Web 2.0 Prosumers Visualisation Purity Cultural Recycling Fans Devaluation Music Culture Co-option Convergence Musical Abundance Levels of Production Heirarchies/Trending
-The second phase of the internet, where the focus shifts from people receiving information and services to people creating and sharing material
- PROducers & conSUMERS, the contemporary audience behaviour as active participantants in the process of production of media texts
- Audience who has a strong interest, belief and identifies with the band or artist
- Where contemporary recordings are increasingly accessible and lead to a renewed cultural valuation of past music
- The process of Remix, Re-cycling, Mashup, Re-packaging, Re-imagining of existing Media (Music) to create something new out of the old
- Industry practices that are different to traditional pre Web 2.0 and respond to the blurring of boundaries between the audience, text (music) and institutions (record labels)
- The consequence of a culture of free music which could be said to decrease the cultural worth or 'value' of Music.
- A way of charting popularity via social networking and online distribution sites
- A concept that questions the authenticity & integrity of Music in the light of cultural recycling, over production and autotuning.
* A debate of The Organic/Cultural Depth in tension with The Synthesised/Culturally Superficial
A
Part of the Party!?Fan-culture
on the web 2.0 as
a way towards a participatory music culture
The
World Wide Web is a place of freedom: of free speech, free choice and
of free creative expression. The latter is
becoming increasingly observable ever since the Web
2.0
is available to the Internet-users. The second generation of the web
has given people the freedom to put their own content online with
only few restrictions. According to media theorist Henry
Jenkins
(2006) this user-generated content has led to a phenomenon called
convergence
culture. Three concepts are the buzz words of convergence
culture:
media
convergence,
participatory cultureand collective
intelligence.
With the first Jenkins refers to a media landscape that is mixing old
and new media, as for instance showing and watching TV series
online. The second and third are about the interaction of the
consumers with the producer and with each other. They do this without
knowing the effect and where “grassroots and corporate media
intersect” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 2). All of this is also expressed infan
culture,
which is merging all sorts of media and content and is very
grassroots, participatory and collective. Relating convergence
culture to music culture in the Web 2.0, one could claim that they
will shift the passiveness of the music consumer to a more active and
participatory involvement. It could function as a space for
expressing the fans’ needs rather than being influenced by the
music marketers. In the following I will examine in how far
convergence can be a
way towards a more participatory music business and culture and
how marketers can learn from the music culture online.
Of
all fan-products I found, looking for fan culture on the Web 2.0, the
most interesting subjects were located on the video platform YouTube.
Other communities and networks as MySpace,
Facebook[1]
and LastFM[2]
give room to promote one’s favourite artist[3],
but the creativity is often limited due to the preset character of
the platforms. The works I discovered on YouTube spoke of rather
unlimited creativity. Those were:
Fan-alternatives
to original music clips.
For instance, a SecondLife
version to the song Jein
by the German Hip Hop act Fettes
Brot;
So-called
‘mash ups’ merging
videos and songs of famous musicians, as the mix of Oasis’s
Wonderwall
and Green
Day's
Boulevard
of Broken Dreams;
The
merging
of cuts from movies with popular songs.
For example, a Star
Wars
version of Snow
Patrol’s
Chasing
Cars
The
creation
of completely new music videos,
as the very artsy remix of Madcon’s
Beggin,
not only remixing the video but also the entire song .
These
are only a few examples of how fans have used media convergence to
promote their celebrities. This type of convergence, mixing various
musical genres and creating videos to it, is also called ‘remix
culture’.
Lawrence
Lessig
(2004), the inventor of the term, calls for a culture in which
different types of media-mate rial
should be mixed in order to open up the production of culture to
everyone and making it more participatory. Convergence
allows for this remix culture
as it implies a cultural shift, which makes people look for new
sources of information and connect the content of media that usually
do not seem to fit, as the abovementioned examples show. According to
Jenkins
(2006), fans are generally the early adopters of new media
technologies. They are also “the most active segment of the media
audience” (p. 131) and hence do not appreciate the dictation of the
music industry. Moreover, Jenkins states that “the web provides
them with a powerful new channel for amateur cultural production”
(p. 131). Thus, it seems natural that they have already invaded
the Web 2.0 and exploit its opportunities to generate
Simon
Moretti feat. J.M. Armleder-
Remix 2003
their own content.
The online grassroots efforts of fandom become an
Source:
Galerie
chez Valentin2003
answer
to the dominance of the mass media. They are hoped to create a
participatory music culture that finally gives a voice to the
consumers in the music business.
Some
bands have already used this potential for their own purposes. The
American alternative-rock band Incubus,
for instance, started the I
Dig Incubus
competition in late 2006. The task was for their fans to create a
video clip to their song Dig
and then post it on YouTube. The winner entry was to become the
official clip to the song. The result was quite a substantial amount
of entries that were not only very creative but also served as an
expression of the fans’ commitment to the band. The competition is
a symbol for how convergence
culture can also be used by bands
(and quite probably their management and marketers) to promote
themselves and their products. However, whereas there is no doubt
that a musical fan culture exists on the Web 2.0, it must be asked
whether it really provides the consumers with participation in the
shaping of a music culture according to their needs. The term
‘participatory’
would require that the consumers become involved
in the process of production and marketing of
products connected to music that has so far been the domain of the
music industry . According to Jenkins, the cultural fan-works can
only achieve marketability if they can obtain collective meaning. The
Internet has provided a platform to the fan culture that can
distribute those cultural artefacts and help them to be adopted by
the rest of the fan community.
The
leaders of the music industry will eventually be forced to pay
attention to their customers’ desires. As Jenkins explains, TV
producers have already started to listen to their series’ fans to
adopt their programmes according to their needs. Furthermore, the
dialogue
with the consumers
through the Web 2.0 is even called the Future
of Marketing
by the
Economist Intelligence Unit
(2006) – a leading economics research unit. The researchers found
out that marketers will have to incorporate online efforts of
web-users as well as the merging of offline and online media into
their strategies. Through this they will be able to achieve a more
holistic branding that is participatory and that suits the medium.
Their advice is to get into a dialogue with the consumers through the
user-generated content on the Internet. Moreover, following Holt’s
(2004) theory on cultural
branding,
marketers should be able to understand
the social tensions
of an era and adjust their product according to them. For the music
industry that means that it must be assessed what the place of music
as a product and brand is within the current music culture. An
instance for such a tension is the consumers’ reluctance to pay for
music and the overall negative attitude towards the major labels. The
marketers would need to find out how the knowledge about this tension
could help the music market out of its dip.
Winner
video of the I Dig Incubus competition
Furthermore,
Holt also attaches importance to the consumers’
role as authors of cultural content and brands.
For him especially those have an influence, which are immersed in
what he calls “populist content”. According to Jenkins (2006),
those who are involved in the creation of fan-culture usually are
immersed in such content. Thus, marketers should accept that fans
are necessary to shape the music culture and business
in order for them to profit. If this view on fan-culture is really
adopted by the music-marketers in the future, then the participation
and integration of the grassroots-level of the music culture will be
possible in the music business. It is possible that this way the
ongoing process of alienation of the music consumers by the music
industry will come to an end or will at least be slowed down. Ideally
the consumers would feel that they are part of a culture that is very
important to them.
Notes
[1]
A social network, mainly to connect friends. [2]
An online radio, presenting related artists to the listener, when
entering the name of one’s favourite artist. [3]
See The
“Do it yourself” guide to stardom
on the promoting effects of MySpace.
The early history of music and video games is fondly remembered by gaming enthusiasts: an electronic chorus of wailing mass produced chips worked upon by unsung musical geniuses. We thought they were pioneers. They thought they were film industry rejects. We were both right.
But those who were not indoctrinated into the world of video game music have never really understood the fascination with these coarse, unnatural sounds. Least accepting of all was the music industry itself, and there wasn’t a lot of cross pollination. Music based on game tunes was thin on the ground and are probably best forgotten. Google Ambassadors of Funk’s ‘Super Mario Land’ and Doctor Spin’s ‘Tetris’ if you’re a masochist (but you can have the trivia that Doctor Spin was a pseudonym for Andrew Lloyd Webber for free).
In the nineties, some ‘games’ exploited the newly emerging CD format for quick wins (The Make My Video series of games that allowed you to mess around with videos for INXS and Marky Mark). The list of artists who worked on actually creating games based around their music is slightly more impressive: Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker is perhaps most fondly remembered, though David Bowie’s input to David Cage’s bizarre Omikron: The Nomad Soul is undeservedly obscure.
Video Game Music Embraced?
But even as games have moved beyond the problems of limited fidelity, the music industry (which lets face it, has more than a fair share of its own problems anyway) has been slow to dip its toe in the lake of opportunities in gaming. The explosion of the music genre in the last five years bought a raft of karaoke games, guitar puzzle titles and variations on those themes only to end with a kind of mutual parting. Musicians everywhere saw it their place to look down on anyone who dared to hold a plastic guitar and the late-coming lawsuits brought by Maroon 5 and Courtney Love over the use of likenesses in various titles speaks volumes for the animosity. Though in all fairness, the music genre had a simple innovation problem, and the band-themed Rock Band and Guitar Hero titles jumped a particularly lethargic and malnourished shark.
Nevertheless, composers working in video games now have the same technology that is available in any field they dare to work in. And composers who reknowned mostly for working in Film (Harry Gregson-Williams, Hans Zimmer) are collaborators and originators on major video game projects. But what of the lumbering giant that is popular music itself? Are artists and agents adequately offering up music to the games industry, and are game directors raiding the treasure troves of popular music to enhance their games?
A Few Great Examples
It cannot be a coincidence that the few games that have embraced popular tunes to bolster their atmosphere are also among the few that have set the industry alight in recent years. Any other scenario would require the creativity to come from the music industry itself, and good luck with that. Among the luminaries of the last decade, we’ve got the Grand Theft Auto series, which innovatively featured a mix of radio stations along genre lines (that were cleverly coordinated with each city’s gangs). Getting around the fact that budgets were small and the music industry wasn’t especially interested, earlier games featured songs by lesser-known artists who deserved the exposure. Little Big Planet would repeat this, giving well deserved exposure to experimental rock groups and foreign artists.
Apart from this, there has been a wealth of royalty-free music to exploit for period-based games. The Fallout games use music from the era of vocal harmony bands to add a fifties flavour to its nuclear paranoia fuelled world of wastelands. Fallout 3 aped Grand Theft Auto’s radio station approach effectively. Similarly, the Bioshock games add music from the same period played over tannoys, radios and victrolas. In fact, Bioshock is a cut above Fallout 3, which feels like somebody did a library search for the words ‘farm’ and ‘atom bomb’: Bioshock actually places its music in areas where it’s most effective. So ‘God Bless the Child’ is played when the story is currently focusing on the freakish ‘Little Sisters’, and ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ plays in an area where the downfall of the underwater city of Rapture is most apparent.
The Music Industry Needs Video Games
But despite these fantastic examples, the video game industry seems to be a no-go area for popular music. The chief usage of contemporary music seems to be in trailers dreamt up by the marketing department (such as Eminem’s ‘I Collapse’ in adverts for Modern Warfare 2). Tunes that are nowhere to be seen in the game itself. And it needn’t be this way: the film industry may hate the fact that video games are keeping young people out of the cinema, but at least it knows how to exploit it. The music industry doesn’t even have to compete with video games, but because it’s ‘new’ (i.e. less than thirty years old) it yet again finds itself in a situation where it doesn’t quite know how to exploit them, or to make itself affordable or appealing for people who make them.
So how about it, music industry. How about turning this particular nail in your coffin into a weapon for once?
Paul Smernicki - Director of Digital, Universal Music UK
Today, Spotify, the music subscription service, announced some changes to their service via their excellent blog. The most eye-catching is that after six months of full access to the free version of the service, users will be capped to five listens to any particular track.
We support the free element of Spotify because we know it’s a really quick and easy way to discover new tracks and artists and to introduce people to the even better experience that is a subscription. Subscription offers lots more: Spotify on your mobile, exclusive and pre-release music... and no interruptions.
The debate is already raging about Spotify’s move but what I have been really encouraged by is the sentiment of many comments following the blog post, not just on Spotify but also in other places like NME.com.
Loads of people have left comments supporting the move and being very clear that they think the cost of a subscription represents great value, and that music is something worth paying for.
It’s important to everyone that services like Spotify thrive – fans, artists and labels alike. I believe this move will help them grow as a business: returning fair payment to those who create the brilliant music we enjoy and allowing labels to continue to invest in new artists.
