In a keynote talk at Transforming Audiences 3 in London last week, I address that question, drawing on the interviews I’ve been doing with musicians.

As always, the talk is cc licensed for noncommercial use with attribution, so read it, and if you dig it, share it:

2011TransformingAudiences.pdf

I’m still working through this material, so all feedback is welcome.

We covered topics like how social media have affected online fandom, benefits and challenges of social media, whether bands need to use social media and/or have their own website, whether they can keep mystique, whether they ought to be trying to be friends with fans, and even a bit on how I mix personal and professional in my online identity and why.

Read part 1 and part 2.

Here it is in PDF form for download:

Fans or Friends?

Any and all feedback (especially the constructive kind) is welcomed!

I am calling my ongoing project about musician-audience relationships Beautiful and Strange, following a quote from one of my interviewees about his connections and contacts with his audience. The Beautiful and Strange blog is where I am collecting the relevant bits I run across online.

My thinking is that the more extended reflections about the project will show up here on Online Fandom while the straight links will show up there. Probably not a best practice – my husband jokingly asked if I was “diluting my brand” and I may well be – but I wanted all my links in one spot where others could share them too and that’s what I’ve done. So there.

Also, excerpts of the interviews are getting published on MIDEM’s blog. Up there now are conversations with Richie Hawtin, Sydney Wayser, Stephen Mason, Kristin Hersh, Mark Kelly, and Steve Lawson. There will be more. I’ve talked to about 30 people and every conversation is great. I am still conducting interviews.

Here’s a teaser from page one:

One of the most vexing issues facing the content industries is their loss of control over the distribution of digital material. Combined with the ability of consumers and fans to organize and voice opinions more loudly than ever before, many industries, including recording, broadcast, and motion picture, find themselves acting from defensive postures, seeking to shut down grassroots activities and file sharing.

In contrast, some in the industry, particularly (though not exclusively) independent artists, have embraced this unfettered flow of materials and discourse. This C3 research memo (1) briefly identifies the current situation of information and content flow and the kinds of steps being taken to combat it. Against this backdrop, it then (2) identifies the reasons one might choose to embrace these changes rather than fighting them (3) argues that these industries need to consider the role of social exchange in addition to the economic exchange models they are used to in building consumers’ willingness to pay for content they can obtain for free and (4) proposes specific strategies for building social exchange relationships in this environment. In what follows, I use music as an exemplar, but the discussion will not be limited to music.

MySpace grew up around the LA music scene and built itself on music from the beginning. As I’ve been interviewing musicians for the last several months, they’ve told a consistent story about what MySpace offered, what it didn’t, and the extent of its decline. But they’ve also spoken to practical needs that MySpace still meets, and have some words of warning.

In this post, I’ll summarize what emerges from about a dozen of the interviews I’ve done. I identify people with their permission, and don’t identify them at their request.

MySpace reinvented the Musician-Audience Connection

When MySpace started it changed everything for bands, and though some were wary, many leapt in with enthusiasm. It offered fans a direct line to musicians that neither had experienced before. Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai explained that:

when MySpace became popular and people could write straight to a band, I think that was a point I think a lot of people had never considered that you could just email a band. So I think – definitely- when that first started we got a lot a lot of correspondence through MySpace from people I don’t think would maybe have considered sending us an email.

One artist told me that “during a time where I think MySpace was the main mode of communication between fans and musicians I got Myspace things like “oh my god I didn’t know you were a lesbian that’s awesome!” Odd though some of these exchanges may have been, and much as they might have echoed what showed up in fan mail sent through the post, the sheer quantity of people who got in touch was transformative.

MySpace transformed audience measurement

MySpace also upended the structure of the conventional music industry by providing a new kind of metric – the friend count – that has come to carry its own influence that rivals SoundScan, the industry’s flawed yet taken-for-granted standard. “These social networks come along,” described Erin McKeown:

and all of the sudden here’s this new number that can be used. So for a while it was like Myspace views or number of friends on Myspace, and then it turned into Facebook fans and Twitter followers. I have heard in the music industry ‘this is someone good to tour with because they have x number of followers’ or ‘we’re interested in signing you because you’ve got x number of Facebook fans’ and in some ways it’s replaced SoundScan.

For a while that was exciting

As Big Dipper’s Gary Waleik, a social media skeptic, described it, the friend who insisted he joined

likened it to crack, you know? He says “Watch out with this Myspace thing.” You know? “It’s like smoking crack.” Not that I would know and not that he would know probably, but you know he was talking about the addictiveness of it.

“When MySpace came along,” said Steve Lawson:

I did the same thing everyone else did when MySpace came along and searched for artists that I liked and spammed everyone that also liked them with friend requests.  And for a while it generated an enormous amount of play– of listenership.  I was getting thousands of listens a day on MySpace.”

Greta Salpeter, of The Hush Sound and Gold Motel, came up just as MySpace did:

When the Hush Sound was signed, MySpace was huge. We went from having like 5,000 fans to having 30,000 fans overnight when we got signed just because that was the social media outlet of the time, and when we got signed it was like 2005, 2006.”

But That Was Then

Musicians do still use and appreciate MySpace, for reasons I’ll cover below, but as an interactive medium to which they pay attention, they’re done with it. One tells me she prefers Twitter, and so just ports that into Facebook and MySpace:

I read everything that ends up on my Facebook and my Twitter, and I used to read all my MySpace. Now I don’t even check it. But I used to.

Another, whose band has not recorded in several years, says:

We still have a page but I think no one uses it.  We don’t get many requests for friends anymore. … The thing about the MySpace page is I put it up there and hardly ever touch it, hardly ever deal with it.  But hardly anyone looks at it.

“I got over that hype pretty quickly,” Waleik told me, “and I after that I didn’t have much of a need to be on there. I hardly ever go on there anymore.” “I think now MySpace is much less important,” said Salpeter.

What’s Killing MySpace?

The obvious answer may be “Facebook,” but that doesn’t really tell us that much. Musicians point to a variety of problems with MySpace, problems that its competitors have either solved or should be solving if hoping to stave off MySpace’s fate.

The interface: Cellist Zoë Keating, who has a past in information technology, told me:

I remember the end of 2004 I signed up for MySpace and I couldn’t quite figure out whether it was cheesy or not but I signed up. And I found– as a former kind of information architect I found the interface of MySpace really annoying from the beginning.

“MySpace is hard to use,” said Salpeiter, “it’s kind of annoying, whereas like Facebook, you know, it’s so easy for us to create invites.” Jon Ginoli of Pansy Division echoed their sentiment:

MySpace is annoying in so many ways.  One is you cannot send a group email out to very many people and if you have 5,000 fans, which we did at one point, you cannot search them.  Once you hit 5,000 it’s not searchable anymore which is so counterintuitive and so stupid.  And you also cannot group MySpace people by area.  Because I was trying to go onto MySpace and find all the people who lived in Colorado or Texas and you can’t do that.  MySpace has sown their own seeds of destruction by being so user unfriendly even though it was a good idea, it’s just rampantly stupid.  I mean it’s unbelievable how hard it is to use once you have more than a handful of friends.

Spam: Like email, MySpace has also been seriously undermined by spam. “MySpace has been spammed,” said Salpeter, “you see all these crazy advertisements all the time.” Said Braithwaite, “19 out of 20 comments are ads or people trying to promote their band. It’s too easy to exploit.” As he suggests, musicians themselves are often the spammers. Steve Lawson described:

I had over 10,000 MySpace friends and deleted 8.5 thousand of them, because it was such a mess, I had no idea who was interested in what I was doing and who wasn’t, I couldn’t work out who had spammed me, who I’d spammed.

Disconnection: Despite its use as a metric, musicians describe MySpace as disconnected from what happens outside its own social world. “We use MySpace,” Braithwaite told me, “we get thousands of plays a day but there’s no interaction.” Lawson found that his thousands of plays wasn’t “turning into anything of any value”:

MySpace had its own internal currency which was friending, but no one would sit in front of their computer on MySpace with a credit card in hand.  And there didn’t seem to be mechanisms for turning that into anything meaningful.

MySpace friends may not spend when they’re out either. Gary Waleik told me about a friend of his who had a new CD:

They had this huge following on Myspace. I mean it was ridiculous. I think it was something like maybe this wasn’t so huge but I think it was like 10,000 people or something like that and it would drive them crazy because they did one CD together. And they had a record release party and people came out and they had CDs and they couldn’t give away the CDs. They thought they could sell some at the show. They didn’t sell a single one.

Stigma: Finally, as danah boyd has found in her ethnographic interviews with American teenagers, MySpace came to carry a class, race, and region based stigma as the seemingly “classier” and “more sophisticated” Facebook has gained audience. One musician requesting anonymity described it like this:

MySpace has a bad social connotation. I know like tons and tons of people still use it. I think mostly like in the Bible Belt and the South area, that kind of thing is where it’s still really, really popular. But it almost has this connotation of classless people. You know, there are always these jokes about the slutty girls on MySpace taking pictures of themselves and the kind of asshole-looking guys flirting with the girls and, you know, that it’s just a way to kind of like find sex and fuel vanity and that kind of thing.

MySpace Still Has A Niche

All this said, for those I’ve spoken with, MySpace is not dead. It’s still a fairly easy one-stop-spot to put your materials and have them be heard, a niche that no other site has been able to supplant. ”MySpace really seems to have just moved specifically into launching bands,” said Stephen Mason from Jars of Clay, “that seems to be where I see most of its use.” Another said he thinks MySpace “still is a big deal if you’re a band, that’s about all it’s good for these days is to find bands’ pages and hear their tracks.”

Salpeter’s perspective echoes theirs:

Mostly MySpace is used for people to hear our music, to see the photographs. You know, it’s like a basic template where the audience knows where to find everything, the photos, the music, the blogs, the whatever. So MySpace is a huge one for people to discover bands. MySpace is really just like the one-stop shop where anyone in the press, any potential listeners, any other bands to just be able to get one quick picture of the band, hear one song or 10 songs if they want, look at the photos, read the bio and look at the tour dates. It’s like everything in one place.

MySpace also offers bands the chance some find problematic in other platforms to just be musicians. Said Jonathan Segel of Camper Van Beethoven and solo work:

The whole effort is just to try to speak from that platform about music, but that’s difficult to maintain.  Or speak from that platform about shows or CDs or something like that.  That was easier when people were using MySpace I am really only the musician from my page on MySpace, I’m not like a personal human being.

Said McKeown, somewhat ruefully, “MySpace was less about status updates and more about just making music available in your player and collecting friends. But then Twitter and Facebook’s microblogging aspect kind of demanded fresh personal content.”

Be Warned

Just three years ago it was almost impossible to imagine Facebook as a more important site for music than MySpace, and it still has a long way to go if it is going to fill that space (as do Spotify and other possible contenders). But today’s top sites are just as likely to fade just as precipitously in years to come. As Waleik put it:

One of my misgivings about this whole thing, this whole phenomenon is that people go gaga over one medium and they say “Okay, this is how you do it.” And people try it for a very short period of time and the new better medium comes along and everyone just goes wholeheartedly into that, and then you know, you could see the progress from Myspace to Facebook to Twitter, everyone just loses their minds at the latest thing, and says “No, this is how you do it.”

What does this mean for musicians and others who rely on social media sites?  Perhaps more than anything, it reiterates the importance of keeping control. It’s essential to maintain a presence in some social media, but you also need to have your own mailing list, your own website, your own URL. Support what fans do elsewhere, and meet them where they are but remember to build an online identity and relationships on your own grounds as well. Zoë Keating has fooled around with Google Analytics, and is fairly certain that the people she reaches through MySpace are different from those she reaches through other sites. She warns:

everybody’s been complaining about how awful MySpace is and we’ve been waiting for it to die.  But meanwhile you better try to get people off of that — if they actually exist — to your mailing list because when it goes away you have no way to reach them.

Call For Papers:

Popular Music Fandom: A One Day Symposium

Binks Building, University of Chester
Northwest Popular Music Studies Network

Friday 25th June 2010

Keynote speaker: Matt Hills (author of ‘Fan Cultures’)

While a range of researchers in cultural studies – notably Henry
Jenkins, Matt Hills and Cornell Sandvoss – have moved the discussion
about media fandom forward, much less work has been done specifically on
popular music fandom. We invite contributors from a wide range of
disciplines to discuss topics associated with popular music fan culture
at this free one-day study event in Chester. Themes for papers may
include (but are not limited to):

•    Defining fandom
•    Stardom and celebrity, reading and textuality
•    Fandom and the consumer marketplace
•    Fans as musicians / musicians as fans
•    Perceptions of the music industry
•    Collecting and other fan practices
•    Live music, local scenes and fandom
•    Stereotyping, self-awareness and media representation
•    Gender, age and disability
•    Methodology and research practice
•    Theorizing fandom: processes, practices, identities
•    Issues of taste, social mobility and class
•    Personal narratives and investments
•    Case studies, ethnographies and histories
•    Fandom, heritage and tourism
•    Specific music genres: jazz fandom, metal, northern soul,
electronic music
•    Religion, modernity and the ‘cult’ analogy
•    The fan community: insiders, outsiders and the ‘ordinary’
audience
•    Fan culture and the paradigm of performance
•    The ‘pathological’ tradition: questions of typicality and
obsession
•    Issues of race and nationality
•    Power, psychology and symbolic economy
•    Online participatory cultures

Papers will be twenty minutes in length. Please send an abstract of up
to 200 words along with your name, affiliation, paper title, postal and
email address to: Dr Mark Duffett, m.duffett@chester.ac.uk (marking your
email title ‘fan symposium’).

The deadline for abstracts is Monday May 10th 2010.