I recently did an interview with Dave Cool for Bandzoogle’s blog.
We covered topics like how social media have affected online fandom, benefits and challenges of social media, whether bands need to use social media and/or have their own website, whether they can keep mystique, whether they ought to be trying to be friends with fans, and even a bit on how I mix personal and professional in my online identity and why.
Last weekend I gave a talk at the International Communication Association about the increasingly interpersonal nature of the relationships between musicians and friends. In it, I draw on the interviews I’ve done with musicians to identify some of the positive new rewards they get when they can interact directly with their fans, cover many of the tricky interpersonal issues they face in trying to negotiate how much those relationships can be like friendship, and briefly summarize the main strategies they use to manage boundaries in ways with which they are comfortable.
Here it is in PDF form for download:
Any and all feedback (especially the constructive kind) is welcomed!
This week MySpace announced it is laying off half of its workforce. This follows an attempt at rebranding itself as a “social entertainment hub,” a new and widely-ridiculed logo, and a warning from its parent corporation to shape up or get sold.
MySpace grew up around the LA music scene and built itself on music from the beginning. As I’ve been interviewing musicians for the last several months, they’ve told a consistent story about what MySpace offered, what it didn’t, and the extent of its decline. But they’ve also spoken to practical needs that MySpace still meets, and have some words of warning.
In this post, I’ll summarize what emerges from about a dozen of the interviews I’ve done. I identify people with their permission, and don’t identify them at their request.
MySpace reinvented the Musician-Audience Connection
When MySpace started it changed everything for bands, and though some were wary, many leapt in with enthusiasm. It offered fans a direct line to musicians that neither had experienced before. Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai explained that:
when MySpace became popular and people could write straight to a band, I think that was a point I think a lot of people had never considered that you could just email a band. So I think – definitely- when that first started we got a lot a lot of correspondence through MySpace from people I don’t think would maybe have considered sending us an email.
One artist told me that “during a time where I think MySpace was the main mode of communication between fans and musicians I got Myspace things like “oh my god I didn’t know you were a lesbian that’s awesome!” Odd though some of these exchanges may have been, and much as they might have echoed what showed up in fan mail sent through the post, the sheer quantity of people who got in touch was transformative.
MySpace transformed audience measurement
MySpace also upended the structure of the conventional music industry by providing a new kind of metric – the friend count – that has come to carry its own influence that rivals SoundScan, the industry’s flawed yet taken-for-granted standard. “These social networks come along,” described Erin McKeown:
and all of the sudden here’s this new number that can be used. So for a while it was like Myspace views or number of friends on Myspace, and then it turned into Facebook fans and Twitter followers. I have heard in the music industry ‘this is someone good to tour with because they have x number of followers’ or ‘we’re interested in signing you because you’ve got x number of Facebook fans’ and in some ways it’s replaced SoundScan.
For a while that was exciting
As Big Dipper’s Gary Waleik, a social media skeptic, described it, the friend who insisted he joined
likened it to crack, you know? He says “Watch out with this Myspace thing.” You know? “It’s like smoking crack.” Not that I would know and not that he would know probably, but you know he was talking about the addictiveness of it.
“When MySpace came along,” said Steve Lawson:
I did the same thing everyone else did when MySpace came along and searched for artists that I liked and spammed everyone that also liked them with friend requests. And for a while it generated an enormous amount of play– of listenership. I was getting thousands of listens a day on MySpace.”
Greta Salpeter, of The Hush Sound and Gold Motel, came up just as MySpace did:
When the Hush Sound was signed, MySpace was huge. We went from having like 5,000 fans to having 30,000 fans overnight when we got signed just because that was the social media outlet of the time, and when we got signed it was like 2005, 2006.”
But That Was Then
Musicians do still use and appreciate MySpace, for reasons I’ll cover below, but as an interactive medium to which they pay attention, they’re done with it. One tells me she prefers Twitter, and so just ports that into Facebook and MySpace:
I read everything that ends up on my Facebook and my Twitter, and I used to read all my MySpace. Now I don’t even check it. But I used to.
Another, whose band has not recorded in several years, says:
We still have a page but I think no one uses it. We don’t get many requests for friends anymore. … The thing about the MySpace page is I put it up there and hardly ever touch it, hardly ever deal with it. But hardly anyone looks at it.
“I got over that hype pretty quickly,” Waleik told me, “and I after that I didn’t have much of a need to be on there. I hardly ever go on there anymore.” “I think now MySpace is much less important,” said Salpeter.
What’s Killing MySpace?
The obvious answer may be “Facebook,” but that doesn’t really tell us that much. Musicians point to a variety of problems with MySpace, problems that its competitors have either solved or should be solving if hoping to stave off MySpace’s fate.
The interface: Cellist Zoë Keating, who has a past in information technology, told me:
I remember the end of 2004 I signed up for MySpace and I couldn’t quite figure out whether it was cheesy or not but I signed up. And I found– as a former kind of information architect I found the interface of MySpace really annoying from the beginning.
“MySpace is hard to use,” said Salpeiter, “it’s kind of annoying, whereas like Facebook, you know, it’s so easy for us to create invites.” Jon Ginoli of Pansy Division echoed their sentiment:
MySpace is annoying in so many ways. One is you cannot send a group email out to very many people and if you have 5,000 fans, which we did at one point, you cannot search them. Once you hit 5,000 it’s not searchable anymore which is so counterintuitive and so stupid. And you also cannot group MySpace people by area. Because I was trying to go onto MySpace and find all the people who lived in Colorado or Texas and you can’t do that. MySpace has sown their own seeds of destruction by being so user unfriendly even though it was a good idea, it’s just rampantly stupid. I mean it’s unbelievable how hard it is to use once you have more than a handful of friends.
Spam: Like email, MySpace has also been seriously undermined by spam. “MySpace has been spammed,” said Salpeter, “you see all these crazy advertisements all the time.” Said Braithwaite, “19 out of 20 comments are ads or people trying to promote their band. It’s too easy to exploit.” As he suggests, musicians themselves are often the spammers. Steve Lawson described:
I had over 10,000 MySpace friends and deleted 8.5 thousand of them, because it was such a mess, I had no idea who was interested in what I was doing and who wasn’t, I couldn’t work out who had spammed me, who I’d spammed.
Disconnection: Despite its use as a metric, musicians describe MySpace as disconnected from what happens outside its own social world. “We use MySpace,” Braithwaite told me, “we get thousands of plays a day but there’s no interaction.” Lawson found that his thousands of plays wasn’t “turning into anything of any value”:
MySpace had its own internal currency which was friending, but no one would sit in front of their computer on MySpace with a credit card in hand. And there didn’t seem to be mechanisms for turning that into anything meaningful.
MySpace friends may not spend when they’re out either. Gary Waleik told me about a friend of his who had a new CD:
They had this huge following on Myspace. I mean it was ridiculous. I think it was something like maybe this wasn’t so huge but I think it was like 10,000 people or something like that and it would drive them crazy because they did one CD together. And they had a record release party and people came out and they had CDs and they couldn’t give away the CDs. They thought they could sell some at the show. They didn’t sell a single one.
Stigma: Finally, as danah boyd has found in her ethnographic interviews with American teenagers, MySpace came to carry a class, race, and region based stigma as the seemingly “classier” and “more sophisticated” Facebook has gained audience. One musician requesting anonymity described it like this:
MySpace has a bad social connotation. I know like tons and tons of people still use it. I think mostly like in the Bible Belt and the South area, that kind of thing is where it’s still really, really popular. But it almost has this connotation of classless people. You know, there are always these jokes about the slutty girls on MySpace taking pictures of themselves and the kind of asshole-looking guys flirting with the girls and, you know, that it’s just a way to kind of like find sex and fuel vanity and that kind of thing.
MySpace Still Has A Niche
All this said, for those I’ve spoken with, MySpace is not dead. It’s still a fairly easy one-stop-spot to put your materials and have them be heard, a niche that no other site has been able to supplant. ”MySpace really seems to have just moved specifically into launching bands,” said Stephen Mason from Jars of Clay, “that seems to be where I see most of its use.” Another said he thinks MySpace “still is a big deal if you’re a band, that’s about all it’s good for these days is to find bands’ pages and hear their tracks.”
Salpeter’s perspective echoes theirs:
Mostly MySpace is used for people to hear our music, to see the photographs. You know, it’s like a basic template where the audience knows where to find everything, the photos, the music, the blogs, the whatever. So MySpace is a huge one for people to discover bands. MySpace is really just like the one-stop shop where anyone in the press, any potential listeners, any other bands to just be able to get one quick picture of the band, hear one song or 10 songs if they want, look at the photos, read the bio and look at the tour dates. It’s like everything in one place.
MySpace also offers bands the chance some find problematic in other platforms to just be musicians. Said Jonathan Segel of Camper Van Beethoven and solo work:
The whole effort is just to try to speak from that platform about music, but that’s difficult to maintain. Or speak from that platform about shows or CDs or something like that. That was easier when people were using MySpace I am really only the musician from my page on MySpace, I’m not like a personal human being.
Said McKeown, somewhat ruefully, “MySpace was less about status updates and more about just making music available in your player and collecting friends. But then Twitter and Facebook’s microblogging aspect kind of demanded fresh personal content.”
Be Warned
Just three years ago it was almost impossible to imagine Facebook as a more important site for music than MySpace, and it still has a long way to go if it is going to fill that space (as do Spotify and other possible contenders). But today’s top sites are just as likely to fade just as precipitously in years to come. As Waleik put it:
One of my misgivings about this whole thing, this whole phenomenon is that people go gaga over one medium and they say “Okay, this is how you do it.” And people try it for a very short period of time and the new better medium comes along and everyone just goes wholeheartedly into that, and then you know, you could see the progress from Myspace to Facebook to Twitter, everyone just loses their minds at the latest thing, and says “No, this is how you do it.”
What does this mean for musicians and others who rely on social media sites? Perhaps more than anything, it reiterates the importance of keeping control. It’s essential to maintain a presence in some social media, but you also need to have your own mailing list, your own website, your own URL. Support what fans do elsewhere, and meet them where they are but remember to build an online identity and relationships on your own grounds as well. Zoë Keating has fooled around with Google Analytics, and is fairly certain that the people she reaches through MySpace are different from those she reaches through other sites. She warns:
everybody’s been complaining about how awful MySpace is and we’ve been waiting for it to die. But meanwhile you better try to get people off of that — if they actually exist — to your mailing list because when it goes away you have no way to reach them.
As my Facebook friends and Twitter followers know, like many others I’m angry at Facebook. I haven’t written a blog post about it because so many others have been making most of my points so eloquently (forgive me for not linking to them). But I relent, and here it is anyway, in the form of responses to the criticisms of criticism that I keep hearing:
(1) Twitter’s public, where’s the rage against Twitter?
Here’s the difference, and it’s a big one: When I signed up for Twitter, like everyone else who signed up for a public Twitter account, I knew it was public. There was an easy box to click: private or public? It said right there that if I chose private my tweets wouldn’t appear in the public timeline. Now there may be some users who didn’t infer that if they picked public, their tweets would appear in that timeline, but Twitter was always above board from the start that a public twitter account meant decontextualized public display and searchability of your tweets. That has never changed. Some whom I really respect are upset with the Library of Congress archiving tweets, but I view the Library of Congress as a very different entity from the unknown agencies to whom Facebook sells our data and don’t think a tit-for-tat comparison makes sense.
When I signed up for Facebook in early 2006, it boasted of its strong privacy, of my ability to control who saw what. I used it as a place to share things I didn’t want publicly searchable. Now I’ve been teaching about the internet long enough to know not to post things anywhere that I don’t want in the newspaper, but it nonetheless felt like a safe place to target messages toward a known audience rather than the hundreds of strangers who follow me on Twitter.
And then they changed the rules. Regularly. Repeatedly. And every time they did it required more research to understand what they’d done and more unclicking to preserve the premises they’d offered when I signed up. I was President of The Association of Internet Researchers, I read articles about Facebook every day, I check my settings regularly, and I still can’t keep up and I still get confused.
Facebook has engaged in a bait and switch. They promised privacy, they encouraged us to invest our data in it and build connections on that premise, and then, when we had built networks that really mattered to us, they changed the rules. Which brings me to…
(2) If you think it’s so evil, just leave.
Don’t think I don’t think about it. Every day. I look with admiration and envy on my friends who have left. I’ve also watched sadly as several have returned. And I note above all that very few of my friends, who by nature of our professional connections are probably more attuned to these issues than most, have left. I don’t like supporting Facebook at all. But I do.
And here is why: they provide a platform through which I gain real value. I actually like the people I went to school with. I know that even if I write down all their email addresses, we are not going to stay in touch and recapture the recreated community we’ve built on Facebook. I like my colleagues who work elsewhere, and I know that we have mailing lists and Twitter, but I also know that without Facebook I won’t be in touch with their daily lives as I’ve been these last few years. I like the people I’ve met briefly or hope I’ll meet soon, and I know that Facebook remains our best way to keep in touch without the effort we would probably not take of engaging in sustained one-to-one communication.
I know that I don’t NEED these little interactions but I also know that I like them very much and that my daily life would be less fun without them. The rewards of Facebook are concrete and immediate. The costs are abstract and ideological. When I try to balance the two, the rewards win, but that is because of my friends and despite Facebook. It is not evidence that Facebook is acting appropriately. Telling people with complaints to leave ignores the very real value of the networks they have built and what should be their right to continue those networks on the grounds on which they were built.
(3) Facebook needs to make money.
I agree. Facebook should make money. But I have yet to hear a convincing case that their strategy of itemizing every bit of data we give them, repackaging it into groups of people into that thing or into profiles they can sell for advertising purposes is the best way to do this. I haven’t heard compelling arguments that it is the only way to do this. What I hear is “Facebook needs to make money. Facebook thinks they can make money this way. Ergo, this is the way Facebook can make money.” You know, I’d gladly pay a subscriber fee to opt out of being data mined, though I wouldn’t propose it as a sole solution since it would mean privacy is only for people who can afford it. It is sad that such creative minds can only think of one business model. Where’s the innovation?
(4) If you don’t want it shared, don’t share it.
Setting aside the assumptions of privilege that this claim entails (like the legitimate safety of marginalized and oppressed people who should have a right to affiliate though social networking sites without fear of being identified as dissidents, GLBT, etc), ‘if you don’t want to share it, don’t post it’ completely misses the point. The willingness to disclose all our data to marketers should not be required to socialize. Imagine if AT&T said “we’re going to track all your calls and all your networks and we’re going to store keywords you mention and personal connections in your profile we’ll sell to others so we can insert ads before and after your phone calls. And if your friend calls from another carrier, we’ll share that data with their carrier too.” People would be mortified, legislators would snap to attention, and most users would probably switch carriers. But there is no other Facebook. We can’t switch carriers. We can only give up what we have now and go back to what we had before. You might say, “but you pay for AT&T” which brings me back to #3: Paying for Facebook with money is not an option.
So for now I’ve decided I am better off fighting the system from within. I AdBlock the ads, I have removed almost all my connections. My info is nearly empty. My settings are as locked down as I can figure out how to make them. Like many of my friends, my contributions to the site are increasingly pithy. Most of my posts these days serve to inform my friends who are not obsessed with the ethics of Facebook about what bad behaviors they’re up to this week. Using Facebook with the rules I signed on for makes me a subversive user. That’s wrong.
What I want is a Facebook that is premised on a belief that first and foremost human relationships are valuable and sacred, not the ground on which money trees grow, but that if the value of relationships is genuinely nurtured, there will be ways to earn money.
I want a Facebook that really believes that people have a right to select how their information will be shared, instead of a belief that they’re too dumb to figure it out if the settings are too confusing so it’s okay to dupe them.
I want a Facebook that can find creative ways to make a profit using the rules they originally set for their own game.
I want an ethical Facebook.
That shouldn’t be too much to ask.
Update: You can hear me discuss this more on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. There’s a stream, an mp3, a discussion, and more.
Note: This is closed for comments and trackbacks on account of spam deluges. If you want to post a real comment, please email it to me.
I’ve been continuing to analyze the data I collected about friendships on Last.fm. Last week I presented a paper at Internet Research 10.0 in Milwaukee co-authored with Kiley Larson, Andrew Ledbetter, Michelle McCudden and Ryan Milner in which we combined quantitative analysis of motivations people had for friending with qualitative answers to questions about what they get out of friending. We then did a cluster analysis which led us to identify 6 types of friendships on the site. Axel Bruns did a wonderful job of live blogging the presentation and I hope he won’t mind my just quoting from his summary:
Nancy suggests that there are six types of friends: people who met on last.fm, divided into linkers, music explorers, and last.fm socialisers; people who met online, but not on last.fm (online socialisers); and local socialisers and local music socialisers.
Linkers have a static connection, very little communication, feel that it would have been rude not to friend, have the most recent friendships, and a low relational development; music explorers connect only because of the music, and have moderate last.fm and little off-site communication, they share musical tastes and histories, as well as other similarities, have the oldest friendship partners and low relational development; last.fm socialisers enjoy the site as a social space, do the most communication through it, met somewhere on the site, are interested but may not share one another’s musical taste, talk about music as well as other things, appreciate their differences, tend to be international and same-sex; online socialisers already knew one another from somewhere else online, and may also have met face-to-face, communicate a lot online but not through the site; local socialisers with high levels of face-to-face, phone, and online communication, but not through the site, observing one another’s listening and appreciate the sense of connection but don’t talk much about music, they have a moderately high relational development; and local music socialisers, who have the highest relational development, with high communication through all media,even moderately through the site, with music as a motivation for friending and an observation of each other’s listening patterns.
You can download my PowerPoints from the talk here.
I’ll also add that Axel blogged many other talks given at the conference, and point you to his complete event liveblog.