Waning and Waxing
As I heard Lady GaGa’s far inferior work “Alejandro” in the cafe this morning, I realized that my folk revival is now basically depending on the next sub-generation to produce.
Given they grew into adolescence thinking Green Day’s first album was American Idiot, my hopes aren’t particularly high.
Of course, our sub-generation converted the tiring but still hopeful alternative movement to emo and cry-rock like Staind. So, we weren’t exactly carrying the banner of righteousness ourselves.
As the record industry grapples with becoming an organizer of production rather than an integrated creative, manufacturing, and retail pan-oligopoly, I suppose the idea of a flag-carrying demographic will fade over time.
Everybody seems to think that we will get all our cues from social networking in the near future.
Never really thought about it before, but Google’s name “Buzz” encapsulates this better than any other. MySpace was a holdover from the Geocities concept: any idiot can create a website. Facebook was the networking concept, which classed it up quite a bit until they sold out for some remote hope of profitability and sustainability via FarmVille.
Is Evony available on Facebook, m’lord?
While I love my low-hundreds of Facebook friends individually and dearly, I really couldn’t care less about more than maybe thirty people’s tastes and interests on a regular basis. And those are the people with whom I, surprise, generally have more communication than snooping on a wall post.
This may make me a minority in the social networking world, but I doubt I’m alone. Definitely a minority if I magically found myself within the junior high demographic. But as we get older, hew our own logs, and thatch our own roofs, I think the independent spirit that grows in us pushes this away.
I’ve found a lot of my dark horse music by chance, and with conversation. This passive communication idea, in my view, is just lazy marketers trying to find the next way to “crowd source” the hard work.
My marketing professor pointed out that people hate advertisements until they’re in the market for what is being sold. For example, aside from enjoying hearing Frasier trying to sell me a car, Hyundai ads barely ever caught my attention in the past. But if I saw one now I would check it out, because I’m looking for reassurance that it would be a decent car to potentially replace the often whale-like Honda iterations. And shave some money off the price despite the superior warranty.
So, given this, the odds are that if I check in on a friend using Facebook, I’m not in a music-buying mood. I am in a music buying mood when I’m shopping for music, which means a well-placed, context-sensitive Amazon or iTunes embedded ad would be far more effective than encouraging me to parse through a friend’s music list in search of peer pressure. And last.fm, while frustrating in many ways, is a great and subtle way to tie music shopping to music listening. With a touch of crowd-sourced social networking effect, I might add.
So, maybe it’s “context-specific” that is the key concept here.
Which means we may be tracking back to a device-per-context philosophy. During the emergence of mature smart phones, backwards cranks like me were critical of the “one device with a small screen to do everything” philosophy. What we as a group didn’t see was that phones were not destined to do everything, but they were going to take over quite a few extra jobs.
The iPad and the ensuing duplication panic demonstrate that people are ready to run a phone OS on a larger device to compensate for the bounded nature of phone capabilities.
So Facebook will probably have to discover its bounds, as well. Facebook can easily run on phones and replace Twitter with a richer experience. It can transmit LOLs at light speed, deliver FarmVille, and keep people connected, but it may just not be a music marketing tool.
Which is tough toenails for them, because it’s a lot easier to extract commercial value from these focused activities than it is to insert themselves commercially between one friend and another.