UMF is a younger audience of ‘technology-carrying youth’ so where are all of the videos and photos? This year I saw a staggering amount of people with their cameras and video cameras in the air. People were recording entire DJ sets on their Blackberrys and someone had an iPhone just taking photo after photo which meant I didn’t even see the entire Swedish House Mafia set due to his phone being in front of my face the whole time. Where did his photos go? Why didn’t he post them? Because I saw the photos and they fucking sucked. There’s a reason why old media will be around for a long time. Very few new media people or ‘citizen journalists’ produce any content worth looking at, much less, paying for. Capturing The Moment—Making It Count | adam-jackson.net

This got me to thinking—I definitely agree there were slim pickings of decent UMF photos, and a lot of them had embedding disabled or obnoxious watermarks. For Flickr’s sake people, use tags, and allow embedding and all-sizes viewability. For the love the Internet, use a Creative Commons license. Here’s where you can set this: Flickr » You » Your Account » Privacy & Permissions » Defaults for new uploads » What license will your content have? I also wish Flickr’s advanced search had more filtering options—like most favorited and most comments for a start.

Snapping outstanding amateur music photos takes a lot of effort. Sometimes by concentrating on taking photos/videos, one misses much of the actual experience. On the flip side, I think many people snap photos for the sake of the memory, and not the photo itself. Even a dark, blurry photo will trigger the memory of the concert for years down the road. There’s a sentimental value to it. It may depend on the person and their motivation for taking the photo. People also might take photos to help them tell a story or have a way to share their experience with their friends or family—whether it be in person or via MMS, Facebook, etc. One obvious advantage to digital photos is that you can take millions of them without buying film. But the 5’1″ chick behind the dude with his iPhone in the air all night might tell you otherwise. Me, being 6’1″, I’m pretty much in the way of most people in a concert situation like that—even without a camera. I tend to be pretty conscious about who I’m standing in front of because I don’t want to block anyone’s view. A little consideration for the people around you can go a long way. As far as the amount of quality citizen journalism, the sheer volume of online content is humbling, and there is plenty of quality out there, but many of us are missing it because we don’t always know where or how to look. Now, I ask:

Science

In his above TED talk, Daniel Pink makes a strong case relating the science of motivation to creativity and business. The verdict is that money is not a primary motivator for people doing creative work. Sure, it does play a factor today as people need enough money to meet their essential needs. Once those needs are met, money is out of the picture. I look forward to reading his upcoming book, Drive.

Spotify

I felt compelled to deliver the point—money is not an artist’s true motivation—in response to the exorbitant editorial negativity surrounding yesterday’s news of Lady Gaga getting paid $167 for 1+ million Spotify streams. Where I live—in the US—Spotify is not yet available so I have not been able to try the platform. Spotify is a new service and its revenue model is understandably in a shakedown period where they are still determining what works, what data they have, and how they can best leverage that data to generate revenue.

Mr. Ek [Spotify CEO and Founder] revealed how the company has been working on making its advertising as personally tailored to an individual’s tastes as possible. “We have a lot of information about people. We know our users’ age, gender, location and even mood – which figure out by through BPMs [beats per minute],” he explained. Depending on whether a person has listened to lots of fast or slow music, Spotify is trying to make its mood analysis as accurate as possible – so it can serve highly targeted adverts for users to properly engage with—which should in turn, increase the amount it can charge brands to advertise on the platform. Mr. Ek said Spotify was “beginning to figure this stuff out”. (Spotify chief, Daniel Ek, rules out 2009 US launch | Telegraph)

It sounds like Spotify is on track to me. I like the ad-based model and there are many variations to explore. I brainstormed launching an ad-based free music service back in 2007, and I think Spotify is the closest service to what I would have done, but they’ll need to continue to evolve, as do musicians.

Whether it is really relevant to measure the success of Spotify in this way remains to be seen as it is still a service in it’s infancy. Much like Twitter, it is phenomenally successful in terms of usability but is still finding its feet in terms of making money. As it continues to attract users its appeal to advertisers will grow and so too will the financial returns. How this filters down to the individual artist is then probably more of an issue with the labels than with Spotify. (A Ga Ga approach to marketing? | The Naked Pheasant)

Industry

It’s smart business to think years down the road by expanding your fan base even if it doesn’t pay off immediately. I think Lady Gaga and many other artists see that. The long-term benefit of those 1+ million streams is immense, and I think many people are blinded to that fact—such a level of exposure leads to sellout shows and non-music revenue streams. The one thing I dislike about the situation is that the major labels still have major pull and they can afford huge production and marketing investments. But the need for heavy financing is down—thank you, Internet. In today’s connected, music-abundant world why does any one artist get so popular? Is it hard work, affinity, or talent? To me, talent is relative—it’s not what you can build, but rather it’s what you can build with what you have. It’s the Internet Age—indie musicians have the power to take the industry back but they must embrace change and creativity to do it—they must creatively leverage the internet and mobile apps.

The connection from the fan to the band, financially, has been broken. The fan knows that their purchase will hardly help the band, or more precisely that the marginal benefit from their purchase to the band is near zero, so why do it? The cost to the fan is much higher than the marginal benefit to the band, so the fan just torrents the damn song. (Why Music Is Broken – The Artist To Consumer Connection)

P2P rocks—it turned the industry up-side-down letting the label-lords know they had lost control. I see P2P as a massive benefit for musicians. Do they have P2P streaming yet? They will. With all that said, I believe that many music fans are as-motivated-as-ever to pay for music when they know their money is going directly to the artist. Maybe subscription services like Spotify can find a way to work this, or endorsement deals that fans would want to support, into their business model. I think that fans—and people in general—need to feel like they are part of something and they want to feel empowered.

Artwork: jahdakinebrah/flickr.

The fan artwork you see above is a creative visualization of Pink Floyd’s Money. The image squares depict the story of the song lyrics. What motivates you? What do you think motivates music fans?