Tim Booth

‘And don’t believe me if I claim to be your friend.’ – Jarvis Cocker (Jarvis Cocker, ‘I Will Kill Again’ from the album The Jarvis Cocker Record, RoughTrade, 2006)

My personal experience using social networking sites from a musician’s perspective, as I did for the DIGC101 web project, has led me to believe that there is an enormous potential for completely unknown artists to promote music to a worldwide audience through the use of these sites. Currently it is web 2.0 site MySpace that provides the most user-friendly and effective method of doing this, which has been proven by artists such as Lily Allen (Durman 2006), and which will also be the focus of this essay. But my commitment to promoting music on social networking sites was only experimental and short-term, and therefore in this essay I will discuss how serious musicians use these sites to achieve success and promote themselves. I am also interested in what effect social networking has had on the music industry in general and what the future holds for these sites. Thus, through this essay I hope to be able to reflect on how I could have achieved greater success or what I could have done differently with my brief attempt at promoting myself as an artist on social networking sites.

Durman (2006) noted that MySpace had become ‘de rigueur for any up-and-coming artist’ at that time. This was the beginning of musicians using social networking sites to promote themselves and achieving success, a notion backed up by Lily Allen, whose song “Smile” became the highest charting single in Britain thanks to the promotional efforts of her MySpace page. MySpace had enabled the music industry to become ‘democratized’ meaning, as Beer (2008, p223) points out, that ‘anyone talented enough can chart. Perhaps then my lack of success in promoting my music on MySpace was a matter of talent.

If an already well-established artists MySpace page is studied, such as Alice Cooper’s for example, it can be seen that this platform is used as a way of communicating to fans, posting information about upcoming shows, releasing new music and videos as well as making older media available, and selling merchandise. The site is also highly customised with Cooper’s personal artwork. As of 3 November 2009 it can also be seen that this particular MySpace profile has been viewed over five million times and that the select few songs that have been made available have been played over six million times. To contrast this, a more current artist like Muse has received has received over sixty-five million plays, while my unknown band ‘Southern Cross Tattoo’ has received just over three hundred plays in the short time that it has been active.

Perhaps the important aspect of being a musician on MySpace though, is ‘friends’. Beer (2008) conducted a study on the MySpace profile of former Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker, and concluded that when someone befriends one of their favourite artists on MySpace, it cultivates their ‘perception of proximity’ or makes an ordinary person feel like they are ‘hanging with the stars’. Beer (2008, p233) notes that that MySpace makes this kind of friendship possible because of the ‘security of distance’ that social networking provides, as opposed to when he walked past Cocker at Glastonbury and ‘would not have risked opening a conversation, never mind asking him directly if we could be friends’. He then explains how social networking sites are now breaching the ‘enigmatic distance’ between us and ‘rock gods’ and that they are becoming ‘ordinary members’ of the network.

Musicians are also aided on social networking sites through the concept of ‘flickering friendships’, that is people who are friends or fans of the same artist yet have not physically met each other and are only connected through the artists profile page (Beer 2008, p231). This unlocks the possibility of a kind of “online word of mouth” in which discussions about other artists are provoked.

MySpace is not the only social networking sites available for musicians to reach their fans though; there are many other services such as Imeem and Twitter. Having become the most recent social networking site to explode into the public consciousness, Twitter is now being embraced by hundreds of famous musicians such as Slash and Liam Gallagher. Twitter also provides a number of music applications such as Twisten FM and Song.ly which offer various services such as creating music related links that direct users to GrooveShark playlists or retailers (Forde 2009).

Most social networking sites provide streaming music content to users for free; sometimes even full albums are made available depending on the artist. So, since their inception, these sites must have had some kind of effect on the music industry as a whole, particularly record companies and retailers; those trying to make the most money out of artists. However, on the subject of MySpace again and its September 2008 launch of MySpace Music, the effect is not nearly as negative as you would think. In fact, MySpace Music may actually be, as Klaassen (2008) points out, the saviour of the music industry.

The idea behind MySpace Music is that the company is attempting to create the largest online music catalogue in the world. Through luring fans to the site with the free streaming music, the company hopes that fans will ‘be enticed to buy additional products — eventually, band merchandise and concert tickets — or download songs’. In order to do this, the digital rights to the music are required and thus MySpace has made a deal with the four major record companies (Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, Universal Music and EMI) who are now equity partners in the site and receive shares in the company as well a an undisclosed cut of advertising revenue. This of course filters down to the musicians as well (Browne 2008).

Chris DeWolfe, co-founder of MySpace says ‘The idea is that people will use the playlists to personalize their MySpace page, which, in turn, boosts traffic. Think about why people go to a music service. They go to iTunes because they just want to get the songs and get out. MySpace is different. It’s like going to your friend’s house, and they have cool music playing in the background that makes the experience that much better’. Then, when a user finds a particular song they like, it can be bought via a download service created by Amazon and routed directly to iTunes or Windows Media Player (Leonard 2008).

MySpace have also introduced a way of profiting from pirated music videos uploaded to the site. The company has joined MTV and Auditude to ‘post video attribution ads when users upload content’ which give information about the video and its creator. Auditude has a ‘database of 250 million videos from 100 channels and the company can detect when the copyrighted, or “fingerprinted,” material appears on MySpace’. The three companies have agreed to split the revenue from the ads, which MySpace anticipates will be quite substantial, claiming to host over 80,000 videos with 75,000 people visiting the site each month (InformationWeek 2008).

All of these claims made by MySpace sound extremely promising, both for users and musicians, as well as for record labels to gain back revenue lost in CD sales over the past few years. But, as Starr (2008) asks, the big question really is can MySpace Music possibly succeed? DeWolfe is confident, saying that his companies 300 ad salespeople will have no problem selling ads and that, in relation to the fact that MySpace offers entire catalogues of free music streaming, ‘people will still need to buy tunes to play on their iPods’.

Leonard (2008) is not so quick to agree on the matter of advertising, pointing out that MySpace need to ‘charge $10 for every 1,000 ad impressions just to break even’. However, according to media buyers as the company has declined to comment itself, MySpace has only been able to charge $3 per 1,000 due to overwhelmingly large social networking ad inventory currently on the market. David Caldwell, CEO of Imeem, another ad-supported music social networking site, also thinks that MySpace are ‘setting the bar too high’ and ‘making a leap of faith by pushing free music’. He goes on to state how difficult it is going to be for anyone to replace lost CD sales. Andrew Dubber, a media strategist for New Music Strategies makes a final point about MySpace Music that ‘no matter how well it integrates purchasing, it doesn’t do what iTunes and Amazon are very good at, and that’s the activity of shopping’ (Starr 2008).

Starr (2008) also points out more flaws in the new MySpace Music platform. Firstly it has no recommendation system to encourage users to stay on and explore other artists. Most its competitors such as iLike, Pandora, last.fm and Imeem do use this one of these systems. On top of this, perhaps most significant of all, MySpace does not delete fake profiles. This opens up a whole world of spammers and hackers, which in 2007 took over Alicia Keys’ profile and gave fans a virus when trying to install a codec in order to view her latest video. Not conducting ‘ID checks’ also allows bands to artificially inflate their play counts and number of friends through the use of ‘bots’ and software such as ‘friendadder’.

So did I make the right choice in trying to achieve superstardom through MySpace? Obviously social networking sites are only one way that successful artists promote themselves, and only in very rare cases does an artist achieve celebrity status solely through the use of them. From both the primary and secondary research that I have conducted, it appears that the music industry is still as confusing and risky as it has ever been and that, to achieve success in the financial sense, immense talent and hard-work is still required as it always was. Neither of these qualities was really evident in my web project, and although social networking sites have provided artists with a tool of incredible potential in terms of connecting to people all over the world, they are not and never will be a get-rich-quick scheme for either artists or record labels. Starr (2008) sums it up best by stating ‘if you need to check out a few free songs from some random band you’ve never heard of, there’s still no substitute for visiting MySpace-and no way for Murdoch’s company to monetize its most valuable asset’.

References

Beer, D 2008, ‘Making Friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music Culture in the Context of Web’, Cultural Sociology, vol.2, pp223-241, accessed 3/11/2009, http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/2/222

Browne, D 2008, ‘MySpace Music Takes on iTunes’, Rolling Stone, accessed 3/11/2009, http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23356455/myspace_music_takes_on_itunes

Durman, P 2006, ‘Singer Lily Allen shot to stardom through MySpace’, Sunday Times, 9/7/2006, p.5, accessed 3/11/2009, http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/itx/infomark.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&docType=IAC&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=AONE&userGroupName=uow&version=1.0&searchType=BasicSearchForm&source=library&docId=CJ147978295&Z3950=1

Forde, E 2009, ‘Music embraces the Twitter revolution’, Music Week, 3/7/2009, accessed 3/11/2009, http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=39143656&site=ehost-live

InformationWeek, 2008, ‘MySpace, MTV Monetize Pirated Videos’, InformationWeek, 3/11/2008, accessed 3/11/2009, http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/itx/infomark.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&docType=IAC&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=AONE&userGroupName=uow&version=1.0&searchType=BasicSearchForm&source=library&docId=A188327719&Z3950=1

Klaassen, A 2008, ‘Can MySpace’s grand experiment help save the music industry?’, Advertising Age, vol.79, no.34, p80, accessed 3/11/2009, http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/itx/infomark.do?action=interpret&docType=IAC&contentSet=IAC-Documents&Z3950=1&searchType=BasicSearchForm&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=AONE&docId=A185305701&source=library&version=1.0&userGroupName=uow&finalAuth=true

Leonard, D 2008, ‘MySpace Sets Music Free’, Fortune, vol.158, no.6, pp31-33, accessed 3/11/2009, http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=34909126&site=ehost-live

Starr, K 2008, ‘Can MySpace Music Possibly Succeed?’, The Village Voice, vol.53, no.13, p.70, accessed 3/11/2009, http://proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/pqdlink?did=1573801091&Fmt=6&clientId=20901&RQT=309&VName=PQD

Have now created a torrent file for the bands 5 track release in a nod to the ‘Pirates of the Interwebs’ lecture a few weeks back.

Google site is more organized now with project info, links, progress blogs and reflection esssay.

Band members are forming their own identities through blogging on the artist MySpace page.

I think this project has been fairly successful in achieving a promotion/recognition goal for the band with over 700 views and 300 song plays on the main MySpace page. More probably could have been achieved by befriending more randoms and by creating the Facebook group and Twitter accounts earlier. Taking advantage of Delicious and folksonomy/tagging may have also been beneficial but this was not be as there never really seemed to be a practical way of incorporating this.

My virtual band ‘Southern Cross Tattoo’ now has its own Twitter account and Facebook group. The band members have also been blogging to fans on the MySpace page.

Still working on the Google site as a central hub containing all relevant links and progress blogs.

We will sell our music as virtual discs and mp3’s as well as selling virtual band merch such as t-shirts.

lewisisaacs:

Task Two: You are a virtual world entrepreneur, and you want to create a business in Second Life. What sort of service would you provide? What purpose would it serve? (Social service, building specific item.) Who is your demographic?

The business to start up in second life is a record lablel/music distribution company. The idea is that avatars could play artists music as well as direct second life users to other artists web pages.

The use of avatars would also allow for online concerts, even if it is not original.

In a sense this idea is to serve as a mediator between artists and the digital environment and allows this business to be the middleman and reap the benefits.

The label/distribution company will be called “B side, second life”. More to follow.

In your SL profile, you have 500 to describe yourself. Think about what you might write here. What kind of person will you be in SL? How is it different or similar to your RL self? How did you choose your avatar’s name? What, if anything, will you put in the “First Life” tab?

In creating my second life avatar I opted for the first name London, drawing inspiration from the lead singer of the shortlived side-project of Nikki Sixx, Brides of Destruction. The second name i chose was Xevion as it sounded the most badass off all the options provided.

Currently my avatar is fairly similar in appearance to myself and carries a guitar, one of my main hobbies. I have attempted more customisation but this has been hindered by the prehistoric ISP Everywhere Internet, the only option for using the net when living on-campus at UOW.

My ‘first life’ tab will probably only contain brief details such as ‘uni student’ and list some hobbies.

Everyone’s videos about academic integrity were all highly creative and contained great humour, however my vote also goes to the ‘Food for Thought’ video. It was a great spoof of silent films and made good use of stop-motion filming.

As my web project was comprised of a fictional band using MySpace to promote itself, I feel that my essay should focus on some aspect of social networking sites. Perhaps how they can be used as a positive tool for the music industry to promote music in the new media age or something of the like.

In my essay I may be able to talk about the potential for musicians to achieve success through the use of social networking sites and what I could have done in hindsight (or in the future) to have achieved a greater level of success.

Another point I could make may be about how SNS can be a good tool for the music industry to compete against file sharing.

Anyhow these are all just rough ideas but I think this is the direction i want to head in.

These are the questions we have proposed to ask of an administrator of Wookieepedia:

- What lead you to design Wookiepedia?
- Is there much conflict surronding articles?
- Is there much conflict surronding authors/submitters/moderators?
- Are you targeted by hackers/trolls? Are these attacks related to the fact that the site is a StarWars wiki?
- What are your roles as an administrator of a Star Wars wiki?
- How is conflict regarding accuracy of information resolved?
- How does Wookiepedia differ from other Star Wars fan sites?
- Is there an established hierachy amongst the contributers and administrators?
- How are the featured articles chosen?
- Can we suggest to you that you call trolls ‘Phantom Menaces’?

In order to undertake some online conversational analysis, Travis, Lewis and I decided that a good source would be Wookiepedia. Wookiepedia is an online, user knowledge contributed Star Wars encyclopedia that uses the wiki format. Containing a whopping 70,907 articles as of 25/9/2009, we knew there was bound to be a lot of controversy surrounding the accuracy of some of the available Star Wars facts.

One article that demonstrates this is the Tusken Raider article which, at the top of the main page contains the phrase ‘Help me, . You’re my only hope!’, a line from A New Hope demonstrating to fans that this article requires the Wikipedia equivalent of cleaning up. On the discussion page of this article, which where most of the action takes place, there appears to be a conflict between fans as to whether this article should be merged with Sand People. The fans then proceed, in a fairly civil manner it must said, to present evidence for this from the many mediums of the Star Wars universe such as the books and video games. Also taken into consideration are ‘outsiders’, what would appear to be casual Star Wars fans who seem to also have an impact on the way the articles are written.

Final decisions and rule enforcement appears to be the responsibility of administrators such as Silly Dan. These admins are long-time, constructive users of the site.

How are independent video game developers and the video game industry in general affected by major publishers who own developers and therefore have creative control?

“Believe it or not, independent game developers are still toiling away without multimillion-dollar budgets. While not always the most technologically advanced, their products are just as entertaining as and often more original than games that cost two to three times as much” (Brown 2003).

In its basic form the video game industry is made up of developers, who are the talent that create games from the ground up, and publishers, who are responsible for the financing, manufacturing, marketing and distribution of the games. Major publishers, such as Electronic Arts, have their own development teams or give financial support to other developers. Developers who do not receive this financial support are known as independent developers (Wikipedia 2009).

According to the corporate section of its website, Electronic Arts is a public company that employs around 9000 staff worldwide. EA describes itself as ‘a leading global interactive entertainment software company’ that ‘develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, wireless devices and the Internet’. Sales wise, EA claims that it had 31 titles that sold over 1 million copies in fiscal 2009 and 3 that sold over 5 million copies (Electronic Arts, 2009).

It could be validly hypothesized then that ‘indie’ developers would struggle to compete with the major games corporations. However this is not always true as certain case studies can show. With a desire for innovation rather than following trends and with cost efficiency provided by new media technology such as digital distribution, many independent developers have flourished in recent years.   

One of the best examples of independent developer success is the story of Activision, who was the first ever independent video game development company, and is now the second biggest publisher in the industry (Fleming 2007). Activision took in $2.9 billion in 2008 thanks to the likes of the Guitar Hero, Call of Duty and Tony Hawk series of games (Activision 2008). A lot of Activison’s success was due in large part to the risk taking that the company has undertaken over the years. For example, Activision was the first ever third party developer of video game cartridges for console games, a move that required fighting lawsuits and developing expensive new technologies (Fleming 2007). 

New media technologies have now made it much easier for independent developers to participate in the once difficult-to-crack and expensive console market.  The ‘Live Arcade’ channel provided by Microsoft on its Xbox Live service for the Xbox 360 has been the main driver of this. According to Torres (2008) the Xbox 360 Live Arcade is fuelled creatively by 25 independent developers. This can be seen as a big step forward in ‘democratizing’ game development and is allowing indie developers to have a level playing field with the major publishers, which in turn is allowing for more creativity and innovation (Irwin 2008). Several games have already had immense success with this new digital distribution system such as the game ‘Braid’, a “meaning-of-life kind of game”. Braid was downloaded over 50,000 times in its first week of release and has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by game critics (Chaplin 2008).

Before the affordances provided by current digital distribution technology and broadband speeds it was much more difficult for independent developers to achieve major success, this being due to exposure difficulty and distribution costs. One of the few studios to do so was Bohemia Interactive with the Operation Flashpoint series of games which, after being picked up by Codemasters, went on to become a best selling game in multiple countries as well as winning Bohemia Interactive several prestigious awards (Wikipedia 2009).

Web 2.0 technologies have also aided independent developers in advertising and distributing their games in a much more cost-effective manner. Blogs such as IndieGames.com have allowed independent games to reach a much larger audience than previous methods such as the use of freeware and shareware. 

It can be said then that independent developers who consciously choose to not pursue financial support from major publishers can have a highly positive impact on the gaming industry. As Bill Roper of Flagship Studios puts it, independent developers “are dedicated to making products that set new standards in gaming through the fostering of a focused development group” (IGN 2004). With new media technology it would appear then that independent developers that are innovative are not affected that significantly by the major publishers. This is also very positive for the diversity of the gaming industry in general.


References

Activision Annual Report 2008, accessed 18/9/2009, http://investor.activision.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=309134

Brown, R 2003, ‘Indie Games’, PC Magazine, vol.22, no.12, p162, accessed 18/9/2009, http://proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/pqdlink?did=350009851&Fmt=7&clientId=20901&RQT=309&VName=PQD

Chaplin, H 2008, ‘Xbox’s ‘Braid’ A Surprise Hit, For Surprising Reasons’, NPR, accessed 18/9/2009,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94025221

Electronic Arts 2009, About Us, accessed 21/9/2009, http://aboutus.ea.com/home.action

Fleming, J 2007, ‘The History of Activision’, Gamasutra, accessed 18/9/2009, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1537/the_history_of_activision.php

IGN 2004, ‘Independent Developers Article at GameSpot’, RPG Vault, accessed 18/9/2009, http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/492/492519p1.html

Irwin, M 2008, ‘Indie Game Developers Rise Up’, Forbes.com, accessed 18/9/2009, http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/20/games-indie-developers-tech-ebiz-cx_mji_1120indiegames.html

Torres, N 2008, ‘Get in the Game’, Entrepreneur, vol.36, no.7, pp80-82, accessed 18/9/2009, http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=32788629&site=ehost-live

Wikipedia 2009, ‘Bohemia Interactive Studios’, accessed 18/9/2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemia_Interactive_Studio

Wikipedia 2009, ‘Video Game Industry’, accessed 18/9/2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry