Hit Machines

Two articles worth reading together:

Rob Walker on Pandora in the New York Times and an older piece from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. Both are about tech companies working to “predict” artistic tastes based on the formal characteristics of the art in question. The first is about music, the second is about film; but both deal with the problem of trying to use objective measures to make sense of subjective judgements.

Pandora has come a long way since its inception and I genuinely enjoy it as a way of finding out about new music (though I’ve used it less since there was a crackdown on Canadian user a little while back). Still, the connections it makes between songs and artists is at least worth using as part of a wider strategy of finding out about new music. The film story line prediction service Gladwell talks about seems a little less scientific. I’m not sure why music strikes me as easier to codify than film, but I guess where ever there’s money to be made from making the subjective more objective, then companies like Pandora or Epagogix will be trying to figure out the formula.

As Walker points out though, and as anyone who’s read Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love knows, trying to get rid of the cultural and social baggage that comes with art is ultimately a futile process. Pandora’s model rests on the belief that people’s music tastes should be based on purely musical attributes. Forget what your friends like, what the latest mp3 blogs recommend, or what Pitchfork said. Pandora thinks this shouldn’t matter when making musical decisions. But we’re social creatures at heart and we express our sociality through art. Stripping music, or film, or books of all the cultural infrastructure that gets built up around them might lead us to interesting musical discoveries, but there’s no art to it. It’s pure science.

Radiohead addendum: Quick Math

Comscore, an Internet measurment company, released a report earlier this week detailing some data from Radiohead's pay-what-you-can marketing stunt. Here's a quick recap:

1.2 million people visited the site in Oct.
62% of people paid nothing.
38% paid something.
Of that 38%, the average paid was $6.

Coverage of the report has been predictably skewed, with many - including the report's titular jab at freeloading - concluding that the experiment was a failure, that the poor results confirm that the tip jar model just doesn't work.

Here's some quick math:

- 38% of 1.2 million paying $6 = $2,736,000 (almost all of which goes to the band)

Or, factoring in the 62% who paid nothing, the average price people paid was $2.26:
- 1.2 million paying $2.26 = $2,712,000

Hail to the Thief sold 300,000 in its first week. If it continued at that pace for the whole month (which it didn't), that gives about 1.2 million. Or, for even more fun, let's assume that Radiohead could sell as much as Kanye West's Graduation (which it couldn't, Graduation was the highest selling album in 4 years). It moved 957,000 units in it's first week. It moved 226,000 the week after. It continued to decline. Again, 1.2 million in the first month is a good guess (but incredibly high estimate for CD sales).

- 1.2 Million units at $15 - $18,000,000

Of course, not all of that goes to the band. Usually bands get a 10-15% cut. Higher, obviously, for bigger bands.

- 18 million with 15% cut = 2.7 million
- 18 million with 20% cut = 3.6 million

Set aside the fact that Radiohead was doing this as a publicity stunt, some pre-hype for their upcoming CD release. Even at 38% pay what you can, the band made about as much as if they had released it traditionally. Sure, being Radiohead, they may have gotten more than a 20% cut. But, being Radiohead, they probably wouldn't have sold 1.2 million physical copies of their album anyway.

Radiohead Addendum

Here's a range of commentary on Radiohead's marketing plans:

The first, is a fairly generic article from two weeks ago, talking about how the band is changing the rules of the game

The second, from MTV news on release day shows how some fans are a bit sour over the low quality audio files, and over the realization that the files are just digital placeholders until the album comes out (which Radiohead expects them to pay for, again)

The third and most vehement, from the eternally cranky Bob Lefsetz, blasts Radiohead for duping fans with a marketing scheme (far greater than one any label could have concocted).

The interesting thread here is not that people are angry. It's that people somehow feel cheated that the electronic launch of this file is actually just marketing. Its not some kind of sonic or industry revolution, as they had hoped (though, as I said in the last post, it will have a relatively revolutionary impact: people paid for digital files).

Almost every digital music file online, whether it be streamed on myspace, sold on band websites, or available for download from an mp3 blog is a piece of marketing for other things the artist in question is doing. It may be band-driven promotion or user-generated hype, but it's rarely the end goal.

If you bought In Rainbows, you weren't duped. You got what you paid for. Which was up to you.

In Rainbows - Marketing Radiohead Style

I'm listening to the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows, that I *bought* yesterday from their online store. If you've read any paper/blog today, you know the deal. Radiohead are finally without a label and have decided to release the album themselves, online. Perhaps more radically, they're letting fans set the price. All you have to do is go to their website and, server crashes notwithstanding, pick the price.

I'll spare you my opinion on the songs, since describing an album after only 24 hours of listening is at best futile and bound to be inaccurate in the long run. But I will talk the album's marketing, or rather, its anti-marketing, since that may be ultimately what's most interesting about In Rainbows.

Radiohead have long been masters of anti-marketing. After the intense press hype and intensive touring schedule for Ok Computer the band had a near meltdown. Their follow up album, as a result, was a different album (complete with electronic glitches and odd time signatures) that was marketed differently. For Kid A, Radiohead abandoned traditional music videos, pre-released radio singles, and they did very little initial touring. Instead, they held private listening parties and used their website to update fans on the development of the album. Kid A’s semi-secretive campaign created an air of intrigue that became an important statement about the band. Far from a lack of marketing, Kid A’s anti-marketing said much about Radiohead and positioned them as avant-garde, anti-corporate musicians.

Now, sans label, Radiohead is extending this strategy even further. To get the word out about the new album, they've relied solely on touring, their website, and the immense peripheral press (mainstream and online) that comes from a band as huge as Radiohead deciding they're going to let fans set the price they're willing to pay.
But they've also had over a decade of brand building done on their behalf (courtesy of Capitol/EMI). Without this, they could never have pulled this stunt as successfully as I'm sure it will work out.

And it will work. People will pay, because Radiohead represent a valuable product (in the eyes and ears of its fans). Also, the faith they are placing in their fans shows a level of respect for their fans not seen elsewhere (like the 6 recording companies who just last week sued a woman $222,000). Radiohead realize that people can and will get their product for free. Rather than fight through legal or technological means, they simply created a mechanism for people to show their appreciation, should fans feel its worth it. Importantly, this appreciation goes directly to the band, not through any label or (apparent) middleman. This only increases the likelihood people will support the initiative.

With Kid A Radiohead successfully convinced consumers the band was anti-corporate and unbranded, despite being on the roster one of the world largest recording labels. With In Rainbows their greatest achievement will be that they got consumers to pay for a product they increasingly frequently get for free. It's just too bad Radiohead didn't go the full 9 yards and allow fans to sample the work before deciding how much it was worth.

I Can't Believe it's Not Advertising

One of the most interesting aspects about YouTube's rise and ensuing attempts to become a legitimate service has been the way individuals and institutions have incorporated the site into their marketing plans.

Independent bands looking for ways to get the word out have turned to the site as a place to publish music videos. Although The Arcade Fire probably doesn't need much more publicity these days, it is significant that they used YouTube to share the first sounds from Neon Bible. The clip is a tongue in cheek anti-ad, but it's an ad nonetheless. The band knew the low-budget clip would be worth the price they paid for it versus anything they could have sent to Much Music.

Then there's the not-so-independent bands that are trying their best to look independent. YouTube is the ultimate venue to show off an amateur aesthetic, despite how many professionals may be behind the scenes. I was sent this video by email. Like most videos I receive, it came with little context. "Check this out, it is awesome." It is an impressive and seemingly spontaneous subway station performance of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight". A bit of digging, however, shows that the band , Naturally Seven, is a SonyBMG artist and that the video is part of a massive multimedia campaign to launch the single and the band's debut album. The video's credibility rests on the assumption of spontaneity. On YouTube, it appears as any other user video would appear, bringing even further assumptions about it (i.e. that this is something someone captured in the Paris metro station, though it was cool and uploaded it).

Perhaps the best example of what I am getting at here is the bride freak out video that garnered millions of views before the hoax was up. It turns out the video was what advertisers call a "net seed", the precursor for a shampoo ad campaign. The problem with these types of clips is not that they are intentionally deceptive. It's that they destroy the credibility of the social networks on which they depend. Advertisers want to be where the viewers are, but trying to sneak in through back doors does more damage than good. MySpace users are now inundated with friend requests from Fox TV show characters.

As marketers invent new ways to reach their target through social networks, their biggest challenge will be not to destroy the very environments they hope to tap. Otherwise, they'll end up like TV or Radio, media that users are increasingly leaving out of frustration. It might be good if marketers heeded the honest simplicity of Montgomery's Flea Market. Unless of course I've been duped and this is actually the first single of this guy's new album.