Music has been to build, retain and rework social relationships and institutions. It doesn’t matter how announced be, it can “never be a product. “
This is one of the maximum incisive and intuitive statements that Nancy Baym makes in her new interpretation for the crowd book: musicians, the public and intimate connection work, which he previously published this month through Nyu Press.
As an art form, the basic price of music for its creators and listeners is based on emotional connection and compliance, which is difficult to nail with a price. However, we also live at the age of $ 95 in Kanye West Hood, land tickets of $ 250 in the Madison Square Garden and tickets of $ 1,200 for the burning of men, where corporations to LIST and almost monopolists run to extract a maximum advertising price of those without bonds.
To complicate additional things, the fashion generation has distorted the nature and the same scale of these connections first. With the emergence of social networks, the good monetary fortune of the artists is now based more and more on their ability to administer non -public and intimate relations with possible billions of public members on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and dozens of other platforms. Making these manual paintings of managing individual intimacy at the giant scale can be exhausting and monetary, a fact that has encouraged Baym, who recently paints as the principal researcher in Microsoft in Cambridge, MA, to invent the concept of “relational paintings. “
That said, the generation can also be a positive and disintermedia force, allowing more and more artists to paint complete assets about their revenue source resources and their communication channels with fans. They can assume all the complicated paintings themselves, but in the end harvesting all monetary awards.
When playing with the crowd, Baym presents an old and adequate story of the way in which this “relational work” has replaced the progress of virtual media and communication, with first -hand interviews and case studies with artists as remote as R. E. M. , Amanda Palmer, Richie Hawtin, Zoë Keating and Billy Brag. Above all, all these artists have very other advertising models, degrees of technological flavor and philosophies around the communication of enthusiasts, to bring to space one of Baym’s main arguments according to which there is no exclusive solution to nail the commitment of enthusiasts in the virtual era.
Artists have the right to establish their own limits and decide on their own set of technological teams to manage relationships with fans, according to their own artistic and monetary objectives, and the platforms deserve to facilitate without a doubt, to discourage, this autonomy. The diversity of technological methods that artists have followed at the service of more powerful emotional and advertising relationships can serve as a valuable lesson for anyone in any industry that seeks to navigate in the immediate global social networks and the complexities of the concert economy.
Baym took the time generously to talk to me through the phone in the main conclusions of his book, and how they can relate to recent advances in the music industry, the ecosystem of the expanding play list on the transmission platforms, with musical ambitions of giant generation corporations such as Facebook and YouTube. Follow an edition published through our verbal exchange.
Cherie Hu: identity is a very important component of the musical fandom, but some would say that the generation has diluted the role of musical intake in identity and vice versa. I heard meetings from the leaders industry who did judicial cases in the sense of “No one is dressed in Metallica t -shirts. ” How do you think this musical event has changed, if not at all, with technological progress?
Nancy Baym: I think there are more pop culture articles presented to identify than before. For example, a piece that falls from these conversations is the game: there are many other people who today identify with one player or another, online, thanks to sites such as YouTube and Twitch. This dynamic and this opportunity did not exist so much in the “Metallica T -shirt. “
In general, all the increase in the culture of the logo has replaced, to the point where dressed with a T T -shirt with a logo logo is now much more common and means anything absolutely different. Metallica’s rise and popularity preceded the generalization of logo identification. Metallica’s strategy to attach with enthusiasts has been a success that everyone has followed, and other people have logos names all the time. A rock organization is just an imaginable piece in a series of pop culture fabrics with which you can now identify.
That said, identity with musicians is very alive. I just saw Janelle Monae in concert in concert, and there was no doubt that the public felt talking to them. There were transparent moments in which I told myself: “Yes, I am a fan of Janelle Monae!” There was a network sensation and a feeling that I was talking about in the call of all of us, who percentage, considerations and safe emotions. We surely assign those things to the artists and demand them as tactile stones of who we are and who we are not.
A vital theme in his electronic book is the perception of “originality” and the roles that artists and enthusiasts play to evaluate and speak to what extent they are “originally” original. “How do social networks complicate this process?
For decades, the music industry calculates and invents total concepts of “authenticity” to stimulate sales: white blues musicians in Chicago that simply do not release races because tourists only looked for the music of “authentic” blues blues touched through blacks, migrates in the city are necessarily “invented” to take urban. Peterson creates country music for more information). In those two examples, what was considered “authentic” was directly connected to the correspondence of a kind of demographic categorization scheme.
Now, with social networks, there are many more points in the consultation of what “matters” as original. If you are a singer and composer who publishes songs of political protest, is it original “enough” to live in East Village in New York and that you passed to demonstrations in your neighborhood? Or the other people you pass and even your non -public voting file, now at stake? Are those more public consultations, or only the “type”?
Especially in the Instagram era, authenticity is much more in questions such as: “The food you have breakfast this morning corresponds to the ideology that you sing in your last album? How can you sympathize with poverty if you eat toasted with the lawyer?
What does an effect have? Do you think this hyper specialized concentration in the non -public questions of artists has had about the nature of the musical Fandom, compared to the types of fans that we have noticed in recent decades?
This is one thing to identify with a partial sampling distorted by an artist, or with an artist who is a wonderful replacement for a way of life. It is absolutely another identification with an artist when you are in “commitment” to them all the time, day after day, sharing those banal activities. In this last situation, the area does not appear as “empty”, in the sense of allowing enthusiasts to invest power in the filling of whites and create the artist as they sought to believe them.
It’s like the difference between reading an Ebook and watching the movie. Suddenly, the main character is interpreted through an actor or an actress who does not look or does not speak at all as the way you imagined them: “He did not intend to be a role of Scarlett Johansson, this character intended to be Asian”, and now you cannot perceive this character or read this book eebo in the same way.
That said, folding that mystique on social networks can actually improve fans, pointing out that the artist is “one of us. ” Billy Bragg does it very well, in the sense that his open accessibility makes other people identify more with him.
A Trfinish you are talking about in your electronic book is how social networks are increasingly “organized with Americans than subjects. ” The user delights in the transmission facilities such as Spotify is also individualistic, which provides custom -made refinations for the unique finish user, almost without local social functionality. Do you think that generation and culture will have only more and more individualistic over time, to the point that the communication of enthusiasts lost emphasis on “issues” or broader communities?
This is a difficult consultation to respond, since some of the generalized Fandoms at this time occur in “intermediate” sites such as Twitter and Tumblr. Each of the individual users of these platforms previously has its own organized network of other users to follow, but that also adhere to a fandom or a broader theme like K-Pop that thrives much beyond the platform.
I have written in the concept beyond “network collectivism”: the concept that other people come in combination in other equipment on other platforms that are vaguely connected to each other, instead of agreeing with a single singular area to talk about an express subject. We are all Americans with our own networks, however, we are also components of teams from other people who “collide” almost everywhere. I may first see you on Twitter, but then I also see you on LinkedIn, and we have non -unusual wisdom in any of the places. Then, we can move on to a type of musical policy and gather in person, so each of us can meet other people on this occasion that we will locate ourselves later in virtual environments. These are groups of other people who are on the network between the two.
An attractive tendency to look is the other people who look to get away from hypervibility, whether in open and public networks spaces or in social networks strongly overcome such as Facebook and Twitter, and to messages and platforms of small teams such as WhatsApp.
Another important argument of its electronic book is that even if “the price of musical paintings has resided in communication and connection”, the main enthusiastic communication platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. ) do not highlight music in those connections. Instead, its algorithms simply praise more visual content that generates more perspectives and clicks. Recently I heard someone present a complaint in this sense that “the music industry is the visibility industry. ” Do you need to agree with this statement? Does visibility now have a complete precedence about sound in musical marketing?
In fact, we are in this strange “metric moment” really where anything with more vital metrics is interpreted as best, which is possibly or not the case. I recently interviewed someone who directs an independent Swedish label and he told me: “We don’t even get as a label. We are just looking to get attention. “
It is for me to see how so many races, in music and beyond, they have repositioned so that it is no longer enough to make the paintings. Now you have to make the paintings to make sure they all disregard that you have done the job. And now, influential people like Celeste Barber, who has built a total career when laughing at the culture of celebrities and representations of the female framework on Instagram, take their position on their own national tours and compete with equipment that has been operating for decades. Obviously, I think that music is very special, but it is not as if music only had the only right to be the only content that thrives on those platforms.
As for the music industry to be a visibility industry, the component of me thinks that it is true and exclusive in our time. But what about MTV and musical clips? What happens to the pop star of the 1950s that were its appearance? What happens to Berry Gordy, who sent all his artists to school to be informed to seem presentable, to behave well and even to eat the right path in a restaurant? It has been an industry that is worth it and the aesthetic appearance. When R. E. M. For the first time, it was so strange to see an organization that didn’t care how they looked. It was such a radical position until now.
How do you think the increase in temperament reading lists and the activity in Spotify and similar platforms can have an effect on the artist’s relationship of artists? While temperament reading lists tend to generate more flows for a given track for a longer period, other people argue that they are only exacerbating the distance between the artist and the listener, in terms that the listener does not actively see the artists in the playlist, not to mention them later.
There are two parallel clues, or perhaps orthogonal, at stake here that can cross at one point. As an artist, his cash can come from mass components, for example. You land in a reading list that generates a lot of S, however, it is only a component of a case of use of the “soundtrack” and none of the listeners pay attention to you as an individual act, there is no genuine fandom on this topic, or an organization of faithful enthusiasts who are really in you and that will be effective for you beyond this list of games.
The sweet point is the position in which you get a reading list and arouses sufficient interest for some of those passive listeners before entering this other category. But I do not believe that the musical transmission platforms are lately the progression of the Fandom. They are the discovery of an act, but they are not enthusiastic about the connection with each other and let them do their own.
One of the maximum enlightening parts of his electronic book was the argument that all the open participation of enthusiasts cannot coexist without problems with the complete assets of artists and the control of their verbal exchange and image. Interestingly, maximum social networks and dominant transmission platforms do not allow the complete participation or complete property of artists or enthusiasts today. Could you see that the duality of property ownership, resulting in a transparent selection that artists have to do, or a more indistinct tension that artists will have to constantly negotiate?
I see them as in tension consistent with others. In an environment with a complete components, they all play an equivalent role and have an equivalent opportunity to give a contribution to the total procedure of everything that is happening. With the property, you say: “This component of the procedure is only mine, and cannot be composed. “
In some contexts, this asset technique is absolutely legitimate. I do not necessarily need other foreigners to write the songs of my favorite composer. If we were looking for all our arts to be subcontracted, we would have many other models of today. When we communicate about the “assets”, we will also have to other people between high -level assets and preference for conversation, discourse and interpretation around these assets, which is another layer of assets. In any of the cases, there is an inherent tension that everything is common or that everyone has a voice and can participate.
The two are desirable results, in the sense that musicians need and a sense of connection and participation in exciting and participatory communities. That said, if you need to gain effective of this connection, at one time, you must draw an edge and claim a game like yours, and tell the enthusiasts and followers to give it effective for this.
We communicate more about business styles. You help in your electronic book that the musical payment style is inventive because it moves a non -unusual floor between this participatory duality and the controlling artists: “Recognize enthusiasts as clients, but provide them with space to reague their act of paying from transactional to participatory. ” However, the music industry today is more deeply for consumers in the transmission subscription style of $ 9. 99 / month, which, for me, is the opposite of giving enthusiasts the selection of the amount to be paid. Why do you think the payment has not taken off in the classic music scene?
There are probably many institutional forces in the music industry that make it more difficult to move on to such models. Platforms such as Bandcamp, Patreon and Pledgemusic obviously show that there are audience segments with sufficient source of disposable income and that are more than in a position to pay a higher amount for cultural fabrics and the arts in general.
It is a shame that we do not perceive that you are, on the other hand, and micropas for smaller transactions. YouTube had a capacity for inclination and donation (fans financing), but closed it in 2017.
I believe that the explanation of why micropaies in specific have not taken off in the United States partially fear cultural norms, and in part technical and political peculiarities with local payment platforms. Flattr, a co -founded right micropress service through Peter Alnde (which also co -founded the pirate of the Bay), helped some bloggers in Europe winning $ 100,000 more according to the year, but PayPal stopped painting with Flattr in 2014, which significantly reduced the traction of the last company in the United States. However, micropaia models are actually underutilized and subexplored in the largest music sector.
Facebook and YouTube recently introduced their own competition in Patreon, allowing creators to qualify their subscription enthusiasts of their enthusiasts to access exclusive content and network -oriented features. What do you think of the viability of these new offers, especially because they belong to giant generation corporations with fundamental giant contrast products (which are free of giant pieces)?
These platforms generate their own price from the content of the creators anyway, so I think it is wonderful if they innovate and review new products, and build everything that starts more effective in creators themselves.
What makes me suspect in general about these giant and multifunctional platforms is that they have other incentives at stake, and we have noticed that their methods replace a lot in recent years. Although sites like Patreon and Pledgemusic are not in the globe and can suffer right in the end, they only exist to serve the creators. While with the largest technological platforms, even if they build all those characteristics for musicians and creators, it is easy to believe that they say in one or two years: “In fact, it does not paint us so well for us, so we will avoid this. ” Then, worried creators lose all the other people who supposedly had direct access.
This returns to the control consultation on participation. I do not mean that Facebook and YouTube are or not to be intelligent guards of our participatory communities, however, other people deserve to ask more consultations about who manages those subscriptions, and if the artists deserve to be safe to put their eggs in this basket, even if those platforms have the auditory numbers.
Last week there is a lot of controversy around the rapper, the acquisition of the local Chicagoist website. In the center of the debate there is an awareness that artists have their own media platforms more and more, which, through maintaining a visual logo and talking directly to enthusiasts through Instagram or through the transmission service (such as Jay Z does with Tidal), in addition to having a total magazine or a publication. What is your reaction to the rapper resolution and how do you perceive the dynamics between the Internet and the classic media with respect to the artists’ careers?
The appointment of artist pressure is another total layer of these nested hierarchies with tensions between artists, the public and the platforms. One of the main interruptions of social networks has been a break in the ability of classic magazines and other means to serve guards for conversations. The artists look at the existing landscape and think: “Now I can control my own speech. “
However, at the same time, there is an expanding dependence on the old networks and channels to be the voices of final authority. More and more other people now intend to carry out well on social networks in the hope that they are “collected” through classic magazines and even television. Many artists seek to move away “Internet in electronic book contracts and television programs.
I think that media acquisition is an excessive way to handle this. But you can perceive the news about the fate of rapper and Chicago as a user who needs to control their own press, or can also perceive it as someone who considers the resources of the network and network media to break, and who needs to help those civil resources. It is a much less self -centered interpretation in terms of the attitude of possibility that is less a control consultation and more participation.
Nancy Baym’s electronic book must now be obtained to acquire in rigid, pocket and electronic canopy formats through Nyu Press, Amazon and Google Play.