Gloria writes:
This post about interactive networks got me questioning how orchestras could make their new on-line music stores (such as the one being planned for launch soon in Philadelphia) more interactive. I am aware of examples of orchestral interactive web sites, mostly in the educational arena and aimed towards children. There are also examples of orchestras offering musical samples of up-coming concerts and program notes but those are merely informational and not interactive. What could we do here a la the romance novel model to hook folks? Ways to compose, have the orchestra play your composition, play along with the orchestra, etc? And,how would we go about marketing these ideas? Hmm.............!?!?
The most difficult thing to do these days if you're a "content producer" (lovely term, isn't it?) is to grab someone's attention for 5 seconds. There's just too much competition, and people go to the things they have relationships with. So how do you build that relationship (and a community of relationships) if the only time you have contact with people is when they come into your hall for a concert? It's not enough.
Professional sports teams are brilliant at building a community of people who care about the team's story. Professional sports is the most commercial of enterprises, but they give lots away - they're on TV every night during the season, they're in the newspapers every day. They have lots of story lines going to appeal to the most casual fans all the way up to the stats freaks and connoisseurs. They give a lot away, because (though they'd never admit this, probably), it's not just about the game itself and who wins and loses - it's about getting people to buy in to your story so they learn to care whether you win or lose. They give away the things that make you want to care about them. You can see the game every night on TV because if they can get you to check in and care enough, you'll occasionally buy a ticket to a game. And all of that other "non-game" stuff means that when you do go to the game, you have a better context for appreciating what's going on (though they certainly don't call it "educational").
So how do orchestras get more face time with their community? Certainly the optimum experience is the concert itself (as the game is in baseball). But how do you remind people you're there and draw them into interacting with you day after day? If I were running an orchestra, I'd record everything we did and make it freely available. Download everything we do the week we do it, make it possible for you to compare the way we did it this time as opposed to last time. So every performance isn't a gem. It doesn't matter. "Perfect" recordings feed the image that the music is frozen and removed from the people who make it. There's certainly a place for the perfect recording - but that's what you get people to pay for - the "premium" experience. The day-to-day performances are the recordings that help create demand for the high quality recordings (sounds counter-intuitive, but it's a well-established principle on the web).
I'd record a series of ringtones for cell phones (in Europe ringtones now outsell traditional recordings - they're hugely popular) so every time your phone rings you're reminded of us. How about a suite of sounds for your computer - every time an email comes, I think of you. I'd hire the equivalent of the play-by-play announcer to introduce webcasts of performances - someone who wouldn't so much talk in an "educational" way, but someone who could help frame the "live" aspect of it - say that perhaps this time out, the orchestra under X conductor played X part in an entirely different way than last time. Why'd they do that, and did it really work?
The home run is if you can get your audience creating this content for you. Yahoo! recently abandoned a major effort to be a producer of web videos. Instead, they're creating the tools for visitors to make and share their content. They've discovered that their audience is more loyal (read: obsessive) if they themselves participate. A year ago, the video-sharing website YouTube barely existed. Now 28 million videos a day are downloaded there, most of them homemade.
How could you get orchestra patrons to create content? You could have visitors rank and compare performances, for example. Those rankings are a way of harnessing the community to express value. During Katrina, one of the most effective ways of sharing information and finding people, turned out to be Crag'sList. MeetUp.com has mobilized millions of people with shared interests, enabling them to connect and get together around shared values and issues. In Seattle, the local city government channel just got $3 million from Comcast to create a digital video infrastructure for the arts community to record what they do, make it available on demand, slice and dice it so it's available in every hotel room, in every house, on every cell phone and make it accessible to other artists to use in their work...
I recently came across the most extensive (obsessive) and comprehensive website about pianists I've ever seen. The detail is astonishing, and the opinions, though idiosyncratic, are smart. Created by a recording company? Uh-uh - turns out it's a 22-year-old kid in Hong Kong who has a passion for piano. Every day, according to Technorati, 17,000 new blogs are created on the internet. Xanga has 30 million users cranking out content. People have a hunger to participate - if you find ways for them to do it, they will - and thank you for it. Orchestras have a huge advantage here, I think, because they create something wonderful and unique. And what's making all these other experiments possible? They are cheap and easy to try. The reason there are 17,000 new blogs every day is because they're easy to make. And if something doesn't work, fix it or try something else. Talk about play? Experimenting with this is cheap, easy and fun (I'm not kidding). This is the real internet revolution.
I've completely violated my exhortation not to write essays, but one last point: We're moving from a mass-culture society to something I've come to start calling Smart Culture. In a mass-culture landscape, you try to make what you do as generic as possible if you want to gather up the biggest audience. But that's a strategy that backfires in a smart culture world. As people have access to more culture and the ability to use it in the specific ways they want, what will draw the biggest communities are those that appeal to people's curiosity, their desire to belong to something that they can believe in, that they can care about. Generic dumbed-down mass culture can't compete with that. Okay... enough for now.
