Ard at work: Ard Boer (left), New Music Labs, Groningen
Last week, I spoke here about attempts towards a formula for measuring social media engagement about a music artist on Twitter. That was one of the conversations I had with New Music Labs founder Ard Boer, whose Tribemonitor service tracks social media and online metrics for artists and labels.
I’ve been working on a small, IDEA-funded Knowledge Transfer project with New Music Labs to help think through new ideas and approaches for Tribemonitor.
Ard and I spoke at length about the idea of innovative strategies for independent artists in the social media space. At present, a default approach appears to be to do whatever it takes to get followed and increase your audience size.
Artists will encourage their fans to ‘Add me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, Sign up to my email list, Friend me on MySpace, Subscribe to my RSS feed, Go to my blog…’ and so on. The idea behind this strategy is that the artist can then continue to develop their fanbase as a discrete number of people, and communicate with them (broadcast to them) on a regular basis.
However, a reflective discussion with Ard about the realities and psychology at work within the social media space suggest that an alternative strategy can be identified. It’s one that has a potential to use the medium more effectively, and around which an innovative business development can be formed.
I’ve just been in Groningen in the Netherlands to brainstorm and research Tribemonitor – an online information service to artists and record labels, created by New Music Labs.
The purpose of Tribemonitor is to measure the popularity of music artists based on social media buzz across a range of platforms, rather than on sales or radio airplay.
Measuring online buzz is not a simple thing to do, however. There are some scrapable and publicly accessible pieces of information such as Last.FM plays or numbers of MySpace friends that are obvious and countable. These simple statistical measures that make a good starting point that can act as a basis for artist consultancy (or reassurance): number of MySpace plays, number of artist followers on Twitter, number of YouTube views, etc.
But these metrics only measure what could be described as fan activity, rather than a useful and measurable social score, which would have more to do with the extent to which that artist is being discussed outside of their own sphere of influence. And this is the reason for this intervention.
The recent conference at the Open University, The Future of Cultural Work inspired much debate and discussion amongst delegates and touched on many pertinent issues for my PhD research into cultural entrepreneurship and education policy. With many strands including capitalism and work, precarious labour, working in television and inclusion & exclusion, it offered a variety of perspectives and provocations in relation to cultural work and cultural labour. Not only were the themes appropriate to my research, but many key academics on the subject presented and attended the conference – I must admit to being a little start-struck! Read the rest of this entry »
Members of the Interactive Cultures team presented three papers at a conference called Sights and Sounds – Interrogating the Music Documentary, 3rd-4th June 2010 at Adelphi Research Institute for Creative Arts and Sciences, University of Salford.
We will be uploading videos of all three presentations to this blog in the next few days.
In this post is Matt Grimes’ paper: Punk’s Underbelly: De-Canonizing Histories of Punk which he has written about and posted in full on his own blog.
June 8th, 2010 |
by Rob Horrocks Published in
General
The Interactive Cultures research team are very pleased to welcome Nacho Gallego Pérez as a visiting researcher. Nacho obtained a PhD from Universidad Complutense, Madrid where his research concerned the impact of podcasting on Spanish radio broadcasting. He is now teaching at the Departamento de Periodismo y Comunicación Audiovisual, in the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
Nacho joins us until the middle of July and will be returning to Birmingham in August.
On his arrival Nacho commented: “There aren’t many research centres in Europe where the relationships between music, technology and culture are being researched in the way that the Birmingham centre is doing. I want to develop my postdoctoral research round these relationships.”
We look forward to working with Nacho during his time in Birmingham.
The question isn’t “what is this picture about?” or even “what does it mean to you?” – but “given this picture, what shall we talk about?”
I’ve been working recently with Punch Records in Birmingham in a Knowledge Transfer capacity, to explore some theories about online and social media, and apply them to their music and arts activities.
I’m interested in the ways in which people use media online as “social objects” – that is, to take those objects and use them as the occasion for online conversation. And in doing so, people seem to make sense of those objects (whether they’re images, video or music) and recontextualise them in the service of whatever stories or conversations they’re trying to communicate.
One of the interesting things that Punch has been focused on recently, and launched last night at the Custard Factory here in BIrmingham, is an exhibition called Fight The Power, which presents images and posters of protest and propaganda. And one of the interesting things about the exhibition is that it’s designed to be experiential, rather than simply a display that you can quietly and passively consume.
A new one hour film about Birmingham’s music heritage called Made In Birmingham: Reggae, Punk, Bhangra received a private invitation only premiere recently.
In the video above, Jez Collins of interactive cultures explains the purpose and the genesis of the film, and how it connects with the Birmingham Music Archive.
As part of its Wednesday research afternoons, the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research recently hosted a talk from Katrina Sluis of London South Bank University.
Katrina Sluis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts, Media and English at London South Bank University where she leads the BA (Hons) Digital Media Arts. Her scholarly interests include critical theories of photography, digital memory and contemporary fine art practice. As a visual artist, she works with photography and digital media to explore materiality, archiving and transmission in relation to the digital image.
Her paper was entitled ‘Digital Material Archives: Web 2.0 and algorithmic memory’.
Tonight I delivered a brief talk at the Midland’s arts centre. Below is a transcript of my talk (minus my live rambles and tangents and including some typos – sorry). Also speaking were Jon Bounds & Pete Ashton.
Firstly an apology: as an academic I can’t take a title at face value. I find I need to hand wring and worry about the terms of a debate before I can do anything at all. And then once I have problematised the issue, I find that the title is wrong and I start using different words.
As a media and cultural studies academic who has been criticised by the Daily Mail for wasting tax payers money running courses on social media, this condition is particularly acute. I need to be seen to have thought too much about things to justify myself. So that being the case, I struggled to get into this topic and felt I had to change it. I hope you don’t all rush to get your money back, but stay with me for a moment. The new title is:
Interactive Cultures is the research centre of the Birmingham School of Media at Birmingham City University.
Tel: +44 (0) 121 331 7280 info@interactivecultures.org
