On Tuesday the conference was in transition between interactive and music, with the gaunt, goth looking hipsters flooding into the bars of the sixth street just as the Google Village packed up and the final hack-a-thon was resolved. So the schedulers put all the music panels when the two tribes overlapped. I checked out Spotify and Turntable.fm. Disclaimer - I am a junkie of the first and have never used the second.
The key quote that stuck with me from the Spotify talk (key speaker was their 'Chief Content Officer', Ken Parks) was that more money is made in Macau each year than the music industry globally. I now that Macau is pretty hot on gambling and that a fair high rollers must pass through their tables, but we're talking about music. Everyone must listen to music in some form every day, even if
not by choice. It is utterly pervasive, and it has become utterly terrible at making money.
Easy answer would be to look at Spotify and point the finger. It has been well documented that the amount of money an artist gets per play is pitifully small. But the longer the talk went on, the more I came to the opinion that at least they're trying. They give 65-70% of all revenue straight to rights holders and had generated $250m up to the point of the conference. Now you can cut that number down to a per play figure, but that money didn't exist before Spotify generated it, so on balance they're a force for good. The problem I would augur is with the labels and right managers, who I imagine have large, convuluted systems of trickling money down. It is a convenient position to take, particularly given the other panel member was an artist, but one that makes sense. They have all the power. They have the rights for the music, they can cut any deal they want.
This was further compounded by the founders of Turntable.fm who turned up next. They gleefully announced that they were now licensed with all four majors. They took the approach that they would build an excellent product first and "ask for forgiveness later". All of which are positive statements about the health of their business. But the point they kept returning to was that you have to
take any offer a label puts in front of you. They can walk away, you can't.
And this struck me as a paradox. The labels complain about not making enough money (or at least artist's managers do), but then will hold start-ups eager to create new music experiences to ransom. Fair enough, they want the best deal and they can collective bargain on behalf of talent, but they are clearly hungry for more cash, they just don't want to give rights away unless you can prove you will make them money.
I think this is a gap for brands. Whilst many brands try and associate themselves with music properties or acts, often it is little more than sponsorship or part of product distribution. It seldom has any tangible benefit for the music industry. It brands took the approach of "what can we do for music" rather than "what can music do for us", they will likely to find a very receptive label marketer more than happy to cut a deal. So long as you don't ask for too much in the way of rights.
Oh. Turntable.fm is excellent, if a little for the music geek rather than the music everyman. You can get someone else to DJ your house party remotely. Which could be awful if it wasn't for the fact that once A-Trak turned up for a session and an increasing amount of headline DJs are going into partnership with the site.
It was a staight fight on Saturday afternoon. Frank Abagnale Jr. vs. Dennis Crowley. The man who was portrayed on film by Leonardo DiCaprio vs. the man rated 19 out 49 most influential men 2010 by AskMen.com. It wasn't a hard decision...
Sadly it wasn't a hard decision for everyone else at the conference. Catch me if you can was closed half an hour before it was due to begin. Frank Abagnale received a 15 minutes standing ovation twitter told me later.
I was stuck in a Q&A with Dennis.
And to be fair to him, he's an interesting man. You have to be to run a start up that has millions of claimed users. He sees Foursquare as the smallest of the big players when it comes to "social". Which I took to be code for "I'm not selling any time soon".
There were two key pillars of what Crowley talked about - data and radar. The former will be Foursqaure's play to make some cash, the latter their new service that makes the app more useful every day.
Crowley talked about levels of Foursquare user, about how you can track a user's development through stages. First they're into checking in, wanting to be mayor, wanting as many points as they can get. Then they're all about deals, how can they get money off at their favourite places. From that they start to use lists, tapping into recommendations of the world around them, being able to know the best place for coffee/pizza/late night saunas wherever you are. It is clear that Crowley sees this intimate almost symbiotic connection with the world as the key to the future success of Foursquare. He wants discovery of what is around you to become "serendipitous" (a much overused word at the Conference).
Radar should be akin to your best friend in a town you've never visited before. He wants the phone to reproduce how you would talk to your mates, rather than you spending your time head down in your phone.
Question is, can a phone's battery life support that? Its a noble ambition, but if the app is continually making calls based on your location, your phone is going to slow down considerably. The US is probably ready for this feature, the UK and Europe, where there isn't a swarm in sight, may just need to start rolling out deals and selling foursquare to local businesses rather than trying to make take the role of your new best friend.
And it can make this case through the other of Crowley's hot topics - data. Foursquare has millions of data points, and despite the relatively small sample size of its user base, should be able to provide meaningful insights to businesses. Crowley is staking the future of Foursquare on the ability to tell a coffee shop that the next location their consumer checks into is their work/a bar/a cafe... Is their value in this for individual retailers, enough for them to pay? I'd like to think that this data can help smaller businesses rather than giving more insights to bigger box retailers to help them undercut their local competitors, but I'm not sure. The other way of looking at it is that Foursquare will sell personal data about customers to retailers. Here is the name, likely address and workplace of your top 50 customers. I'm sure it won't do this, but I know a business that might, and if they get bought it is a real danger.
Data, privacy and battery life. All problems Foursquare needs to solve, none of which seem to have a simple answer that they're ready to implement. If I were them I'd put all my money in mobile payments.
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I'd like to say I'd planned to see this talk, that I'd been looking forward to it since my tickets were booked, but that would be a horrible lie. I walked in to the nearest room on the 4th floor in a zombie like hungover state. And I'm glad I did, it was excellent.
Stephen Wolfram is a man who achieved more by the age of 21 than many of us will our entire lives; being accepted to Oxfrod at 17 and leaving shortly after, only to find himself at Caltech picking up a PHD in partical physics. All before he could legally drink or kill a man in the US.
This sort of CV speaks of a precocious mind, active and never satisfied. This was almost immediately backed up with Wolfram's early claim that "Computation is not about computers and programs, it is how everything in our universe works". He argues that we can understand our physical world through uncovering which basic computational rules underpin everything around us. According to Wolfram understanding computation "changes the economics of creativity".
He showed Wolfram Tones to demonstrate how computation can be broadly applied. It has mined the "computational universe" and rendered algorithims as music. Simple rules can produce complex outputs, or in this case early Nokia 3 series ring tones.
He then went on to discuss Wolfram Alpha, a "search engine" (but not really), that uses computation to deliver more accurate and meaningful results to users. Wolfram compared it to Google by using the analogy of a library. You turn up to Google's library, ask them a question and they give 10 books with the answer hidden in one or more of the books. You go to Wolfram's Library and they give you the answer on a fresh piece of paper, based on all the mined data from every book in the library.
Wolfram Alpha Pro (the new, improved version) certainly looks like an answer to problems of big data and the deep web. He should how it is working to crunch data on social networks and show connections between people. And the height distribution of washing machines. And what planes were currently over Austin and where they were going. And histograms of the age of people who died on the Titanic. You can also input images and manipulate them using edge detection.
Which is all very interesting. And potentially useful. But like any question regarding data, it needs the right question to answer. The capabilities of what it can achieve are endless, the application of them in interesting ways is where the opportunity lies. In that sense Stephen Wolfram has given us something of great power to play with. We just need to figure out what to do with it.
I don't think height distribution of washing machines will be top of my list.
We were promised a battle, between the soulless machine that is aggregation and the carefully considered choice of a living, breathing blogger. However when we arrived, we were told that such a battle was unfeasible given the time. Not quite as disappointing as the failure to get Pacquiao and Mayweather in a ring together, but false advertising nonetheless.
So rather than a showdown to settle who can detect a viral video with greater accuracy, we were treated to a conversation between Marc Hustvedt of Chill and Neetzan Zimmerman of the Daily What. The focus was on how Zimmerman decides what videos to post on his blog, and insight as to how he became the man who "broke" Rebecca Black to a mainstream audience.
We talk about "half life" when it comes to video content online, the fact than on average a You Tube video gets half of its views in the first six days it was live. Friday, one of the most "popular" videos of all time, lay dormant for 29 days before it was posted on the Daily What. Neetzan then posted it and autotune pop was never the same again. But what gets the attention of these so-called "supernodes" such as the Daily What's Zimmerman.
The 51 and the 30k
They want to be there first and will never post something that has over 30k views, looking for videos that has views in double figures ideally. So if a brand has pumped a load of bought views into
a video, it will never be picked up by a blog like the Daily What.
The remix
A video can only be considered a success if it has a remix. If someone has taken their time to create a spoof version then it has clearly resonated. The more remixes a video has had, the more "viral" you can declare your video. Or the more video editors you've paid off to get cracking the minute it goes live. There exists a world of mini-studios creating content based on acknowledged hits. We should be thinking less about bloggers and more about these guys if we want to engineer success.
The introduction
Can't be straight. Needs to have a unique angle that will grab attention, and brand plus are the hardest sell for a "supernode". These guys can't be bought.
"Not all cat videos are equal"
This was an unforgiveable quote said without irony by one of the speakers. I won't say which one as I'd forgiven them by the end.
You're 14 and getting the bus to school. Its about a half hour drive. You've not graduated to the back seat set, that's two years from now. You're solidly upper middle deck. Occasionally you get three rows from the back on a good day. The appeal of the back of the bus? That's where the older girls are - gossiping, smoking and generally being unobtainable. You sit silently listening in, trying to glean bits from their life and stitch them together. It's a weird sort of escapism. It's destructive too. You should be concentrating on girls your age, but you can't, you want for more.
All of this goes with time. Girls eventually start to talk to you. You get served for cigs. You get let into pubs. Eventually you go to univeristy, you get a job, go to dinner parties... you grow up.
The back seat of the bus feels like a long time ago.
But then you get into Twitter. You feel your way round it for a while, follow footballers until you realise they're generally boring and indulging in "brand building" for when they retire, follow pornstars until you realise there's no porn, follow certain comedians until you realise they're simply emptying all their material that they didn't get through on the last panel show.
Then you find the cliques. The small groups who all talk to each other. The journalists, the writers, the american west-coast comedians. You follow them all and you see all their conversations. You start to learn about them, what they like, who they don't and where they stand on Libya/Amanda Knox/Frankie from X-Factor/Kim Kardashian. Part of you starts to value these opinions. Well if Caitlin Moran, Sali Hughes, India Knight and Hemmo think she was innocent maybe I need to re-evaluatte my position. If Kelly Oxforddoesn't care about the Kardashian divorce then neither do I. But wait Rob Delaneydoes, and Jenny Johnsonalso thinks that's funny - so maybe I should too.
Eventually it becomes all too much. There are too many girls on the back of the bus now. You want to impress them all, but you're reply rate is pitiful. Grace Dent replies once to your tweet. You consider getting all sycophantic about her column and book but think better of it. But maybe doing will get another reply...
I have a new set of girls who sit at the back of the bus, whose conversations I eavesdrop everyday.
Now they're not just gossiping about last Friday in the pub and whose done what to whom. They're plugging columns, books and the films they like. They're forming your opinion on which X-Factorand Apprentice contestants to like. I don't even watch either of these, but feel I could give a run down on who's on them and a list of their character flaws, imagined and real.
I'm sure I'm not alone. Perhaps in how I've made it a bit weird by writing about it.
But between them they've got about 200,000 followers. So I doubt I'm the only one listening in.
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