the music value chain

Choy of RockYou said they went from 7m visitors to 45m since they’ve went onto Facebook. RockYou also works on Myspace and Bebo.

From the audience someone asked: how and when do we get to the stage where this is a normal way to market and communicate with fans? Chen replied: when the tools are simple enough for independent bands and indie labels to use.

Moderator Liz Gannes said we should check out Kanye’s blog. Is it all about the marketing? No one is talking about distributing…

Partovi of iLike commented that a lot of bands are thinking of themselves as a media business, where they’ll eventually be able to do an ad-supported model.

Choy said that the notion that artists can monetize on RockYou only works if they come through something like iLike. It’s very difficult process if you want to go into selling music online.

My question (which wasn’t picked, despite having my hand up for while) was: with a million widgets and oceans of UGC, will search and widget aggregators overtake the viral growth of widgets? Do they optimize widgets for search, and how to they monitor the level and spread of widget usage as content gets more and more disaggregated?

[Sidebar: This issue will be addressed at the Chinwag Live: Micro Media Maze event next week, Tuesday 20th May – and Myspace’s European Product Direcetor Mitch McAlister and Last FM's SVP of European Ad Sales Miles Lewis are among the panelists you can quiz on this topic. Booking and more info here.]

Future distribution – D2C scenarios and widget overload

Gannes asked the panel: is the distribution business viable for you? Choy said that selling (not just music but also photos, videos, etc) is not part of what RockYou does directly, but it is through relationships… I guess he meant RockYou is part of the value chain.

Partovi remarked that as things get more and more cluttered, utility decreases, usage decreases and it’s harder to get take-up. Things stagnate and there’s less innovation; and innovation is very important.

iLike lets artists know who their fans are based on peoples’ activity on the widget. This gives, for example, Radiohead access to a much bigger audience online than they could handle or attract through their own site. However, people still downloaded their new album from Limewire, and Radiohead got no metrics [never mind revenue] for that, and no email addresses for all those people.

And there’s the rub! Elsewhere that day, as reported by Paid Content, there was a rowdier session on ad-supported music services. If I could have widgetised myself (far preferable to cloning methinks) I would definitely have been there.

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More coverage of this session:

Widgets put music where it’s at – Jemima Kiss, Media Guardian PDA blog

Upcoming evening panel event:

Chinwag Live Micro Media Maze – Tuesday 20th May 2008, London
http://live.chinwag.com/micromediamaze

PR unspun – social media sews creative destruction?

Participatory media causes problems for PR and for how brands manage deal with perceptions and discussions of their goods and services.

But it also offers new and significant opportunities for smart brands and operators in the PR space.

How much have they changed though?

At an NMK January event Beers & Innovation 7: Do Agencies Innovate? that I largely put together before I left NMK, Desiree Collier of Burson-Marsteller made the interesting observation that PR agencies are in a much stronger position to develop both innovative and holistic communications solutions for their clients than marketing agencies, because they have more far reaching and integral contact with clients, and the work is more strategic and less campaign-based and short term in nature.

[For readers pining for B&I goodness, Monsieur Ian Delaney has a cracking write up of B&I 7 here]

As Ian recapped of Collier’s points

“For all kinds of companies, in all kinds of contexts, conversations are becoming key. So, in many respects, PR matters are at the forefront of companies’ marketing concerns“

But having just finished reading The Cluetrain Manifesto (mea culpa, I was just a entertainment and consumer-type web editor back in Bubble 1, and missed the whole Cluetrain fandango), I get the feeling something more fundamental is being avoided.

In the final chapter – ‘Post Apocalypto’ – the author quotes Polish journalist Ruszard Kapuscinski from 1991:

“The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.”

So…. I’m expecting a constant thread in the discussion at the next Chinwag Live event on 24th April – PR Unspun – will be that of how brands and companies can *control* and *manage* perceptions and *control* the conversation.

Maybe I’ll be proved wrong (nothing new there then), but seven years on from the publication of Cluetrain the book, am I really far off the mark in saying PR and marketing are still largely paralysed? Can they really change their spots? Back to Cluetrain again:

“…so while business stereotypes are largely empty, or come from another day and have long since lost any real descriptive power, we find ourselves replicating the behaviors they caricature.

Why? Well, because we’re business people, of course! And that’s how business people behave. Welcome to the hall of mirrors. Welcome, as Vonnegut put it, to the monkey house.

We don’t believe what we’re saying at work. We know no one else believes it either. But we keep saying it because because because because the needle’s stuck. The record’s broken. Because we just can’t stop. Because who would we be if we didn’t talk like that?”

Seven years on this is still pretty powerful stuff.

Is social media sewing creative destruction? Are the incumbents poised to make gains, or will new players challenge their rule? And how much truth in the notion that PR will inevitably be distintermediated – at least in some sectors – by the social and behavioural changes wrought by participatory media?

I hope some of you will come along and put some challenging and interesting questions and points to the panel at Chinwag Live: PR Unspun.

The panel features speakers from the big corporates Edelman and Burson-Marsteller, through to brand and reputation monitoring service Market Sentinel and Second Life trailblazers Crayon LLC.

More info here: http://live.chinwag.com/prunspun (NB: 50% discounted booking rate ends Thursday 19th April)

[UPDATE Thursday 19th April: This event is sold out now]

SXSW notes: Bruce Sterling Presentation – The State Of The World

Never one to limit his horizons, this talk saw the cyberpunk author, tech visionary and all-round web guru range across global and local politics (especially those of the former Yugoslavia, where he has recently been living), the environment, technology, design and society.

Segueing between topics with remarkable lucidity and an implicit logical bent, allusions were littered elegantly among the sometimes incantation-like ebbs and flows of his sentences.

This was Sterling at full throttle, and the over 1,000 strong audience were largely frozen with what can only be summed up as astonishment, as if petrified for 60 minutes solid at the sight of an oncoming tidal wave.

But the talk was the opposite of a preacher’s bombastic sermon that manipulates, mesmerises and undermines independent thinking. Rather, it was questioning, often provisional and truly exploratory of events and ideas in the world today.

Afterwards the throng shuffled out silently, reliance on small-talk fully undermined, the waves of aftershock pulsating through the hall.

A laser beam of Texan foresight…

That he achieved this while also speaking so passionately that he wept on stage was visibly discomforting for some (mostly young, mostly male) in the audience. The irony of course being that Sterling could out-ironise any wisecracking kidult in a nano-second, but sometimes, as he understands, you have to fly by those nets.

I took only partial notes on this talk, relating to his perspectives on his new concept of SPIME.

However other things crept in and overlaid these segments, so the effect is a little kaleidoscopic and sometimes obtuse, removed as it is from the fuller context of everything he said. It’ll take some unpacking, which is partly what made it so tantalising and resonant…

The comic artist is becoming the public intellectual Sterling asserted, citing warrenellis.com. Shortly afterwards, he noted that “the unimaginable does not mean catastrophic”, citing how the economic growth of China is often construed. We should remember, he stressed, that it’s *people* who are doing this in China.

A tag and a theory object…

Then he turned to SPIME. Tracing its evolution he recounted that it emerged in 2004 in a speech he gave at Siggraph and in his 2005 book on award-winning graphic design Shaping Things.

SPIME is not a word but a tag, he continued, a theory object! As such, it depends on the popular consensus on what it means. Likewise, William Gibson’s “cyberspace” is a consensual hallucination, a brain experience, and already it has a period feel to it.

This is the SPIME elevator pitch, but it’s not the shape the tag SPIME will eventually take as it’s thrown out into the blogosphere churn of information.

SPIME has an RFID chip in it and a tag, it has a local precise positioning system, it’s Google Maps and a powerful search engine, it’s involved in cradle-to-cradle recycling because you can break it down and re-use the junk. It was virtually designed, a product of CADCamp; it’s rapidly prototyped; it’s a fabject.

Alex Stephen at WorldChanging.com has a new book coming out, an index of the ways out of the smoke-filled cinema, he noted by way of analogy. People will interact with this object in ways we can’t imagine or describe. SPIME because it’s trackable in space and time.

Building an internet of things…

Open and participatory, SPIMEs begin and end as data because they’re virtual objects first and physical objects second. We want to build an internet of *things*.

The real reason we’ll do it, if we ever do it, is because of the way it *feels* – automatic magical inventory voodoo. A lot of people are at work on the internet of things. What it needs is distributed intelligence; it will only work if people find it useful and get value from it.

It’s a new world and a new tag, the semantic web is turning into the wetlands of language. A theory object is a word for a platform of development… it’s just a different type of social activism.

Become the change we want to happen…

People who read the papers and watch TV and don’t engage with all the other stuff, linkages and trackbacks, these are *legacy* people. Words that turn on their creator like Frankenstein – but the creator *is* Frankenstein…

Later, at the end of his talk he emphasised that if we’re going to get anywhere, we need to become the change we want to be. Make no decision out of fear. What is required is a great regional novel about the planet earth, he concluded. And the cure for the panic stampede is to be found in historical perspective.

—————-

Sterling grew up in Austin and is a regular fixture at the festival. In 2007, in addition to another talk (yipee!), he is taking part in the EFF/EFF-Austin SXSW Futures of the Past Steampunk Extravaganza after-dark event. Verily the SXSWi massive are spoiling us and we like it  ;-) 

London podcast

[For more Sterling brainfood – this time on the environment, alpha geeks, media, technology and Web 2.0 – check out the podcast of his New Statesman-hosted talk in London, April 2006. Sterling was *so* on form that night and this is pure quality]

My other SXSW Interactive 2006 session reports:

What’s In A Title?
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/03/15/whats-in-a-title-sxswi-notes/

Beyond Folksonomies – Knitting Tag Clouds For Grandma
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/sxsw-notes-beyond-folksonomies-knitting-tag-clouds-for-grandma/

Book Digitisation & The Revenge Of The Librarians
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/03/23/sxsw-notes-book-digitisation-and-the-revenge-of-the-librarians/

James Surowiecki on The Wisdom Of Crowds
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/04/07/sxsw-surowiecki-on-the-wisdom-of-crowds/

Running Your New Media Business
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/11/07/sxsw-notes-running-your-new-media-business/

SXSW notes: The Perfect Pitch
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/11/09/sxsw-notes-the-perfect-pitch/

What People Are Really Doing On The Web
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2006/12/18/sxsw-notes-what-people-are-really-doing-on-the-web/

Commons Based Business Models
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/sxsw-notes-commons-based-business-models/

Danah Boyd – Current TV interview
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2007/01/12/sxsw-notes-danah-boyd-current-tv-interview/

DIY Media – Consumer Is The Producer
http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2007/01/19/sxsw-notes-consumer-is-the-producer-–-diy-media/ 

See all SXSW Interactive 2006 daytime panels here:
http://2006.sxsw.com/interactive/programming/panels/

See the SXSW Interactive 2007 website

Aggregators and upsetters event nearly full

There are just a handful of tickets left for Beers & Innovation next week.

If you want to join the discussion about content aggregation, user-generated content, edge economies and disruptive business models on Tuesday 17th October, book your ticket now.

Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration, Paul Pod of TIOTI (Tape It Off the Internet), Richard Anson of Reevoo and Mike Butcher of mbites will be exploring this issues and reflecting on their experiences in tandem with the equally quizzical audience. 

Once the event is full we won’t be operating a waiting list this time, due to the current NMK staff shortage.

Evolutionary scepticism and the bubble

I went to see scientist Richard Dawkins speak at the Institute Of Education last night about his new book The God Delusion after hearing about it on Upcoming.

It was a packed out hall (of about 500 I think) and luckily I got a ticket on the door, after queuing for 40 minutes.

Anyway, I won’t go into the entire contents of the talk and discussion here, although it was very engaging and lively.

You can check out Dawkins resources and coverage elsewhere.

But one woman in the audience mentioned the fact that Dawkins’ Channel 4 series ‘The Root Of All Evil’ (which Dawkins disagreed with as the series title – he thought ‘The Root Of A Lot Of Evil’ more accurate, albeit not such a catchy title…) is available on YouTube! (and also here, and here)

Science of aggregation?

Interestingly, Dawkins voiced no comment on this (what Channel 4 might say is another matter).

Then overnight this breaking story on Google’s aquisition of YouTube first dropped into my inbox via PaidContent.

So perhaps the days of the YouTube copy are numbered… (BTW, does this run counter to the theory that Google is the ultimate aggregator?)

In turn, while I’m fully aware that online has now eclipsed print media in Europe, the soap is still stinging my eyes 

[UPDATE: Turns out there's a God Delusion tour of the UK, USA and Canada with Cambrige, Birmingham and Cheltenham all happening this week and the tour finale in Oxford on 14th November ... via Dave, via Tom]

Mash ups and web services

A stack of interesting facts and points came up at Beers & Innovation 3: Web Services & Mash Ups… a few of which i’ve compiled in this special list for y’all.

(1) Yahoo has a data copy of the entire world wide web!

(2) Flickr is making money out of APIs via the ability to order photos and professionally-bound books of the photos (albeit delivered by external companies). And eventually Moo cards I guess.

(3) A start up called www.ookles.com (a photo-sharing service) has cloned the Flickr API in its entirety.

(4) James Cooper noted that with MySpace you can plug into it by just using a little widget that has the same effect as an API – so what’s the difference?

(5) The BBC Programme Catalogue resource came about partly through a chance encounter with a librarian (go librarians!).

(6) Tom Loosemore considers the BBC Backstage intiative (as it stood in April 2006 – long before Ian joined) as a “vicar in trainers project” but….

“We’ve done some amazing stuff with it, for example, the ‘Was This (weather) Forecast Right or Not?’ mash-up.”

(7) A mash-up of Google Maps and a Flickr clone (Zoomin) holds out great hope for businesses in New Zealand (and now Australia), apparently.

8.  Ning – a site that makes it easier for you to create (or clone) APIs – was cited on more than one occassion.

(9) For Tom Loosemore, SXIP Identity were the most interesting company in this space, as they are focused on federated identity.

“Just as Google owns the search query level of the internet, whoever can own those other layers of the web apart from front-end websites will make a lot of money,” said Tom.

(10) Simon Willison reckoned that the most useful mash up was the Craigslist & Google Maps apartment mash up HousingMaps.com. Andy Budd of Clearleft noted that ononemap.com does the same thing with estate agents in the UK.

(11) How do you innovate, someone asked, and what do you need to enable this to happen? Standards was a suggestion from a delegate but Tom Coates disagreed – what we need is openness, he said.

(12) The UK is the biggest user (per head of the population) of BitTorrent.

(13) Tom Coates said that the appearance of API’s is the first sign of the movement forward towards structured data.

Agree, disagree, corrections?

Certainly plenty to digest. And granted, it happened in April and I only published the report in September and I forgot to blog it until now, but dammit I have standards to maintain!

Luxuriate in the full details here.

[UPDATE 7th October: I accidentally linked to the User-Generated Content B&I webpage in the first link in the intro - I've corrected it now]