I Wish I Were an Early Adopter
Last week a friend emailed me a heads up about an upcoming new musician:
here’s the video from a newly signed British singer… she became famous after webcasting concerts from her basement… (she’s of the KT Tunstall? genre)… i hope you like…
I like her sound all right - bit bubblegummy- but what really excited me was the story. First, the video was linkable allowing this casual exchange - enriching a remote friendship , my iPod, AND this enterprising young musician’s career. Our catalogs, for the most part, are not linkable meaning that we, as libraries might be missing out on this kind of organic, grassroots movement.
Second, she allegedly won her lucrative, major label by webcasting three weeks of “private” concerts from her Tooting basement. The first night she enjoyed 70 viewers and by the end of the series, she had 70,000 AND Sony BMG had taken serious interest in her. So she harnessed the extreme power of Web2.0 and now her single I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair) is number one on the UK Charts. It’s a regular social software fairy tale.
But soft, I forwarded the story on to another well-informed friend who crushed me:
Yeah, I heard about her, but I heard that the webcasts were a marketing gimmick after she signed the contract. It was part of a public relations stunt.
Why was I upset? The fact that this gigantic company with bottomless pockets had exploited my trusted tool to manipulate my love of the underdog filled me with righteous indignation. They’d invaded the precious purity of the community these tools create to *gasp* sell me something. Is this how recipients of phone solicitations felt when their first dinner time was interrupted? The difference here, though, is that the commercialism isn’t explicit - they know they had to remove themselves and their commercial agenda from the the equation for it to be successful. Sandi and her record company continue to deny the allegations, perhaps it’s a combination of both stories…
The whole thing is very interesting and got me thinking, most of our favorite tools started slowly, with a grassroots community of early adopters. The internet and www itself, is a case in point. Amazon began its bookstore by focusing on technology books because the hard-core techies were the only ones bold enough to plunge into online commerce. In a rare TV watching session last night I noticed that FX is promoting their show, It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia with a MySpace account - showing the url over all the ads.
What does all this mean for libraries’ participation in community, interactive spaces in Web2.0? Is it more evidence that we have to work harder for attention in those circles? Or does it mean that as the fringe becomes the mainstream the circles will eventually come to us? In any event, if gigantic networks are understanding that MySpace and You Tube can give them something they can’t buy, it seems to me that library’s should certainly take notice too.
Tags: community, interaction, Libraries, Services, and Librarians, library, linkability, myspace, sandi thom, social software, webcast, youtube