There’s a piece up in the Post about Fox’s digital division, which is home most notably to MySpace. The article discusses the meager revenues earned by this division relative to the others, but remarks that:

One upside for a corporate parent, Levinsohn said, is that much of this generation’s Web content is user-generated (see: YouTube.com), meaning payments to its creators are not required. For instance, in May, News Corp. bought online karaoke site kSolo.com, which lets users record their own versions of hit songs. The company will apply kSolo’s technology to Fox Interactive sites, allowing users to create free content for News Corp. that the company can use to sell advertising.

On the one hand, I am all for the celebration of fan creativity, and I certainly believe it’s in everyone’s best interest for even megacorporations to cooperate and nurture that creativity. On the other, I don’t like that fans are providing free labor so that Rupert Murdoch and the people who bring us FoxNews can make more money. It’s not like those people are just scraping by.

Where is the line between enabling fans’ talents and exploiting them?

Here is a somewhat-less-hypefilled-than-the-norm look at some of the questions raised by The Snakes on A Plane/Snakes on A Blog phenomenon:

Regardless of how the movie turns out, a line is being crossed here, and it raises questions that don’t have quick answers. Should audiences have a hand in how a movie is made, even an out-and-out crowd-pleaser? At what point does a director become part of the marketing team? Is this a bad thing or does it just rubber-stamp a practice increasingly part of the cost-conscious film industry? Can studios even hope to control the use of the blogosphere as a marketing tool? They’ll certainly try.

“I’ve gotten calls from filmmakers asking how we can do this again,” says www.Snakesonablog.com‘s Finkelstein.

“I’m sure you’ll see other movies with silly titles. The very smart thing New Line did, though, was to do nothing. No posters, no trailers. They recognised people were attracted to it on their own. And people, online especially, are very aware of what’s organic and what’s false, and if it’s false they shy away.”

For a sharp academic analysis, see Henry Jenkins’s take on how this phenomenon combines fan power, trash-media aesthetics, fan-made media, and a Hollywood that was game to play along.

Today the New York Times has a nice big piece about the revivial of the internet in the music business, writing:

A dot-com-era bid by concert promoters to market live gigs online fizzled out. But now concert Webcasts and vintage performance clips are gaining new currency. An array of players — from independent record labels to major concert promoters — are drawing up plans to capitalize on fans’ appetites

They pay particular attention to efforts by bands, fans, promoters, and record labels to post videos to YouTube and point out that:

Within the music industry, however, there is still widespread debate about whether a thicket of copyright and contractual issues will slow or prevent some of the new enterprises from taking off.

The “big question?”

What role, if any, will be carved out for fans who take their own pictures and “bootleg” video at concerts?

Erik Flannigan, general manager of America Online’s music, film and television content, said that at a big arena performance these days “20,000 people walk through the door.” He added: “How many people who went to that show walked out with some kind of media captured? They called someone, they took a photo. Why not harness that and turn it into something?”

One idea being bounced around is the creation of online fan forums, where music lovers could post pictures and interact with one another after a show, said Jim Cannella, national director of corporate partnerships for House of Blues. “People want to be heard and they want to develop a community of people that have similar interests,” he said.

Creating fan forums is certainly one approach, and not bad though hardly novel. But it misses the enormous point that many if not most cases the fans have already done that for themselves. They are already out there pooling these resources, creating these materials, talking with each other after shows. So the question of fans’ roles is not just one of what to do with their materials, or how to bring them together online, it’s how to take advantage of the materials and online communities they are ALREADY generating on their own. The real question is how to manage what fans do anyway in ways that will benefit the artists. If you are going to create a fan forum, it has to be one that is better than what they’ve already got. Package it with ads to generate your revenue and it might not be.

I wrote the other day about the Madrugada fanboard, which is an interesting example of the value of fan materials like this. Last fall the band toured Europe. Fans on that forum recorded several shows themselves, spent a good deal of time not just creating torrents, but also in some cases remastering the recordings for best sound. Others posted photos they had taken. Living in the States, it was a lot closer to getting to see them live than I ever would have gotten without the board. There is an archive of back concerts that are periodically reseeded and traded again. I’ve amassed enough live Madrugada recordings through the board that I have a pretty good sense of what they were like on each tour of their career. This is done with the band’s tacit approval, with the understanding that there is no money exchanged and nothing available for purchase is posted, points which the webmaster gently enforces when need be. Not only did it keep fans who weren’t able to make this tour involved with the band long after their last release might have stopped getting playtime, but it also brought in fans who didn’t like the recent release, fans who wanted to know what old songs were being played. So it kept fans they could easily have lost involved with them. Would it have worked if it were a board run by the band? Maybe, if they were able to resolve the copyright questions in ways they and those around them could live with. Would it have worked if it were a board run by their label or any other third party? It could, but it would take a good deal more than simply “creating a fan forum.”

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Here is a really interesting article in the Baltimore Sun about the importance of blogging in supporting a fan base’s relationship with a band (or, if you’re on the money-receiving end of the relationship, the importance of blogging in marketing):

“Blogging ultimately drives a pop star’s brand and leads to more sales via iTunes,” says Robb Hecht, a New York-based branding expert and marketing strategist. “It is very important for a pop star to keep a blog in our new age where music is incredibly accessible via the Internet, cell phones and various other technological advances.”

The article points out that the internet changes the relationship between fan and ‘star’ in ways that enable a much greater sense of closeness (something evident in the Pete Townshend quote in the entry below). In essense, marketing becomes relationship management on a scale somewhere far closer to interpersonal than mass communication is used to. There’s a long line of mass media research into “parasocial relationships” — the kind people develop with their favorite tv characters. The fact that blogging is continuously updated while records are released months or years apart opens new potentials for parasocial relationships with musicians:

“Blogging humanizes artists by bringing them down to the eye level of their fan base,” says Andrew Foote, account supervisor of Peppercom Inc., a communications firm in New York that specializes in digital marketing. “This interactivity gives fans the sense that they have an affiliation with their favorite artist, which empowers them to remain loyal and spread positive word of mouth.”

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Pete Townshend has given up on his plan to webcast Who concerts following what the press has interpreted as a fairly nasty public spat with Roger Daltrey over whether and how to fund online broadcasts of their concerts. It’s a good example of the confusion that ensues when people just aren’t sure how to mesh the unprecedented ability of the internet to bring music to fans with the business models they’re used to.

Like Kevin Smith, Townshend takes advantage of the internet to create a kind of openness and direct connection with fans that just was not available before, using his own website to articulate the issues at stake. As he describes himself and his online fans:

I am an internet nut. In Madrid last night I met at least a dozen shining Spanish fans who up until now I have known only through exchanges on the web on Blogs or through my appearances on In The Attic. There are two way of looking at these people – either they are real fans, who buy tickets and support me unconditionally as an artist, or – as decried by Janet Street Porter recently – they are Blogging ‘Saddos’. Either way, we have fun, we connect, we are alive. At a concert where the Who play to what looked like 20,000 roaring people I also have a more intimate sense of connection with some of the audience. I suppose the only thing that’s ‘sad’ about that to the press is that it doesn’t make them any money.

When he asked for emails so he could assess fan opinions on the matter in a bid to persuade Roger, the hotmail mailbox filled within a day. And then he expressed surprise that the press paid attention:

Its Lebanon and Israel who are “at war” – not Roger and Pete.

In related news, he’s:

taking down www.thewho.com as well after tomorrow, but again this is not out of spite or anger. This was always something that was planned to be a part of the webcast package, and on this Roger is in agreement to help support a new and greatly revised website, reflecting more of his ideas, as soon as we can find a good webmaster. This new website will definitely go up prior to our first U.S. dates in September.

When even the Who can’t find a good enough webmaster to keep their site up and running and compelling for fans, that’s a sad statement on the state of official band sites.