This Mess We're In

I've been drafting and deleting various blogs in relation to the Digital Britain report and how disappointed I am that, despite it being a decade since the music industry and governments dropped the ball with turning Napster legit, it might as well have been yesterday.

Before I go into any depth, I wanted to reveal some things I've found. First off, for the sake of context, here is a selection of Google Trends graphs which show how much interest, in terms of search traffic, certain sites have received:

The Rise of Twitter



The Fall of Myspace



The Growth (court case/"bad pr" related spikes?) and Scale of Pirate Bay



The Contextualized Rise of Spotify



To make your own comparision graphs visit Google Trends.

I'm sure someone much techier than me can come up with some even better graphs and would be grateful if you could pop them below as a comment if you do find anything more revealing.

Crowd sauce? Would this be a crazy idea for funding DiS?

By crazy, I mean less bonkers than doing a deal with a non-music-minded or Murdoch-like media corp again. Or as in, less crazy than turning the whole thing back into an amateur project, with an hour or so of several peoples time spent on it a week... which, quite likely, would mean DiS going the way of Stylus (RIP) - although things are stable at the moment, so that isn't something people need to worry about.

Basically, in the current climate, we have ever-increasing reliance on annoying and irrelevant advertising (although praise be for the folks at Beggars Group who you may have noticed taking out a lot of ads as of this week to reach our 300k+ users). Worryingly, the value of advertising (especially Google ads) is falling and there have times recently when advertising has ground to a halt and I think there must be another way.... especially as DiS the brand has value, it just needs to speculate a little more than we can afford right now, to accumulate.

Anyway, I just saw http://www.waywesee.com/nl/info/about- basically its a crowd-funded, shares-like business model (a bit like Sellaband, Bandstocks) but for film-makers.

What I'm thinking, in a very wafty half-awake kinda way from germs of ideas I've had over the years, is something that either:

1) Takes the possibilities of what a DiS community could look like 3years from now and you all help fund the features you'd like be it an iPhone app that finds you nearby music fans looking for people to have a pint with or some follie, like a crazy mash-up of Last.fm and types of biscuits people who like a certain band like. And then, should this site make money, we all share in the profits, when things are ten times as big and every music fan in the world benefits from all the best ideas being prioritized... mostly because at the moment advertising isn't significantly funding things and we need more than one Tom (or at least one and half, part-time), as well as some editorial staff. Although, maybe you'd all fund DiS and decide we don't need to focus on editorial... This is what Twitter should do.

2) Writers suggest features or jobs they'd like to do and people pay for the ones they want to read. Like, I dunno, Kev Kharas to come back as news editor for an hour-a-day a week is £70 a week, and then when enough money is raised for a few weeks in-a-row, he starts doing it. Or Mike Diver says he wants to write 1000 words on 20 bands Mastodon/Deftones fans should check out - a bit like a personal shopper or in response to popular "where to start with threads?" - and users pay him to write the piece, rather than other pieces and share in the ad revenue from the article. Or the people who pay for articles can pay more to advertise beside them (so, I dunno, Dananana... take out a £100 album ad to pay Diver to do a feature about bands inspired by comedians - this is sort of how Japanese style/music mags work, as, from what I could gather, the advertisers pick the articles they'd like to sponsor/fund, although I'm sure there are or would be clear guidelines which we could come up with for avoiding nepotism).

Obviously, the downside might be that some of the bigger shareholders would most likely be labels and musicians with agendas beyond philanthropy (there's obviously practical ways we could avoid this being an issue), or even business-minded hedgefunds, but am sure there are ways of addressing that. I guess I just get a sense that people would really need to have a hope of getting something back or something more or they wouldn't cough any money up (or view it as some cynical pyramid scheme). And perhaps we could offer some shares, like travel miles/indie-points, for users who do helpful things, like posting links on Wikipedia, adding listings, (this is a half-idea I've had in the back of my mind for ages, probably since the first time I played with Wikipedia, that I think a certain type of person will do more grafting if they feel some sense of reward, even if it's just enough 'points' to get into some gigs for free or get access to certain music early or something - although I did suggest this idea http://www.orangerockcorps.co.uk/ for Live8 and think it'd maybe it's a better and more positive use of the idea).

3) It'd potentially be a sensible way for DiS to re-open (well, we still have Martha Wainwright signed, so technically we're on hiatus until her next album) its label... I'm just not sure there is enough potential revenue tho for many people to be able to get their money back. And, for instance, if it was say Youthmovies next album, it'd need a minimum of £10k to make it (let alone fund any specialist people to work on it) and am not sure there are enough fans (although maybe a 1000 people paying a tenner isn't too unreasonable, as I hear Patrick Wolf has raised a fair but but obviously has the benefit of major label exposure and a hardcore fanbase) with enough money to fund them making a record and tour and everything else. And I'm pretty sure, going by sellaband, etc the types of acts people end up with the funding are either ones with existing fanbases, rich relatives or that make palatable crap that was relevant 10years ago.

But perhaps this model make more sense for a way of funding some tracks or package tours (a bit like owngig.com) to help start some careers? And perhaps the idea needs to be a combination of ideas like milliondollarhomepage.com and creating some sort of fund for exceptional music. I know a friend of mine who was trying ot find 50 people to put in £50 each for a 7" singles club which was kinda a nice idea but not sure he found 50 willing people.

4) DiS could avoid these kinds of revenue-share ideas or traditional ideas and 'Do a Radiohead', allowing users to pay/donate what they want? Maybe a daily request to do so for an ad-free or premium selection of content? Although, the flaw I think is that I'd rather people paid because they liked something (rather than a pushy donation request, with the desperate air that without your money will we fail to exist), so it'd be clearly more like a tip or a thank you for a great review or reliable selection of suggestions of music to check out - and this could perhaps also apply to messageboarders who consistently give great and useful advice (sort of like 118 118 for music with any knowledgeable user making some beer money for their advice?)?

Thoughts?

Oh twit, twoo! Don't be such a twit. OR My top 10 twitterers

Today, my twitter went a little bit crazy, or at least my inbox alerts about new followers did. It felt a smidgeon like an invasion to my little niche clique, where, like when I was originally on the internet (er, 14 years ago - which is totally, like, seeing the Rolling Stones play a mediocre show to 10 people), I swapped links and blabbered whatever, whenever, knowing only a thimble-full of like-minded peoplez were reading. Twitter - like Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal and many more before and in-between - is a little like geeks anonymous, only you don't need to hide anything, you can be fully 'out' of the laboratory, wearing your scruffy anorak and sipping a slim soya cappuccino with a sprinkle of nutmeg and only brown sugar, plz.

The great thing about being an early'ish adopter on social networking sites is that you get to 'hang' with other early adopters, who are not only are first on that 'platform' but they're the pioneers of technologies, the first to try out new restaurants, the people who know where the best coffee shops are. These are the people who can already tell you what band will matter to you next year. They know what Google and Obama are upto before newspaper editors do. These are the kids growing up trying to find the next 'hit', in both senses of the word. I know this because I'm one of them.

Now, as the web grows and things shift so quick, I still fear - despite the fact I'm using stuff most people (i.e. the mass, the hive, whatever...) might use five years from now, or more likely never - that I'm no longer hip, no longer a trailblazer running around like a loon in freshly cut grass, leaving nothing but footprints. That was the joy of Napster before it was outed as being evil and then, er, a decade later the industry held up its grubby hands having hung its salvation. Those rushes of exploring things which didn't quite work yet and the fuzz of sharing in something which only a few people are/were using but something which in years from now might be the new phonograph, gramophone or BBC, was special. Just thinking about it makes me gooey and strangely nostalgic for a not-too-distant past. I can't wait to discover what might be over the next hump, and I have a few inklings but R2D2 style phone projectors and the music industry ripping itself up and starting again, still seems some way off.

Thankfully it doesn't seem like my mum will be joining Twitter to poke me like she does, and school 'friends' that I hoped never to speak to again do, on Facebook. No, no, Twitter will remain a mini-blog clique and link-sharing, viral snowball fight of the proudly geeky for quite some time. I feel a little safer knowing the reason for the flurry of new followers was this post about the top 10 music industry types to follow .

So seeing as it seems to be all the rage to blog your top 10 (ten) people to follow on Twitter, here're my suggestions, in no particular order...

The Blog Queen: Ultragrrrl
I've known Sarah since running my first email blog a decade ago. She's since become a renown blogger, dj, label boss and now tv host. She 'tweets' alsorts of stuff about songs, bands, boys and Starbucks coupons.

The King of MP3 Blogs: Fascinated
Anthony is the man, mind and frustrated-but-liberated music fan behind the Hype Machine, which has revolutionized the way people consume and understand music blogs. He's often travelling to conferences and sharing insights from the tech, music and general tourist world.

The Legend: StephenFry
If you're on Twitter you're bound to be following his constantly entertaining adventures across the world and his journeys through technology and tidbits about anything. Last week I learnt that he's a fan of Explosions in the Sky, am not sure whether my surprise says more about my lack of expectations for older people to know about good modern music or whether it says more about his constant striving to find greatness in all fields.

The News: BBCbreaking
Is great for delivering just the big headlines, most of which I miss or don't realise are bigger than everything else in the unmanageable muddle of RSS feeds that is my Google Reader.

Music News: theDailySwarm
Their site is great for filtering out the best news stories and like DrownedinSound's twitter they have a feed set-up of their news headlines. DiS uses twitterfeed to do this for our site, which was really simple to do.

The Upstart: CatherineAD
Life-affirming new musician documenting her rise, rants, listening addictions and various news.

Food Guide: FoodbyMark
By day he's booking agent for the likes of Panic at the Disco and Falloutboy but my night (and lunch and breakfast) he's a roaming food critic, exploring and devouring his way from meeting to meeting to pre-gig, all around the globe (but mostly London).

Indie Label Legend: SlimMoon
He started Kill Rock Stars and has been involved in assorted moments of amazing music.

Useful to know: FakeSensations
Last.fm employee, musician and reformed music journalist, who's often posting links to interesting music, tech and comedy stuff, as well as projects he's working on.

The Start-Up / Keynote: IanCR
He's the man behind TopSpin who're the people behind various pioneering album release methods, like the Dandy Warhols club and David Byrne and Brian Eno giveaways. Often posts useful links.

That's 10. Who / what do you suggest I should be following? Do you find Twitter creepy? Should I have moved over to Tumblr already or is there something even better out there?