27
Jan 12

Social Commerce: Selling Movies in Social Network Markets

[DRAFT]

Audiovisual content industries (ACI from here forward) are made up of a range of economic actors that produce a variety of media products for a number of markets. These actors, from individuals to companies to large clusters of companies working together, create content with target audiences in as diverse socioeconomic situations as the unprivileged single mothers watching TV in urban neighborhoods – to wealthy businessmen in first class intercontinental flights consuming movies on iTunes on the newest iPads; in geographies as disperse as China, Brazil and Estonia; in formats intended to be seen in one sitting or in a series of viewings throughout 20 years in soap operas that cross generational chasms; with variation in length from a few seconds to multiple hours; with revenue steams as different as Google Adwords, streaming licenses and downloads; with budgets from as low as €0 for a webcam-shot YouTube series on how to apply makeup to €500M in James Cameron’s transmedia IP Avatar that creates a fictional universe. My point is, the ACI are diverse in every sense of the word and their ability to make use of social network markets (SNM from here on) is – and will be – proportionately diverse.

Large portions of content is now – for free or for money – available online. Whether legally or illegally, content has found new markets in social networks that have previously remained inaccessible or have not been though of as markets at all. In the case of piracy, these are markets where there’s a buyer but no one is selling; and this will be a crucial point that emerges from my argument – the seller needs to be present where the consumer is to engage the buyer in a transaction; while this may seem obvious, in the current online landscape this is often not the case. As Lessig puts it  “YouTube is a picture of unmet demand” (Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, 2009). In the following I will look at the opportunities of SNMs concentrating on Content Discovery by audiences and Collaboration between producers to capture a new markets; I will also look at the Challenges of SNMs, focusing on Decision-Fatigue.

Opportunities

Entrepreneurs have built online platforms that connect people together as if they were living in the same tiny village: online hubs where people see and interact with each other every day – and throughout the day. In the largest network of such, close to 900M people can reach each other through multimedia messages (text, video, photos) both in real time and with delayed messages. A person can communicate with 1/7 of the world population (privacy settings permitting) in a network that is growing rapidly by the week. From the point of view of ACIs, such previously unprecedented access creates opportunities to disintermediate parts of the content production and distribution value chain that have been previously deemed crucial for a successful product.

Hartley compares SNMs to airport book markets – places where mere expertise in written form is not enough to sell the book to a business traveler. Grabbing his or her attention in the first place – through publicity and fame – is crucial to making the sale; and thus to the dispersion of the valuable knowledge contained in the book. With a focus on educating the public, Hartley highlights the “importance of signaling in the propagation of public thought”. But the same idea applies to content that is frivolous or “mere” entertainment. “If you want to get an idea across, get attention” (Hartley, 2010).

For brevity, I will refer to selling movies (and any other type of media products) through SNMs as Social Commerce. This name has become popular with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley in the forefront of building these new social platforms and engineering ways to engage audiences. Social commerce has the promise to become at a buzzword – and perhaps a key trend – in 2012.

1 Collaboration

Pre-production fundraising ands soliciting investors.

Movies are more entertainment than public thought.

There is a key trend towards consumers creating more content. Consumers are more active to express their own unique perspective and there’s expectation to be able to interact with media. Interaction makes a product feel more tangible; and something that feels like you can to touch it feels trustworthy. Also creation adds meaning to one’s life. As Lessig shows with Japanese schoolgirls with day jobs have active amateur lives. “[They] see themselves as producers and participants in a culture and not just recipients of it.” (Lessig, 2009)

ch2 Content Discovery

For a content owner the geography of the consumer does not matter. Whether a customer is 10km or 10000km away. If there’s someone in Australia interested in seeing an Estonian show, how can content industries take their silos of content and connect people across the planet with content in a fashion that is relevant (individual and personalized) to such a degree that they would pay for it?

Social networks are building out interest graphs that One can target their message to groups of people based on shared tastes and interests. While the technologies for assessing a person’s taste are only in the beginning, they are improving with better understanding of human nature.

What’s the difference between a YouTube video and a Blockbuster movie? The Aesthetic of a Product.

Content business models rely on windowing that focus on a specific channel for a limited window of time; with each window accompanied by a marketing campaign (sometimes paid for by a 3rd party, such as the cinema chain where the theatrical release happens). The overall budget for marketing across windows may well be larger than the production budget of the media product itself. Windowing focuses marketing efforts on a single channel in succession, from the channel with the highest perceived value – the cinema release – to DVDs, pay TV, free TV, online streaming and downloads. Disney will even release an old movie across generational windows every 10-15 years to attract new young audiences (Anderson, 2004).

Curation is the act of selecting a number of products from a large product catalog and attaching the social proof of that value of the chooser – the tastemaker. If the tastemaker is influential, this can affect the choice of a consumer who identifies with the curator. The curator need not necessarily be a national or international celebrity but he is a celebrity – someone with an esteemed taste – for his community, his group of followers.

Because the market is global, in the long tail, marketers can “aggregate disperse audiences” (Anderson, 2004) that are similar in their movie-taste.

 

The question of

Curation. Finding content. Human-powered and algorithmic.

Marketing is used to create demand for product with mass-market appeal.

“By divorcing bookselling from geography, these networks create a liquid market at low volume” (Anderson, 2004).

“hits still matter in attracting the customers in the first place” (Anderson, 2004).

“businesses can then guide consumers further afield by following the contours of their likes and dislikes, easing their exploration of the unknown” (Anderson, 2004).

“Access is the mantra of the YouTube generation. Not necessarily free access. Access.” (Lessig, 2009).

“Free access is a means to gather extremely valuable data about the viewer. That data can translate into much more effective advertising techniques” (Lessig, 2009).

People make important decisions based on aesthetics. This looks like fun, this looks boring, this looks x. It is important to style content for the target audience.

Content producers can make use of a number of ways of signaling that are fundamental to human psychology. These signals include Artificial Scarcity (exclusivity in time, space, group), Social Proof (endorsement by a famous person, endorsement by a large number of people = movement). An example of time scarcity is Limited-time streaming. Prescreen is a Groupon for filmmakers, where a time limit is set for the purchase of a movie. It remains to be seen whether this model works, as the company has not released data.

How to stand out?

Psychology of the campfire. Meet people who like the same thing. While Lego is a physical product, a cultural good such as a movie can work the same way. Media become the campfire around which people gather to enjoy family, find friends. Sites like Letterboxd allow one to interact with others who like the same film.

And then of course there’s the infamous long-tail, with your product remaining on the digital shelf for all eternity as finding the infrequent buyer looking for content within that specific niche. Anderson brings the example of Into Thin Air supporting the sales of Touching the Void, because both have similar characteristic and appeal to the customers of the niche (Anderson, 2004). If the customer find one, he is likely to look at the other as well, as recommendation engines cluster similar product together. There more people buy both products, the stronger the indication to the automated algorithm, that this is a good match. Recommendations and people’s actions turned into a demand-creating feedback loop (Anderson, 2004).

Buzz. Referenences add up. If you’re indundated with mentions of the same film across channels, from friends, the new you read, etc, you finally give up.

Everybody buys the movie new. No market for old copies.

Filmmakers get a larger share.

 

Content discovery through virality.

The Audiences in the networks can be highly targeted.

We no longer need to find local audiences (Anderson, 2004).

“Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching” (Anderson, 2004).

Finding niche audiences. If you can target very specific people with content that is highly relevant for them, perhaps they pay for it? Niche audiences coupled with the long tail. Finding a niche audience for you content that is willing to pay.

Turning social networks contacts into buyers. Conversion funnels

Social commerce is global by default. Because of the ease or reproduction, a piece of content can find an audience that has no geographical connection but share something in ideas.

As filmmakers learn more about human psychology and strategy, concepts such as the Facebook Affinity score are helpful in targeting an audience.

Direct sales to the consumers.

Private sales that create a sense of exclusivity.

Recommendations

The value of a recommendation is based on its relevance to the person; it needs to correspond to the interests and tastes of the consumer; it needs to be backed up by social proof; it needs to come at the right time; and it needs to be at an attractive price. Getting all these details right is what makes a sale happen. From the point of view of the sellers, all these details need to be right for millions of people that each receive a personal experience; in other words, the system needs to scalable – meaning it needs to be built on machines and algorithms interpreting data from the social graph and figuring out a response to the customer. Direct to customer sales strategy.

Mobile phones.

 

Challenges

Disintermediation

Disintermediation enable content-producers sell directly to audience but then how do you get large marketing budgets? Opportunity to be a digital-only producer and distributor, cutting out the middlemen, and selling content directly to an audience. Schumpeter’s ideas of creative destruction in increased global competition.

Decision Fatigue

People like to make decisions but they like to be guided. Not unlike the famous x cartoon with the boss. While the global nature of social commerce is an opportunity for digital audiovisual goods that don’t need transportation, it is also a challenge. Finding a niche is time-consuming. The web is characterized by content overload.

X argues that social network markets are inherently global. Through licensing restrictions from one hand cut of markets. On the other hand, targeting markets with export content that are cut of is an opportunity. Estonian creating content for the Balcan countries. Could this work?

Knowledge Transfer

There’s a requirement to know it all. Startup filmmakers need to be well-versed in business models, digital distribution, marketing, psychology, and many other areas, which leaves less time to focus on the actual writing, shooting a audiovisual piece. As related to digital workers in the X, less business-savvy digital workers make trade-offs in the lifestyles, not affording a family, not having time. A lot of this information comes from websites and digital books, conversations with other filmmakers around the world, tweets, chats, and etcetera. University is not the center of knowledge but the facilitator and there’s no benefit to going to film school. Wikinomics and Prosumtion, user-innovation, and taking the best ideas from users, encourage and reward them to be more engaged with your product, create communities, and feel a part of something. Tribes.

Gill highlights there are concerns with people not having sufficient income to raise a family (Gill, 2007). Cultural Differences. Globalization standardizes culture through multinational corporations. At the same time empirical evidence shows cultural identities rise against and reinforcing their identity against the Hollywood movies, etc.

Copyright.

Lessig worries we are moving towards a feudal system of copyright. “

Conclusions

What are the opportunities and challenges in the networks for filmmakers? How can filmmakers monetize their work? There is a market for audiovisual content. There are people who are participatory but consumer innovation is endangered by decision fatigue from too many options. Zynga’s players play virtual goods that offer emotion value. A movie is not that different; it is an emotional, experiential good. Requirement to understand of human psychology to drive sales. As stated in the title, the social network markets are in evolution. As businesses themselves, these platforms are in the business of finding new ways to connect people between themselves and people with businesses. Changes and improvements (and occasional problems) are expected and made use of.

 

 

 

 

 

 

21
Jan 12

What is Media Economics?

In the following I will give a brief introduction to the field of media economics by

  1. defining media economics
  2. defining media management
  3. explaining the special characteristics of media products
  4. giving an overview of the areas of interest for key scholars in the field – Albarran, Doyle, Chan-Olmsted and Picard
  5. listing sources for information for further inquiry and study of the field

Moreover, in the final part of this paper, I will briefly discuss future issues of concern for the field in particular regard to crossmedia and multi-platform distribution that opens new creative avenues for transmedia storytelling but introduces new economic and managerial challenges.

Definitions

Doyle’s Understanding Media Economics (2002) lists the key definitions of the field of media economics used in academic literature; for instance Picard defines media economics as a field of study that is concerned with “how media operators meet the informational and entertainment wants and needs of audiences, advertisers and society with available resources” (Picard cited in Doyle 2002). Downing, McQuail, et al. define media economics as a field that applies “economic theories, concepts, and principles to study the macroeconomic and microeconomic aspects of mass media companies and industries” (2004). Furthermore, Albarran provides a rationale for the study of media economics, as the “context within which one can better understand the behavior of media firms, media markets, and consumers” (2002) when answering questions such as why did one company merge with another.

For the purposes of this paper media economics focuses on the wider ecosystem of markets and consumers around the companies. Media management on the other hand focuses on issues within the companies themselves.

Special Characteristics of Media Products

Media products are characterized by a high front-investment, with high risk of failure from lack of interest, as consumer traction is difficult to test for before the actual release, distribution and marketing of the product. Attention scarcity is a challenge for business in general but especially so for media businesses.

Mainstream media economics literature considers media products to have high fixed costs, however Bourreau, Gensollen and Perani argue media products costs to be variable, with a positive correlation between increased production cost and audience traction (2002), pointing to large-budget Hollywood productions. Movies in particular make use of what is known as windowing – each release with a certain timeframe set for each successive channel, accompanied with a marketing push for each window in order to hedge against failure in a high-risk environment, with multiple tries to sell the product becoming an insurance policy. Staggering of distribution is used to create exclusive windows where 3rd party actors (not necessarily the original content producer but license-buyers) act to market the content; the release of the same product in distinct distribution channels at different times aims to maximize profit from each channel and increase positive word of mouth with each release. Because word of mouth can also turn negative, an established film franchise with a new tentpole release is a safer investment than an entirely new movie. Cinemas, international cinemas, DVDs and Blu-ray, television, and online streaming and download platforms such as Amazon and YouTube, each have their own window of release. When the consumer misses the theatrical release, there’s still a chance to capture their attention in the following windows, with free television licensing fees and long-tail DVD sales as the final opportunity. Some argue though, that windowing is a thing of the past and movies should be released on the same day and date across channels to maximize profits (Wilson, 2012).

In order to navigate the changing media markets with confidence, media managers make use of a number of analytical tools to inform their strategic thinking and communicate in a systematic, clear and actionable manner that’s applicable in managerial decision-making and corporate processes of planning and assessment of the company’s competitive advantages in the marketplace. The most common of such tools is SWOT, an analysis of strengths and weaknesses, referring to the internal characteristics of the company; and opportunities and threats, referring to the phenomena outside of the company – the marketplace, the consumers, the other companies, the regulatory frameworks in the country – and increasingly outside of the home country as media products are subject to cultural preferences, which must be taken into account as understanding cultural biases towards a product may affect managerial decisions. While such strategic approaches are valuable in decision-making, Chan-Olmsted also argues that strategy should leave room for opportunism (2009) in cases where a higher degree of flexibility in management may be the more prudent approach.

A media business exists to make money for its owners in a private company or shareholders in a public company. Increased net profits come either from increased 1) license sales while costs remain steady, 2) increased efficiency within the company that decreases costs or 3) from increased market power through corporate expansion. Convergence of media companies into larger conglomerates is a global trend; media companies’ strategies for expansion include international, multinational, shared-language-based, and multilingual global expansion through vertical integration of service providers (downstream expansion), distributors (upstream expansion) or both (balanced expansion). Moreover, through a strategy of horizontal expansion by buyout of – or merger with –companies in the same market and with the same functionality; an example would be a children’s books publisher buying a competing children’s book publisher in order to grasp a larger product portfolio of books at lowered costs and possibilities for creative synergies between storyworlds. Furthermore, companies expand through a diagonal strategy that incorporates aspects of both vertical and horizontal expansion in a comprehensive approach. Finally, media companies  engage in talent acquisitions that involve buying out a company for their skilled workforce and discontinuing the company’s former functions. The key thinker in this area, Chan-Olmsted, focuses on competition between media firms and competitive strategies in a changing media environment (Competitive Strategy for Media Firms: Strategic and Brand Management in Changing Media Markets, 2009).

As business becomes larger, economies of scale are achieved when distributing the product to more markets with the average costs of distribution decreased and the average cost of production also decreased. In production an in-front investments into high quality camera equipment can be amortized over a number of years while it adds value in the production number of media products. In distribution an established brand name can reduce the cumulative marketing cost associated with each media product released by the company as the brand has earned a degree of consumer trust through previous products.

In the digital economy, the marginal cost of reproduction of a digital media is close to zero, which means copies are easily made and distributed. While copyright is protected, licenses for content provide theoretically an easy revenue stream. However, with markets saturated by media products where a substitute product is easily found, attention becomes the highest scarcity, as there is too much content for anyone to watch available. Moreover, because media companies have a double-sided revenue-model, with consumers and advertisers bringing in revenue, in businesses where the consumer pays for content, copyright and piracy become issues for lost revenue. However, in models where advertisers pay no such problems exist as increased viewership is to the benefit of the advertisers (and usually here the content is released for free).

Another aspect of large companies is the economies of scope. Economies of scope are achieved through the repackaging of content for new media products, achieved by companies large enough to have accumulated an archive of assets that can be incorporated into new products, thus saving costs. This applies also to repackaging content for a foreign market or repurposing content for a different use, such as a television show on traffic safety created for distribution on national free television but later repurposed as content for showing inside an educational game used in primary education. Another example is the practice or remaking old Hollywood movies with modern technology. With the studio already holding rights to the screenplay and an existing awareness of the story bringing a built-in audience, economies of scope can be achieved. By diversification into similar products, economies of scope save from the higher costs of original production.

Areas of Interest

As an academic field, media economics is new and growing. Downing, McQuail, et al., cite Miller and Gandy whose work identified “351 articles published between 1965 and 1988 in several key journals [...] that focused on “some economic aspect of communication” (2004). In latter years, because the media system has become global and interconnected, key scholars now have a large scope of analysis, taking a systematic and planet-wide view of the media economy. Because new areas of the world are becoming part of the media market, scholars increasingly focus on emergent media in the African, Asian, and Latin American markets. Albarran focuses on Spanish-language media in the US as a way to reach people in and of Latin American origin. This highlights a crucial point, as even in the age of global interconnectedness, language plays a role in identification, community, and in how, what types of, and whom messages reach. “Thus Hispanic/Latino-oriented media have received increased attention and advertising revenues for their ability to reach a sizeable portion of the electorate” (The Handbook of Spanish Language Media, 2009).

A further branch of interest in media economics is the consolidation of ownership. The trend of an increasingly small number of media increasingly large media conglomerates owning the media, also known as the concentration of media ownership, and the structure and reach of these companies merits its of branch of economic analysis. Doyle focuses on the horizontal, diagonal, and vertical expansion of European media companies, especially in the UK (2002). Downing, McQuail, et al argue that with “increasing consolidation and concentration across the media industries, media economics emerged as an important area of study for academics, policymakers, and industry analysts” (2004), highlighting how media economics can provide quantitative methods and statistical analysis for guidance in financial and policy-related decision-making.

Media economics has only recently started to move towards studying particular companies, and differences between them. As a formerly television-focused scholar, Picard has emerged from a political analysis of the role of media in democracy (1985) towards incorporating more economic study into his argument. Picard analyses companies in detail in Media Firms: Structures, Operations and Performance, showing how media companies that have traditionally worked with a single product (such as a newspaper, a magazine, a TV channel) now juggle a variety of products that may number in the hundreds and span mediums in highly complex portfolios of media products (2009).

Future studies of media economics will have to accommodate for and expand upon the emerging trends of 1) attention economy 2) crossmedia distribution and 3) artists taking a stronger role in their own economic well-being. Albarran and Arrese already focus on the role of time from a consumer, producer, and advertiser perspective (2009), however the latter areas remain relatively un-explored. While some artists are visibly successful at building attentive audiences and large follower-bases, the question remains whether and how these followers can produce enough economic value for the artist so the activity is sustainable. New forms of funding, such as crowdfunding and micropayments, while still minimal in total input of financing, are emerging trends and will have to be focused on more in future economic studies. Studies into artists like the Pixies who sell merchandise and tickets directly through fans, cutting out middlemen with Amazon and Apple Books becoming the entire distribution channel will have to be explored.

Further Sources for Information

Discussions on media economics takes place in academic literature, international panels and conferences, the halls of university buildings, and in the board-rooms of media companies themselves, where an understanding of media economics finds its practical use in steering a media companies in the turbulent waters and changing winds of the global media system. Public companies release annual reports, which list revenue sources, net income, cost structure, and other financial information. Journals provide academic discussion of media economics. The key journal of the field is the Journal of Media Economics, started by the preeminent researcher and founder of the media economics field, Robert G. Picard, and the International Journal on Media Management based in Switzerland provides another scholarly source of reference.

Conclusions and The Changing Landscape

Digitalization of content enables online distribution and changes the options for international media in a number of ways.

Firstly, the globalization of media with content accessible from new entrants like South Africa or Australia on the media market, increases competition between media producers in separate parts of the world, while also increasing global interdependency through increased cultural ties. Secondly, media corporations have more opportunity to open up and re-package content stored in siloes to international audiences through franchising licenses across the planet; for example a show that is popular in the US may create demand in Bulgaria without any targeted marketing as Bulgarians see clips of the series in YouTube; when a legal way to see the show is not provided increased piracy of the content is likely to occur. Thirdly, removal of the middlemen is a threat for distributors, as when there is no need for a traditional publisher and Amazon and Google Books with 1-click-publishers are the largest global platforms that act as a single marketplace where consumers 1) find movies, books, music, and other types of media in a single platform through advanced content discovery engines, 2) can pay with 1-click through an integrated payment processor and 3) have access to advanced delivery mechanics that make the content available independent of consumption device  (iPad, iPhone, iTV), there is little the distributor can offer as added value. The value chain is flattened, with media products created by a single person – a book, written, edited, and published and marketed through an online platform, without the help of a professional team, with lowered barriers of entry with insignificant initial capital costs, while time costs remain the same.

Finally, in a world with more content than time to consume it (the attention economy), the platforms for content aggregation, curation and repackaging, such as iTunes and Amazon but also crowd-powered platforms such as Pinterest, Quora, Facebook, Twitter and others become a crucial part of media economics and the convergence of traditional, single media companies from publishing, broadcasting, movie producing and other media backgrounds into transmedia companies that provide content trough different platforms and across media making use of transmedia storytelling to immerse the audience and gain attention will be an important focus of economic study in media.

 

 

16
Jan 12

Music 2014: Transmedia Storytelling in Experiential Product Design

I’m beginning to plan my MA thesis for 2014 and these are my first ideas about what I’m doing. As this feels a long time in the future, and doing this will take me a long time, I’m betting on some of the most visible macro trends to hold true for the next 2 years.

I am assuming that in the attention economy, a single type of media (just an album, just a video) is no longer sufficient to capture the full attention of a viewer for a prolonged time. A media product needs firstly to be present, but also high quality and attractive across channels, be it the music store, the app store, or the movie storie. A single brand, best memorable as a character, because people relate to people. Music as the tentpole, because music creates the deepest emotions of all media. I propose a transmedia album that spans the audio, the visual, and the textual, and the participatory, where viewers can play a thematic song themselves, complete with a social network, that facilitates fans to connect with each other.

The Product

Transmedia music:

  1. App. An App Album with character backstory.
  2. Video. A music video.
  3. Dance. Particular dance moves that fans can copy.
  4. Wristbands. Physical objects that communicate being part of the group and give superpowers.
  5. Live. A live event in a secret location.
  6. Game. A participatory alternate reality game?
  7. Network. A social network to connect fans together.
  8. Websites (Should these be seen as separate platforms?)
    • YouTube
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • SoundCloud

Character

Character is what people best recognized and remember, thus developing the central character is the starting point from which transmedia extensions originate from. IN PROCESS.

Aesthetics

The character extends into a storyworld with a recognizable and memorable set of aesthetics. Like in Star Wars, where the dusty and scratched metal of every set piece of the movie made the world look ancient and gave it a feel and scope, the transmedia musician needs an aesthetics that crosses platforms.

Storytelling

A number of MIT Media Labs theses touch of multi-platform storytelling, as do a number of transmedia blogs, most notably transchordian, however an encompassing academic analysis of transmedia music has not been undertaken. IN PROCESS.

Existing Transmedia Artists

An incomplete list of existing artists whose work is notably multiplatform, remediatory, or makes use of transmedia storytelling – with relevant analysis, description, or in one case a concert experience, where available.

This is something I will spend a lot of time thinking about in coming months and years, so I welcome any ideas, criticism, collaboration offers, contacts, etc. Send me an email (or tweet me for the quickest response). You can also reach me by phone: +372 53073123, although I might not always be available to talk; just call again.

15
Jan 12

This Week I Give Away Books

raamatud_jaanuar

Books on Monday

Raamatud Jaanuar 2012 - 2

Books left on Wednesday

I started giving away my books already last fall but this is the last of the bunch. Get in touch before january 22, 23.55. These are all in Estonian.

04
Jan 12

Developing a TV Format

These past weeks I’ve been playing around with developing a TV format. That’s curious because I don’t watch TV. Not because I have anything against TV but just because I’m used to the web and always have been. It’s a generational thing. I wrote the whole thing as a PDF but the web version has videos and is far more visual and you can read it here.

Here’s list of the things that gave me a headache:

Firstly, writing little enough, so as not to describe things that would make a format into a series.

Secondly, out of habit I chose a strong main character and got into writing episodes when I finally realized that every territory (should the format be sold, in theory), has its own protagonist. So how do I solve this? Can I write the protagonist for a format or not? If the protagonist is too recognizable, then does that get into the way of extending into other territories? Perhaps not, if you look at Tyra Banks in America’s Next Top Model and her format franchise around the world.

And thirdly, my format was global in its scope from day 1. Even though this seemed suitable for my theoretical multicultural target audience in Britain (Channel 4, Sundays 20:00), maybe this will be a nuisance extending into other territories? If the show is already global, how do you extend it into other territories around the planet?

So maybe the result of all my work is not a format after all, but something more similar to a BBC documentary series. I know I’ve seen many BBC documentaries and am influenced by them. And I’ve really only followed one format, the aforementioned * Next Top Model. In any case I would appreciate feedback, so if you have something to contribute, please tweet me at @krishaamer or shoot me an email.

31
Dec 11

What Do I Wish For 2012?

I wish that in 2012 may we skip over challenges like Samoa did yesterday (they changed their time zone to be better positioned for commerce). I wish Peace, Love and Prosperity firstly to Me (grin), secondly to You :-), and thirdly to Everybody out there!!

Happy New Year!

20
Dec 11

Transmedia Music

Producing and Consuming Transmedia Music: Perspectives on the Future of Electronic Music in the YouTube Economy

Abstract

While the details of exactly how are debatable, it is uncontroversial that mainstream adoption of web as the backbone of daily life and the digitalization of information goods such as books, movies, and in the context of this paper – specifically music – and the related economic issues are affecting the cultural consumption of both the Internet-using and non-Internet-using populations around the world. As of May 31, there are 2.1 billion people online out of Earth’s overall 7 billion habitants (Internet World Stats, 2011) and while precise statistics for actual usage patterns in terms of % of Internet population who are consumers of digital music don’t yet exist, the worth global worth of digital music markets are estimated at 4,6 billion US dollars (IFPI Digital Music Report 2011) without taking into account music that was not paid for. The following paper discusses how the web influences the production and consumption of digital music through increasing transmediation of music and the rise of the amateur music creator.

Transmedia: The Aesthetics of Immersion

Owning to the increasing convergence of art with technology, musical artists have a larger array of digital tools to express their ideas over a variety of media platforms. These ideas may belong to the same story universe and extend the aesthetic of the artist to new audiences in which case the artist is engaging in transmedia storytelling. Examples of musicians extending from only making music across other media abound and musicians of diverse style and content create content that goes beyond their traditional art.

In 2008 the Flaming Lips, an alternative rock band crossed media boundaries and released a full feature movie titled Christmas on Mars, funded by the band’s record producer Warner Brothers and directed by the bandleader Wayne Coyne (IMDB). While the movie was a commercial failure, fans appreciated it and this single act extended the band’s music into the annals of transmedia history, as directing a feature was something bands normally don’t do, save many a musician who starred in movie roles as an actor. A researcher of transmedia storytelling, Michael Monello finds their creativity incredibly inspiring, explaining in the Culture Hacks podcast how the band imagines everything they do “as part of the Flaming Lips world” (Monello, 2011).

In October 2010 another musician, the hip-hop megastar Kanye West released a half-an-hour short film that extended the concept of a music video in length (a common music video is 10 times shorter) and again extended the role of the musician, as West – in addition to singing – was also the director of the film.

One month later, the hip-hop heavy-weight Jay-Z created an alternative reality game for his autobiography Decoded, a book that allowed fans “literally decode the lyrics of 11 studio albums to unlock details about Jay-Z’s personal history and life” (Hartman) where each page of his book were spread over diverse locations in metro cities such as New York and London. The locations were creative, such as the bottom of a pool or the insides of Gucci jacket in a store window. Each location was inspired by the content of that particular page and people could go out and hunt for them in sequence based on clues released online, learning about Jay-Z’s connection to that location in the process. Fans could literally “walk through Jay-Z’s life where it happened” leading to millions of impressions of pop culture coverage (droga5, 2011).

Justin Bieber’s video Baby with 430 million views became the most watched music video in YouTube history early 2011 (IFPI Digital Music Report 2011). Only 3 months later, in May 2011, Lady GaGa whose character holds a gripping presence across both online and offline platforms “was the first artist to reach 1 billion views on YouTube” (Hernandez, 2011). Lady GaGa is the Star Wars of music in the sense of being among the first who’s aesthetic of a baroque character plus perceived authenticity is so unique that it travels across platforms. She is able to “construct an emphatic relation with her fans” (Vellar, 2010). Lady Gaga’s presence has risen to such levels that she dwarfs popular world leaders like the US president Barack Obama by follow count on social networks.

Audience numbers aside, artists create transmedia extensions that also add intrinsic value to their art. In October 2011 Björk released her album Biophilia – a work of concept art – which in addition to music inspires to learn about biology, physics, astronomy and science in general through a series of musical mobile applications for the iPad. Her tour incorporates “educational lectures and nature footage and a publicity campaign that included [...] National Geographic and the scientific journal Nature Medicine” (Mitchum, 2011). Another raising example is Nicki Minaj with her multiple characters however she’s very new so the question is staying power, without mentioning whether she is using multiple platforms for her story but the potential for her characters is there.

A contemporary band doesn’t necessarily have actual singing members; it can be a virtual band, such as Mistula in the Philippines, whose fictional characters write their own music and keep a blog (Sterritt, 2011). One doesn’t have to know how to play an instrument or how to sing but can be in the role of the world-creator and the character-designer. With the aid of the computer one can find a way be a rockstar and look great doing it.

One of the most successful bands to have emerged in the early stages of such development was Gorillaz; a band that didn’t have physical members shown to the audience at all but rather was a “four-piece animated band [that] was created by former Blur front man Damon Albarn and Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett […] They have sold tens of millions of albums, and currently hold the Guinness Record for Most Successful Virtual Band” (Sterritt, 2011).

When creativity is allowed additional freedoms traditional formats start to break down. The web is essentially form free; traditional forms such as a music television shows or a music videos do not necessarily apply. Experience is the design paradigm. An artist no longer creates a piece of music or expresses one emotion but rather creates an entire world. What matters is if the content produced by the artist is something that each member of the audience personally wants to see and whether it gets to a particular person through one of the channels they use throughout the day. What is exciting about the emergence of transmedia storyworlds in music for someone who is not an established international star but just starting out is how one can “just start creating things on a small scale and start building an audience for your world” (Monello, 2011).

Amateurism: The Rise of Everyone

It is not only established artists backed by media conglomerates and with transmedia budgets that are looking for ways to extend across media. Consumers want to learn to produce music too; and many are already doing it – the rise of the amateur culture in the literal sense of the word is a large, notable trend. Amateurs as people who do something for the love of it create music for their own enjoyment and share it online with an audience of friends and followers. While some these amateurs would like to be world famous, the economics of digital music mean that someone with a few thousand fans but no actual buyers or subscribers needs to have an alternative revenue source to survive – such as a paying day job.

Kusek and Gerd propose the “music like water” model, where content is paid for by a single monthly subscription and individual use of each media is without the friction of payment (Kusek & Leonhard, 2009). If music is going to be everywhere and all the time, then the process of paying for something as small as one song each time you want a new song is an enormous waste of time. More money will still be made in live events because it feels real and that authenticity is what people are willing to pay for. One does not pass by the nightclub bouncer with the same feeling on ease that one downloads a piece of music. There are far-reaching question of whether “access will replace ownership […] if you can hear whatever you like, whenever you want to hear it” (Kusek & Leonhard, 2009) and perhaps “[a]ccess is better than ownership” and this makes intellectual property obsolete. (Bertini, 2011) .

Online collaboration greatly facilitates producing music. Music files are relatively small and one project may be perhaps a few gigabytes including all source materials. This makes music easier to collaborate on than, for example, a movie project that consists of hundreds of hours of high-resolution footage weighing in terabytes in source data. Cloud-based filesharing such as Dropbox, Box.net, SugarSync, Amazon and many others allow for storage and synchronization of projects files and the changes each collaborator makes. Electronic music can be produced on an inexpensive laptop computer without expensive musical instruments. People with an entry level Internet connection can collaborate on making a project and share the task of specific part in the digital music, such as beat-making, vocalism or mastering.

The sum of human knowledge on the topic of making music is accessible on YouTube and other parts of the web. The work of the best musicians is free to watch and large numbers of potential collaborators are accessible for creating one’s own music through networks like SoundCloud. An aspiring digital music producer may learn by imitation from the YouTube channel of someone in Canada, Switzerland, the UK or Japan. As long as they share a common language, there’s a way to share experience.

Consumer content distribution happens on the same channels as content distribution by established producers. There’s no difference on the platform: both commercial and non-commercial content are available on YouTube and on SoundCloud. The crucial factor is the quality and personality of one’s work. One needs to be better and different than the millions of others trying to be a musician on the same networks. A German digital musician who went back to producing a cassette, when everything is digital and put together a collaboration with a string quartet of classical musicians to stand out from the “50.000” other digital musicians in Berlin, says “Unique” is the most valuable word in a “crowded environment” (Goldmann, 2011).

One’s career in music is more in one’s hands than in the previous decades. A musician is one’s marketer looking for audiences online. Audience may be negligible for someone who fails to appeal to a specific demographic. But good (in the sense of relevant to a specific audience) content gets discovered. A short timeframe is important because for something to become viral it has to rise to TOP10 lists on YouTube and become a news story on pop culture blogs. If one’s music can achieve this, it may be featured on the front page of YouTube raising the viewer count even further.

In rare cases an audience of millions may appear overnight if the content should spread rapidly enough (2 days in the case of YouTube and Facebook) and become a viral hit on social networks. With the popularity of books like “Your Band is a Virus” a global market seems to be in reach. While only a few succeed, the perceived ease of starting and the stories of success are an incentive hard to ignore. A rare success like the story of Justin Bieber who’s video became so popular on YouTube that a producer had to sign him to a label inspire new musician to try their luck, skills and their talent.

Musicians from poorer areas of the world, such as African countries join in with increased access to Internet due to the process of installing new backbone cables connecting both East-Africa and West Africa with fast Internet. This allows for new sources of inspiration and interesting acts of remix. For example, the music and dance of Kuduro in Angola was created as a remix response to Jean Claude Van Damme dancing in an action film video and was mixed on a laptop by Tony Amado into a music style that took over the Portuguese-speaking world (Antonio, 2007). At the other end of the same phenomenon, established artists like Beyoncé remix dance they’ve seen on YouTube as in her video Run The World (Girls) with a group of Tofo Tofo dancers (Leila, 2011).

Conclusions

More music is being consumed every year and this is probably a rising trend (IFPI Digital Music Report 2011, 2011). With the rise of the web – and increasingly mobile devices – people are going to consume more music than before. The audience around the world who has access to Internet will raise and so will the global consumption.

As movies, music, books, media converge into experiences, new ways of consumption emerge. Music is being consumed at the movies (Flaming Lips, Kanye West); music is becoming a game (Jay-Z); music is released as a series of apps (Björk), music is becoming a virtual reality (Gorillaz), etcetera, and etcetera. Pop culture phenomena extended across media is looking for an audience because in the 16 hours of attention economy of a person’s day the biggest question is whether one has the time to consume your content; every entertainment property is competing with another and to stand out one must be unique and offer something new and exciting. The floodgates are open and success is up to the musical creativity and marketing ingenuity of the artist to build a following.

 

 

 

Democratization of electronic music production http://audioproduction.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2011/04/14/everything-popular-is-wrong-making-it-in-electronic-music-despite-democratization/Eletronic music collaboartion

  • Files are relatively small and easier to collaborate on than open source cinema. DropBox, Box.net, SugarSync, Amazon Could, Cloud-based file storage and synconication.
  • Cloud-based collaboration tools
  • First examples of live events broadcast from different location without musicians meeting in real lvie?
  • Eletronic music can be producer on an inexpensive laptop computer without expensive musical instruments
  • Musicians from poorer areas of the world, such as African countries join in. Kuduro became to be as a remix response to Van Damme dancing on television which was mixed on his laptop into a a music style that took over the Portuguese-speaking world. Or from poorer families in Bigger cities.
  • Ease of information acces about live events allows artists to gather an audience for their work and get them to come to the live event (selling tickets).

3 Key Points – Learning. YouTube, Quora, forums – Access to tools. Free programs. Audaciyt. AuidoTool Renoise. Money people starting out use pirated versions of professional tools are become paying users if they are able to become professional. Software companies tolarate pirates because this is their future user base. – Access to people (collaborators). Sound Cloud – Distribution – Where is the money? (live events) Transmedia storytelling in Music http://blog.beautifulandstrange.com/mike-monello-interviewed-about-transmedia-sto Everything they do they think of as the World of Flaming Lips, releasing band Christmas on Mars funded by Warner Brothers in 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363240/ Kanye West directs a 20 minute music video for his album. With the convergece of technologies and mediums, and artist can express his ideas over a variety of platforms that all belong to the same story universe and extend the artists brands to new audiences. Jay-Z Decoded: http://www.transmediaproducer.org/jay-z-launches-decoded http://www.transchordian.com/ http://mashable.com/2011/05/24/lady-gaga-case-study/#14867And-More Björk Björks Biophilia App

16
Dec 11

Open Source Cinema and Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence

It’s exam period here at the Crossmedia MA at Tallinn University Baltic Film and Media School so I’m presenting all over the place. Here’s my take, a pretty extensive overview really, of how open source cinema (could) work and what are some existing examples. I welcome you to read the whole paper or you can get a quick view from the presentation:

And the other one is an analysis of Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence transmedia storyworld. AI is one of my favorite films and perhaps the most  brilliant science fiction movie of the 2000s decade. The alternate reality game “The Beast” was the first of its kind in 2001 and some argue it has still not been surpassed. Here’s the presentation:

12
Dec 11

Star Wars & Entrepreneurship

Here are the slides from 2 talks I gave in the past weeks. One was about the Star Wars movie franchise’s contributions to transmedia storytelling (picture by dear professor Gambarato here) — and got quite some retweet love on Twitter

And the other was on entrepreneurship (with reference to mistakes I made, low traction, failure and lessons learned with ARTBART), creativity in the face of challenges (inspired by Flora Gomes) and the power of being completely honest in your communication i.e. radical honesty influenced by Brad Blanton and the Lie to Me television series (incidentally Radical Openness will also be the theme for TEDGlobal 2012). Enjoy.

StartSmart event Wantrepreneur 2 Entrepreneur 1.12.2011. Tallinn, Estonia. View more presentations from StartSmart

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