Outside The Box Office

In Defense of Disaggregated Discovery

I took a poll the other day: “Do you feel like you have a music discovery problem?” 1/3 of respondents said yes, the other 2/3 said no. Honestly, I was expecting a stronger skew towards no, but I suppose we’ve been trained to expect a constant stream of new excitement, regardless of the medium.

Today, though, I want to make the case that content discovery is not a problem with a single solution. No matter how good the algorithm, there’s no way that Rdio, Spotify, HypeMachine, exfm, or any blog could possibly single-handedly “solve” discovery. No matter how perfectly they can match content to my tastes, they are inherently devoid of the emotion that comes with disaggregated discovery.

After I graduated college, I spent a few weeks in Scandinavia. I was fascinated by the similarities and differences of cultures and countries, and as a music fan I was on the hunt for great artists and songs that hadn’t crossed the ocean. In a record store in Stockholm, I heard Oh Laura playing over the speakers. While not particularly awesome, and certainly not in line with most of what I listen to, I became obsessed for the next few months (I had to hunt like crazy to get the MP3s in the US). It was real-life context and happenstance that caused me to like the music.

A few days ago, I opened the daily email from The Listserve. A guy I don’t know from Brooklyn who apparently likes baseball and Game Of Thrones recommended everyone check out Lorde, a 16 year old New Zealand female pop artist. On any other day, I would’ve passed over his recommendation (I don’t know him, why would I trust his taste?), but I was feeling adventurous. I checked it out, and after a couple days of listening, I shared it on Twitter.

Discovery comes from all over, and it should. When you’re surprised in a good way, you ascribe more value to the thing that did the surprising. Algorithms can be designed to make better choices for you than your brain is often capable of (“What should I listen to after this Foxygen record?”), but they’re rarely designed to surprise and delight; they’re designed to build trust, which means consistency. We take more risks with our choices than algorithms do, and with greater risk comes greater reward.

Does all this mean companies shouldn’t try to help you discover content? Absolutely not. It simply means those efforts should be designed a bit differently than we see today. Ideally a system would include:

• - A variety of choice, with some close to the user’s comfort zone and some towards the various edges; some suggestions from social data, and some from “likeness” algorithmic data.
• - Additional context to power further discovery. This could be as simple as user-defined tags (Bandcamp does this well for music, Instagram does it well for photos, etc).
• - Easy ties to other points of discovery. Eg - if I discovery something elsewhere, I should easily be able to bring it into this system.

The final point is clearly the toughest. Content platforms want to believe that they are your only source for that type of content — if you have access to “every song in the world” through a streaming service, why would you ever go to blogs and SoundCloud (or even crazier yet, a live show)? But opening up to those inputs will add value to the platform’s ability to better understand your habits.

Discovery doesn’t happen in silos. It never will. It’s as capricious as we are, by design — we appreciate things more when they come from surprising places.

The Evolution of (Music) Blogging & Journalism

My friend David published an interesting piece today titled “How Online Advertising Is Killing Music Journalism.” It has moments of sheer brilliance, including the title itself, which, he admits, is “just a catchy headline that assured I’d get a pageview.” He argues that our lust for pageviews, fueled by the promise of ad revenue, has devalued music journalism to a point where it hardly exists.

I disagree. I don’t believe music journalism is in any worse shape than it’s ever been. In fact, it may be in better shape than ever before. But I think I know where David (and others engaged in the debate) got confused: blogs.

When blogs came about, every talked about them democratizing journalism. Everyone can have a voice. Everyone can write. Everyone can build a following. Those are all true statements, but just because you can doesn’t mean you will, or at least not sustainably (hence Medium and Quora’s attempts to get more people to write better blog posts less often).

People blog about the things they’re passionate about, so naturally music fans got on board quickly. Thousands of music fans suddenly had a way of showcasing their tastes to the world, not just to their best friends. But music blogging had a different purpose than mere democratic journalism — it also served as a distribution mechanism for MP3s, which were the gold of the time.

That’s the key right there. Bloggers were putting a lot of effort into writing great pieces, but (most) consumers only wanted those little golden (digital) nuggets. HypeMachine understood the consumer side and aggregated those nuggets, delighting journalists in the process, who saw a rise in their “audience” from folks discovering the music elsewhere and coming in to download it.

Several bloggers also discovered what consumers were really after. Stereogum, Pitchfork, IndieShuffle, and more began posting more and more music with less and less writing around it. They even studied their analytics to best time their posts to get maximum traffic from HypeMachine.

Those folks (the “content farms”) are in the music content business.

Journalists are in another business altogether.

Journalists aren’t just there to tell you something. They exist to tell you why something is important. They craft stories from research and experience. They have a choice of media through which to tell their stories — written, spoken, imagery, or video. (I’m particularly bullish on video, but that’s a story for another day)

Journalists will continue to exist and thrive because people like stories. The businesses built on top of it are all about quality — the winners are those who can convince people they have something truly valuable. They keep their audiences coming back by engaging with them deeply and for prolonged periods of time.

Content, however, is commoditized by technology. Anyone can create it. Anyone can distribute it. The businesses built on top of it are all about scale — the winners are those who can amass the largest audiences by having the most content. They keep their audiences coming back by always having something fresh and interesting.

Many early music bloggers were, unfortunately, caught unknowingly in the middle of these two disparate business models.

The good news for everyone is that there’s room for both models to exist, and at times even reinforce one another. Hell, that’s how the magazine business has worked for years — you stuff the front of the magazine with a ton of small snippets of content to lure in a whole lot of people, then you add some long articles to engage with the folks who want journalistic stories, then you add some more snippets towards the back for the real nerds on whatever the magazine’s content is. Only a few online publications have adopted this model so far, but I would imagine we’ll see it more and more.

At the end of the day, most people go to any sort of publication, be it traditional or web-based, for small, digestible nuggets of content. They’re attracted to headlines that quickly convince them that content is worth their time. However, fans of the topic will yearn for more depth, and will identify with brands who consistently offer them that depth. Sites like Buzzfeed will always favor the former, but brands like Pitchfork and VICE will need a little of both sides to continue to grow beyond the walls of pageviews.

Never fear, David — there will always be a place and an audience for your wonderful words about music :)

The “Death” of the MP3 Music Blog

I stole this title from a story I saw tweeted several weeks ago. I don’t recall where. I apologize, and will attribute it properly if someone can point me in the right direction.

I’ve seen some alarmist posts lately, suggesting that music blogs as we know them may be in their waning years. It’s a fair question to bring up: in a world where music is streamed, rented, borrowed, but rarely owned, what role do music bloggers play? 

If we step back a bit, we see that music regularly falls at the forefront of the disruption spectrum. The content, relative to movies, books, apps, and other media, is relatively easily to produce and distribute. It comes in small, easily digestible chunks, regardless of the packaging.

Bloggers, then, fall into the spectrum as tastemakers. They are de facto replacements for the magazine and newspaper journalists of yore.

Or are they?

At one level, yes. They do the dirty work of sifting through heaps of bad music to find gems to share. They provide context for the music, and some go so far as to give insight into the lives and creative processes of the artists.

However, the context in which the bloggers themselves exist is significantly different.

Journalists worked for very straightforward businesses, generally driven towards mass appeal. Few bloggers aim at mass appeal — that business is ever more in the hands of the major players (radio drives the pop audience, Pitchfork drives the indie audience, and frankly I need to do more research to understand what drives the massive and ever-growing EDM audience — I suspect a mass of simplistic Tumblr blogs). A few accidentally stumble into it, by being one of the many sites that roll up into aggregators like The Hype Machine, We Are Hunted, Exfm, and Shuffler.fm. 

Most bloggers are not Pitchfork. Most bloggers have a niche audience that has spread largely organically. They shared music with their friends, who shared it with their friends, and so forth. Many blogs promote concerts as a way to both make (a very small amount of) money and build brand recognition. Some bloggers occasionally get DJ gigs.

So what happens to music bloggers when the MP3 is virtually dead and there’s little incentive to download when the rest of your music library is in a streaming service like Rdio or Spotify?

Very little.

Sure, their platforms might change. They might start sharing Rdio links instead of MP3s. They may become an app on Spotify. The best ones will change formats entirely, to focus on video or mobile apps to tell their story. But their fundamental purpose does not change.

Pandora has found their business in customizing and replacing radio, not as a music discovery site. They are not a threat to bloggers. Spotify and Rdio replace iTunes and Best Buy, not music bloggers.

Aggregators could not exist without music bloggers, and they’ve proven their ability to follow the bloggers regardless of format — The Hype Machine has progressed from pure MP3 aggregation to support Tumblr, SoundCloud, and a plethora of others (which make up an ever increasing proportion of their content). They’ve even brought their aggregation to Spotify, making it clear that they will exist wherever there is music.

Bloggers, or whatever they may be called in their next iteration, will continue to exist, too. There will probably be more of them than ever before. Or at least we should hope there will be — consumer interest in the stories surrounding music sits largely on their evangelical shoulders.

Apps: The New Billboards

There’s a long-standing mantra in advertising that you need to have people see or hear your brand in some capacity several times a day in order to achieve brand recognition. It’s the reason why billboards exist, and why you see Coke and Pepsi signs on restaurants and on high school scoreboards. 

But momentum has shifted away from traditional advertising, as the return on those investments cannot be as easily targeted or measured as online advertising. It still works for the biggest of the big, but anyone past the top ten or twenty brands is looking elsewhere for customer engagement.

Naturally, recent smartphone growth has become mightily attractive to these brands (as it is to thousands of entrepreneurs).

The approaches to mobile engagement varies widely. While brands like Dole and Heinze rush to stick QR codes on everything, which take you to horribly lame mobile games and trivia, retailers like Target (and most others) try to make it as easy as possible for you to buy more from them through native apps. Perhaps the most successful app building brand is Nike, which has a suite of apps (I count fourteen) to get you more active, and hopefully using more of their products (like the FuelBand).

One approach, however, is particularly interesting. Japanese clothing brand UNIQLO has built four different iOS apps. Only one of them has anything to do with clothing.

One app is an alarm clock that changes its tone depending on the weather. One app is a “fun clock” that tells time with singing and dancing. Their most popular app is a calendar app, which showcases beautiful video images of Japanese seasons and music from Japanese musicians, alongside date, time, weather, and your personal calendar.

Their least popular app? A social app geared at sharing the way you (and others) wear UNIQLO clothes.

How could this be true? Well, it turns out people are looking for value when they download apps. And they don’t particularly care what brand is attached, as long as it adds value to their life.

UNIQLO recognized this, targeted the most common utilities used by their broad audience, and added their own brand flavor to them. As a result, they have brand engagement on a minimum once per day basis (alarm functionality) from everyone who has downloaded the apps. And, perhaps most importantly, their cost of development for all the apps was probably less than a single billboard for a month.

If you have an offline brand, apps are an efficient marketing tool for extending your brand relationship, when done right. In the music world, Bjork’s Biophilia apps allowed fans to explore themes from the album more deeply, when most other musician apps are merely condensed lists of tour dates and YouTube videos. Nike’s most downloaded and top rated app is Training Club, which offers anyone personalized exercise routines without the need for a gym or trainer. It vastly outperforms their apps that tie directly to Nike+ and FuelBand products, but is just as free.

While they often require more thought, well done apps may just be the new billboards. Your attention used to be a plentiful commodity, which could be exploited easily by brands with big budgets. Now they need to find ways to catch your attention on the regular, and the best place to do that is the phone. The key is adding enough value to make it worth your download.

Experimentation In Higher Education

I went to my five year college reunion, and all I got was this stupid blog post.

College is an important time in an ever-growing number of young peoples’ lives. It’s often the first time you move away from home. Sometimes it’s the first time you pay rent. More often than not, it’s the first time you take on debt. And almost always, it’s a huge growth period for social connection and human engagement.

And yet none of those things are college’s purported purpose: higher education, and a gateway to the working world of adulthood.

This fact is troubling to me, particularly as tuition costs skyrocket and the bar to a college degree is constantly lowered. I don’t mean to suggest that broadening access to higher education is inherently bad, but it detracts from the value that those increased tuition costs are intended to justify, creating an imbalance.

You can see this imbalance play itself out through the frustrations of recent college grads. Their expectations going into college were to get a degree in order to be more employable, yet most are discovering that isn’t necessarily the case. Many hide in graduate programs, adding to their debt and hopes that they will become employable, but many find themselves only slightly better off employment-wise, and rarely much happier. Others find themselves taking jobs that really don’t require a college degree, just to pay their bills and avoid moving back in with their parents.

Why is this happening? What’s happened to our beloved college system that, just as its become a more universally attainable right of passage, its value in pointing the way to a fulfilling life post-passage has diminished?

I believe that the learning part of the institution has simply not yet evolved as the admissions and operational parts have.

The key factor that hasn’t sunk in is that the fundamental product offered, knowledge, has been commoditized. Everyone has access to several orders of magnitude more knowledge instantly, at their fingertips, for free than any university and its libraries could offer.

But that doesn’t mean college is inherently irrelevant, for many of the reasons I listed earlier. It can still be an incredibly powerful transition to independent living, it just needs to rethink what it offers.

What I find fascinating is that the elements for this restructure are already on campus, and have been for nearly as long as college has been around. Ask people across generations what college is all about, and the two most common words you’ll hear are “learning” and “experimentation.” Yet somehow college administrators believe that learning should happen in the classroom, whereas experimentation should happen outside.

False.

The two are, and should be, more tightly coupled than any college administrator cares to recognize. The best way to learn is by experimenting. The best teachers are not those who impart the most knowledge, but those who help shape paths to productive experimentation.

Sadly, on most college campuses, experimentation is a word that’s relegated to the science wing. And even then, most “experiments” are routines that hundreds of students have performed before, all yielding the same result if “done right.” Those aren’t experiments, they’re demonstrations.

Experiments are empowering. They are designed to teach that failure is inevitable, and more revealing and exciting than success. They keep you coming back to try again. Imagine a world where college students are as excited to go to class as they are to get drunker than they have before and try new ways of getting other people to share their beds.

It’s not impossible. And I don’t mean to replace the parties and idiotic-in-retrospect choices we all make in college — those failed experiments are just as important to learning.

The issue is not that kids aren’t experimenting in college, it’s simply that they aren’t being taught that experimentation is a great thing. It doesn’t just result in hangovers and STDs. It results in greater, more rewarding successes than college kids are even allowed to dream of today. It results in the ability to change the world and control your own destiny. It results in innovation and discovery.

Aren’t those the results we always wanted from our college experience?