The objects around which fandom happens are broadening as the internet enables more and more taste-based social organizing. No longer restricted to pop bands, movie stars, television shows, sports teams, and science fiction novels, fans can now unite around retailers! One great example of this is the online fan phenomena regarding Trader Joes, a socially-conscious grocery store. I have a friend who moved recently — one of the things she was most excited about was the presence of a Trader Joes in her new town (though IKEA moving in soon ranked a close second). Another friend has described herself as “in love” with Trader Joes, and a third insisted on taking me there when I visited her town. Trader Joe fans spread their gospel online too: Among the Trader Joe fan sites are Are You A Trader Joe’s Fan? which specializes in recipes that can be made with Trader Joe purchases, Tracking Trader Joes, where fans gather to track store openings and events, and the all-purpose Calling All Trader Joe’s Fans. There are also sites like Nancy Dowling’s Trader Joes: A Love Fest, with links to dozens of articles about the stores but no fan interaction. Media have caught on to the phenomenon, with articles about Trader Joe’s online fans showing up in The York Dispatch, the Twin Cities Pioneer Press (“Trader Joe’s Fans Prove Retailers Are The New Rock Stars”), and elsewhere.

Fandom has jumped the shark from media products to companies. Trader Joes is one example, but there is much more of this going on. Media companies are used to thinking of customers as fans, and even they are facing more challenges than they can count figuring out how to make the most of what fans do online while protecting their intellectual property and creative control. Companies that have never thought of customers as “fans” before will have even greater challenges ahead. But if retail customers can become engaged enthusiastic proponents in the same way media fans have, there’s a gold mine waiting for the companies that figure out how best to work it. Trader Joes couldn’t buy better online advertising.

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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Samuel L. Jackson, whose new film Snakes on a Plane owes more to bloggers than any film in history, envisions a new world of film making in which producers work with fans from the start:

“It’s the next step in what’s going to happen. There are so many people who are aware of films because of the information highway and most times people who sit in offices have no idea what’s going on in the real world.

“Fortunately for New Line (studio), this happened and was out of hand before they were even made aware of it. The fan demands made them understand what they had.

“Eventually I think there’s going to be films like this that are of a certain genre that some smart person will invite that type of input.

“Someone will say something like, ‘I have an idea for a film, and here’s my idea. How do you think this should play out? Who should be in it? How long should it be? Should it be one parts, two parts, or three parts?’

“The interaction from the fans will fuel this whole thing and make those people feel like they are such a part of the film. If you got a dollar from all those people you can make the film.”

Great to see someone recognize fan creativity as a business asset rather than a threat to intellectual property rights.