Conspiracy at the CCA

I spent the better half of last week at the Canadian Communication Association's conference. It was part of the annual Congress, a scholarly throw down put on for academics working in the Social Sciences and Humanities. This year's event was hosted at York University, inconveniently located on the outskirts of Toronto.

It was three packed days of talks and talking. Highlights include hearing David Suzuki speak, seeing old friends, and those little cookies they serve between sessions. The best presentation titles go to Darin Barney's "Taking a Shit in Peace: Lament for the Scholar as Worker" and Derek Foster's "Redeeming Reality Television: Horse Rectum as Pharmakon". Academic titles are an artform, though one with hilariously predictable (styles and conventions)

The paper I presented on Saturday about Branding and the Popular Music Industry, was nowhere near as excitingly named. It discusses the case of Radiohead's Kid A album and its associated marketing materials. I argue that branding leads to the creation of expectations among consumers and that this potentially limits an artist's creativity.

I was presenting at the same time as Stephen Lewis was addressing a crowd of over 500 academics about AIDS and poverty in Africa. This either means that a) the CCA views my research as being of equal importance as Stephen Lewis' or b) Stephen Lewis was attempting to subvert my presentation by scheduling his more popular talk at the same time as mine. Either way, some kind of conspiracy is afoot.

American Idle

The numbers never lie. It's true. Unless of course you make the numbers up.
Which in this case I have not (except in several instances).
The point is, I can't talk rationally or irrationally about American Idol,
so I will let the numbers speak for themselves.
(A debt of gratitude goes to Shift magazine, from whom I "sampled" the framework for this article, Shift mag, r.i.p.)

Number of viewers for last night's season finale of American Idol: 32 million
Number of votes cast to "elect" the winner, Taylor Hicks: 63.4 million
Total ballots cast in last Canadian election: 13.7 million
Age of Taylor Hicks, the newest American Idol: 29
Average age of the last 4 American Idols: 22
Toughest obstacle in Taylor Hicks's life: Life itself
Age and Percentage of gray hair required to be officially diagnosed as prematurely grey: 50% before the age of 50
Other diseases I discovered I had while surfing the lynk-biotech page: 7
Person Taylor Hicks would first thank if he won: God
Number of votes God cast for the finale: 0 (busy at an 8pm showing of the Da Vinci Code)

Estimated net worth of Simon Cowell, Idol producer and judge: $80 Million
Estimated price per haircut for Simon: $500
Date of birth of Paula Abdul, Idol judge: June 19, 1962
Release year of "Straight Up", Paula's most glorious contribution to the world of music: 1988
Date of publication of Idol judge Randy Jackson's how-to-guide "What's up Dawg?: How to Become a Superstar in the Music Business": 2003
Release date of Snoop Dogg's DoggyStyle: 1993
First known usage of the term "dawg": 1898

Number of films starring William Hung, early round loser on American Idol, season three: 1 ("My Crazy Mother")
Number of films directed by Hung: 1 ("William Hung: Hangin' with Hung")
Number of times I laughed out loud while visiting former Idol runner-up Clay Aiken's, website: 17
Number of tears David Hasselhoff, who was in the audience, shed upon hearing Taylor Hicks proclaimed Idol: 1 (single tear)

Do I Work for Pandora?

Ok. Last post about Pandora, I promise.
As useful as the service may seem for finding new music, the trade-offs should be highlighted, especially as the site gains interest from companies looking to profit from it. Just recently, links to both Amazon and iTunes have appeared on the interface of the Pandora player. These links may be harmless for now (if you want to buy the song, then surf to somewhere it is sold), but it is worth considering where this service could lead, as I'm sure other companies will be knocking on Pandora's box soon enough.

While I generally enjoy cookies of the Oreo or Fudge-o variety, cookie-driven programs such as Pandora have strings attached to their deliciousness. Through cookies and other tracking software, Pandora serves up such tasty recommendations because it is tracking exactly what you have said you enjoyed or didn't. Their database is filled with hundreds of thousands of songs but each time you add a parameter, it provides Pandora with another clue as to your listening habits. The more clues you give them, the better (as in more accurate) a listening experience it will be for you. However, you have also voluntarily provided the service with valuable information about consumer preferences (i.e. users who liked this, also liked this). If Pandora's plans for that data is simply to refine the service's musical offerings, fine. But think of how valuable that information would be for any of the major music companies, and many other consumer goods companies.

Data such as this could provide interested parties with new ideas for how to market their artists/products and new ways to extract greater profits from their consumers. As of yet, I can't find anywhere in Pandora's privacy policy that indicates they make this information available to third parties. But, as the site's popularity increases, other companies will be looking to access/purchase this information from Pandora. The question that arises is whether the trade-off is an equal one. Companies get information, Pandora gets dollars, consumers get free music. Win Win Win? The answer will likely differ depending on who you ask. Either way, all should be aware of who's getting what and who's "working" for who.

It's hard to deny the excitement that surrounds many of these new online digitized services, but increased digitization also means increased data tracking abilities for corporations. Individual consumers shouldn't necessarily be incensed at this kind of data collection, but they should at least be informed about it.

Playing with Pandora

I’m sitting here listening to Pandora, the online music streaming service I talked about in my last post. Wolf Parade’s Shine a Light kicks things off. I am giddy as a little school person; waiting anxiously for the next track. Modest Mouse comes on. A bit predictable, but obviously related. This is followed by The Anniversary and then the Charmparticles, two bands I am unfamiliar with. I immediately question whether I know anything about music anymore until Morrissey begins to play.

I start a new station, and sticking with Montreal bands, I plug in Stars. Mae, Moxy Fruvous (yikes), and Junior Senior play in response, each with varying levels of similarity to Torquil Campbell and co. The Anniversary comes on again. Apparently they are the Kevin Bacon of both Wolf Parade and Stars.

Amazon and iTunes capitalized on the “customers who bought item A also purchased item B” mentality, and have reshaped the way consumers find books and music. Pandora is a more elaborate version of this idea. Services such as these underscore the fact that accessing content is no longer the problem. Sorting through it is. Why bother spending time looking for new music in clubs or record stores when complex algorithms and software calculations can just tell us what we should like?

Before I leave Pandora, I start a new station with The Anniversary. Bryan Adams comes on. So do the Killers, the Sounds, Lea Kruger and the Wallflowers. We can argue all day about how accurate Pandora’s predictions are or about the impact sites like these might have on the way we discover new music. Some of Pandora’s picks surprised me, in a good way, and led me to music I hadn’t heard before. Others scared me. My music’s DNA apparently links me to bands I never thought I could be linked to. It’s like when “scientists” tell us that our DNA links us to monkeys. Yeah, right.

Musical DNA

Blame Shawn Fanning. Accuse MySpace Music, GarageBand or the crazy German scientists who came up with the MP3 format in the first place. Point the finger at musicians everywhere that are posting great and horrible tunes from their studios and garages. They have each contributed to the overwhelming amount of music I can now access. But with great power comes great responsibility. Shame on the aforementioned guilty parties for giving us so much music without providing any tools by which to sort through the overabundance; to weed out the good from the bad.

Of course, the answer to this technological problem can be solved, fittingly, with more technology. The good folks at the Music Genome Project have compiled a massive database of music, each song coded according to hundreds of musical attributes or ‘genes’. The result is Pandora, a free online streaming music service that plays whatever you tell it to. Pandora also serves up new music you (hopefully) haven’t heard based the previous songs you told it to play. There have been services like this before, though hardly this comprehensive. And there will be many more of these sites popping up as software and sophisticated algorithms evolve.

Like regular genes, the musical genome project assumes that music can be distilled to a set of defining characteristics. Adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine become acoustic or electric instrumentation, major or minor key tonality, or the use of vocal harmony etc. This is supposed to free music from all its trivialities. As the music genome website claims: “It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.”

For purists, I’m sure Pandora is seen as a way to get at music more authentically. No distracting album art or music videos. No press reviews, just sound. Unfortunately, the fan experience for music involves a lot more than just sound. We buy into artists because they sound good, but also because they represent a certain set of ideas and cultural beliefs that we see in ourselves. It may sound inauthentic to admit this but its not unrealistic. Whether it leads us to the Holy Grail of music authenticity or not, Pandora and services like it are going to induce interesting shifts in the way music gets discovered and ultimately, how music gets marketed.

My next post will feature a mini tour through some of the songs and sounds on Pandora.