Part of me wants to have a band who blog all the time, update Twitter every three hours, moblog their tour activities, edit their studio video footage to put up on their own YouTube channel, put their camera photos up on Flickr, email their fans back for at least three hours a day, and goodness knows what else.
The other part of me would like a band who is mysterious, doesn’t blog, whose names and ages no one really knows, and focus entirely on making a good record.
I’m not sure where the balance is for success, or if this whole web 2.0 and fan interaction stuff is as important as we make it out to be anyway. The people who make records go platinum – Radio 2 listeners – don’t want to “buy into” a project, they just want to hear some nice songs. Fan interaction and building it up from the ground up is quite an indie approach, and as a manager I quite want to go beyond indie and have my bands headlining Brixton Academy, please.
I spend too much time thinking about all of this.
Tags: hype, moblog, the internet, twitter, web 2.0
May 23, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I think fan interaction *is* important and from past experience I’ve seen it work really well (think about how we know each other, for example!). But not every band member agrees – and they’re the ones who have to put at least some of the legwork in.
I feel your pain only too well. I have to try and figure out how much or little the artists is willing to put in, and then do the rest myself, without passing myself off as them. They often start off with great intentions, which fade fast. But then there’s the special ones (like Imogen Heap), who continue to produce great content (art in itself you could argue).
I can see why some artists want nothing to do with this crazy internet world, where everyone is telling everyone else everything, all of the time. But unfortunately this is the way of the world today, or at least the world a large proportion of the music buying demographic (horrible terms I know!) live in, so you can either join them, or ignore them at your (commercial) peril.
I think this is more important if you’re an emerging artist. Fans looking for ‘new’ music expect a certain level of interaction and access to artists nowadays, where as more established acts have their history/legacy to keep people content. Maybe they feel they’ve ‘given’ enough in the past whilst emerging themselves and once they’re a massive established act they don’t feel obliged to provide such a level of interaction/access? And maybe their fans feel that way too?
Like you, I probably spend too much time thinking about this.