By now everyone who pays attention has heard about Saddle Creek band Two Gallants‘ violent and disturbing run-in with Houston police at their show there the other week (if you haven’t, google this for summaries). Aside from issues about the enthusiasm with which some law officers whip out their tasers, it’s interesting because of the role of fan communication in its aftermath, as addressed in this Minnesota Daily editorial:

News coverage of the event has been scattered and varied from sources ranging from the Houston Chronicle and Rolling Stone to MySpace and community journalism efforts, such as first person accounts and digital videos posted online. These efforts had a huge impact on spreading news of the incident and gaining more media attention.

Some MySpace pages about the incident seem to have mysteriously disappeared, though the Two Gallants page seems to be working just fine.

I follow political blogs pretty closely (well, some of them anyway) and one thing that has become a recurring motif is the fear that strikes the hearts of politicians when they realize that YouTube can be used to put up videos of all the stupid things they say and do off the record that are captured by anyone who happens to catch it with their camcorder. The moments they turn their back on the mothers of soldiers, cuss people out, and otherwise act very unpolitic get posted and the blog networks make it viral, ensuring that anyone paying close attention gets to see it. It’s an amazing transformation in control, because reports from those present are one thing, but videos have an impact that’s hard to beat, and now that every digital camera (and many mobile phones) record video and YouTube makes their mass distribution easy, every moment that isn’t poised is fair fodder for your destruction.

What we see in the Two Gallants incident is the same thing, only this time it’s the police (or the band, depending on where you stand) instead of politicians, and it’s music fans instead of political junkies. Nearly 500,000 people have watched this video of the incident. It’s given rise to a lot of discussion about the limits of police power, what to do in incidents like this, and, of course, lots and lots of flame wars. Not the highest level of civic discourse, but still a lot more than there would have been had there been no cameras or YouTube.

The blogosphere is abuzz with Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adam’s truly amazing and inspiring blog post about how he was able to regain his ability to speak despite a condition that has apparently never been recovered from before. It’s well worth reading just because it’s such a powerful story and post. But it’s also worth reading because it’s a great example of how an artist uses a blog to build meaningful personal relationships with fans. Look through his earlier posts, he’s got hundreds of responses to every entry. He’s doing it right.

Having railed against last.fm’s communication screw up on their last beta where there were a gazillion excellent design comments met with “we don’t want design comments,” I’ll give them credit for making the point explicit up front this round. Plus it looks like there are some nice changes afoot, including some design ones.

They have developed an algorithmic “taste-o-meter” so that when you check out someone else’s profile, you see a low-medium-high-super ranking of how many artists you share in common (weighted somewhat depending on how much you listen). I got a shout from a user there wondering whether I thought this would change who friended whom — would people use the ranking instead of their own perceptions and with what consequences? Another ‘friend’ on there commented he finds it offensive “as though last.fm is telling us who we can associate with.” There is already grumbling about the algorithm (aren’t there always in each and every service on the net that uses algorithms?), and the staff agree it needs tweaking. Given that some of my self-chosen friends are “super” matches, while my closest “neighbors” (those who the system thinks have taste closest to my own) are only “medium” matches, I’d say it might be the neighbor algorithm that needs tweaking. My own feeling on it: when I look at user pages, it’s the first thing I look at. If I’m a sample of one, my guess is that it will have an impact on how people perceive one anothers’ profiles. How it will affect friending is an open question. I have always had the sense that people ‘friend’ one another on there for many reasons other than shared musical taste. Very few of my ‘friends’ on there are those I think share my taste, they’re much more likely to be people with whom I’ve had an interesting interchange or two or who I already knew offline or elsewhere on the net. (Besides, no one on last.fm seems to have that good a match to my listening anyway, which is not surprising given how long it’s taken to build my narrow music collection and said collection’s strange mix of 80s alt american stuff and 00s swedish pop). Effect of the taste-o-meter is certainly a study waiting to be done.

They are also making the artist pages quite different so that all last.fm generated information appears on the left and user-generated input is made much bigger and appears on the right. I like this too because it makes more of user input, although some artist shoutboxes are full of either “they suck” or “she’s hot,” neither of which are the developers’ fault.

It looks like they are fixing the issues with their player taking iPod listens into account, another constant complaint of many.

They’ve built in a nifty flash player you can use to listen in-page and they’ve restored the ability to download (some) songs. When I look at my dashboard, the list of recommended songs I can hear all of now includes 3 I can download free. That is awesome.

And perhaps best of all, they have integrated something users have been asking for forever — events listings. It looks like there are a few glitches to work out there, but the basic idea is that artist pages will include tour dates and other important info and user profiles will have links to events for artists they listen to. You can mark which events you plan to attend and see what events your friends are going to, so it ought to help with body-to-body meet ups as well. Cool!

I still wish that they would focus on improving its basic functionality first and foremost instead of playing with its look and very small things, although some of these are important big things (especially the events). Would people rather have the taste-o-meter or the ability to capture more streaming listening? I am sure there is lots of backstage improvement going on that users don’t see, but the constant changing of this and that while leaving the basic ways we are supposed to input music, navigate the site, and the search functions woefully confusing and/or inadequate really works against them.

However, the staff communication is much better in this beta round (probably helps that the feedback is so much better too) and I give them kudos for that.

I’ve argued in a number of earlier entries that in an age when fans can get [steal] the product free, artists need to cultivate (seemingly) interpersonal relationships with their fans if they’re going to see income. Social exchange theory offers a nice way of looking at this, so I’m going to get professorial for an entry and lay out why. I’m not going to get professorial enough that I add a bibliography, but if you want references on social exchange, see here.

The basic premise of social exchange theory is that we seek relationships in which the rewards outweigh the costs or, if we can’t have that, where the reward/cost ratio is better than the alternatives. Social exchange posits three kinds of costs each partner in a relationship pays to be in that relationship:

(1) Direct costs: For the fan, this is the money we pay to see a movie, to get cable tv, to buy a cd or a book or a t-shirt or a ticket, etc. For the artist it’s the money spent on recording a record, making a film, etc. The internet dramatically reduces the direct costs to fans, because they can now easily steal the product, but it does very little to reduce the direct costs to artists. This is the imbalance at the crux of all the worries about how artists sustain income in the age of digital reproduction.

(2) Investment costs: For the fan, this is the time we spend learning enough backstory to appreciate the tv show we’re seeing, reading about an artist to better understand the songs or books, reading fanzines, blogs, watching entertainment news shows in order to find entertainment to love, searching for that out of print movie we yearn to see. For the artists, this is the years spent honing the craft, the time spent writing the songs/scripts/etc, the time spent practicing lines, perfecting one’s pitch. The internet makes it easier for fans to find performers that turn them on and easier for artists to reach fans, reducing some investment costs. For artists this is a big advantage of the net — you can reach more people with far fewer investment costs (though the costs of time spent friending on MySpace and the like shouldn’t be underestimated). For fans it makes it easier to find niche artists you couldn’t otherwise find, but it also makes so many more options available to weed through that I’d wager it’s a wash whether investment costs are raised or lowered on account of the net.

(3) Opportunity costs: These are the things we give up in order to have a relationship. For fans, there are all the other activities we’d be doing if we weren’t paying attention to the performer. For die hards, there may be opportunity costs involving the ability to get good grades in school (I had a friend who flunked out of college the first time because she kept skipping tests so she could see her favorite band on tour), to show up to work on time, or in extreme cases, to be there for one’s family and friends. For artists it’s the other kinds of more lucrative employment/income they could be pursuing, the chance to stay at home with the wife and kids instead of being on the road playing half-empty bars, etc. I’m not sure the net does much to alter the opportunity costs for either fans or artists.

And then we’ve got five sorts of rewards against which these costs are balanced. You can also think of these as resources because they are the things we have to offer others that make them want to be in a relationship with us.

(1) Love: This can be defined broadly to include not just affection, but also a sense of being accepted, valued, and esteemed. This is clearly a strong payback for performers, but has not generally been a big reward for fans. Sure we like to think that if they knew us they’d love us, and some artists have done a fine job of making the audience feel loved or respected, but this has not traditionally been very available to fans in the fan/artist relationship. The internet really changes this because when artists blog and participate in online discussion with fans, they are able to convey a direct sense of loving their fans simply by engaging with them in a way that previous media have made much more difficult. By the same token, artists receive more of this because they can see for themselves all the adoring activity that goes on around them if they look at their fan sites (of course, there’s also all the nastiness they have to weed through, but still, there’s no question that the internet can increase an artist’s emotional rewards).

(2) Information: This is getting useful knowledge. I don’t see this as a big factor in fan/artist relationships. The net enables fans to collect far more information about the objects of their fandom than ever before, and the artists have ever more trouble keeping a lid on information they’d rather didn’t circulate. On the other hand, what with ‘crowdsourcing’ and all, artists have more opportunity to use the expertise of their fans in ways that benefit them.

(3) Services: These are the intangibles that we do for one another. When someone sings a song for me, they’re providing me a service. Most of what artists do is provide services. Most of what fans seek is the provision of services. The net offers a new platform for the exchange of services and may up the expectations fans have of what services an artist ought to provide them (for instance, not having an up to date website is no longer acceptable, though still rampant). The net also provides fans with more opportunities to provide services for artists as they build fan communities for them, provide content for their websites, distribute their music through mp3 blogs and other means, code new elements for their games, and so on.

(4) Goods: The tangibles (loosely enough defined to include mp3 and other sorts of electronic files). Fans want a lot of goods and in the pre-digital world, good were the embodiment of services that made artists money. We want objects: cds (sometimes), dvds, books, t-shirts, buttons, posters. We want songs, movies, the things that artists make. Artists don’t ask for and traditionally haven’t received a lot of goods from fans, though there’s always someone sending flowers, baking cookies, painting a painting and so on.

(5) Money: Oh yeah, that. Fans get none. Artists need it if they’re going to make a living doing what they do.

Add into all of this that we seek fairness in our relationships. In economic relationships we try to get the best deal. But in social relationships, we try to get a fair deal. That is why it’s so important for artists to build social relationships with their fans if they are going to get money for what the fans could get free. Our sense of what is fair guides our willingness to pay costs and to offer rewards. This does not mean we expect equal distribution of rewards and equal costs. Most of us don’t expect that our favorite songwriter gets as much from us as we get from him or her. In fact, since there are more fans than artists, fans only have to give a small amount of resources per person. It’s the collective rewards the fans offer that make the artists’ activities worthwhile. Another standard of fairness has been called Marxist fairness. This is the idea that those with the most need should reap the most benefits regardless of their input — this is why we donate to charity, why we coddle sick relatives without expecting the same in return, why we record benefit records for ailing musicians, etc. Then there’s Darwinian fairness, which many fear is operating today — if you can get away with it, you deserve it. This is why people feel okay stealing intellectual property instead of paying for it. And finally, there’s the standard most of us use in our personal relationships — equity, the sense that the rewards should be relative to the costs, that those who put more in should get more out. Equity often holds even when you are getting more than the other person — when someone we don’t do much for showers us with affection and gifts, most of us feel uncomfortable and either seek to do more or end the relationship.

Where does this leave fan/artist relationships? The problem the internet poses is a shift from an equity model of fairness to a Darwinian one on the fans’ part, thereby reducing the fans’ direct costs and the artists’ monetary rewards. This is easy to maintain when the fans feel that the relationship is impersonal rather than interpersonal, that they are seen as interchangable drones around the queen bee artist. But if the relationship is seen as interpersonal, then the norms that govern social exchange are more likely to overtake the norms that govern economic exchange or self-interested Darwinian exchange. The principle of equity suggests that if fans think they are getting a lot and giving too little, they will seek to rectify it by providing more rewards, including money.

So what can an artist do to foster a more interpersonal sense of relationship? They’re already providing services and goods. Information isn’t all that relevant, and the point is not for artists to give fans money. What’s left? Love. Engage those fans, let them know they matter, talk to them, communicate with them, show your respect for them. That’s what the net makes possible that wasn’t possible before, and that may be artists’ best hope for getting paid in the future.

On LiveJournal, there’s a really interesting discussion about Secondhand fandoms, the premise being that sometimes people get really into the fan fiction (aka fanfic for those who are into it) surrounding a tv show without ever having seen the tv show itself. The writers in the thread have a lot of personal examples of how they got into reading fanfic around shows they missed entirely or only saw on rare occassion. One person talks about The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Now THERE was a tv show I loved. I have most of the books and most of the episodes on scratchy old VHS tapes.

The closest I’ve ever come to reading fanfic was some of the alternative storyline suggestions fans came up with in rec.arts.tv.soaps back in the day, which is a LONG way from the kinds of fanfic these folks are talking about, though it was often better than what the soap writers were writing. Maybe some of this blog’s readers could recommend some good starting points for other readers who may be curious about fanfic who don’t really know much if anything about it? I’ll start with a plug for Rhiannon Bury’s recent book Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online, which I read recently and really enjoyed. Also getting a lot of buzz is Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age Of The Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, which I haven’t yet read.

What shows are inspiring the best fanfic these days? Any good examples to point people toward?