Ahead of our next Group Think event in May (co-produced with the Barbican Centre), on the subject of collaboration, we've been talking to some of our friends, colleagues and clients about how collaboration fits into their lives and work. So we sent out a little questionnaire and, over the next few weeks, we'll be publishing what everyone told us. Here's our third guest post, from our old friend John Kieffer, who has more hats than Lady's day at Royal Ascot, or something.
Who are you and what do you do?
I'm John Kieffer. I do lots (possibly too many) different things including: working with three friends/collaborators as John3Shelagh, advising on creative industries/arts policy and editing the odd book when we get the chance; working with mentoring producers, curators and SMEs; chairing arts and learning organisation A New Direction; some consultancy and strategic planning; working with Touch Music as a 'minister without portfolio'; advising organisations ranging from big (Tate) to small (Cafe Oto); and some of my own work as a writer and curator.
Why do you collaborate?
Hmmm. It depends very much on context, but basically it works if everyone learn things they never knew before and the job gets done.
Which collaboration tools do you like and why?
It again depends on context. Anything from googledocs to various online platforms to sitting round a table with a big sheet of paper and a couple of bottles of wine. As a fairly close observer and supporter of Heart n Soul's Dean Rodney Singers project, I'm very excited by the potential of iPads as collaborative tools - not just because of the availablity of great apps - but because of the social and convivial nature of the device itself. There's something interesting happening here I think.
When does collaboration tend to work best?
It's a terrible cliché I know but a collaboration for me really does have to result in something that's more than the sum of its parts - whether it's creative, business focused or both - to be worthwhile. I'm not entirely sure why but (in my world at least) collaborations in a commercial environment are often more successful than for example those between not-for-profit arts organisations. Possibly the former have a strong 'problem solving' impetus whereas latter are often little more than combining budgets and logos with not a lot of innovation or mutual learning.
What framework or rules do you need for successful collaboration?
Again framework and rules may vary somewhat with context but to me a true collaboration must be more than a simple combining of resources (although there's nothing wrong with that of course) and should aim to harness the creativity and intelligence of all the players and ideally open up a 'third space' that surprises everyone involved.
Briefly describe a collaboration you admire and tell us why you think it works.
I've had most problems with collaborations either where the ground-rules have not been properly established or the parties come to the collaboration with very different agendas and/or levels of commitment. There are some situations where collaboration is not the best way forward and a single voice or context is preferable - perhaps particularly with artists. In a particularly candid moment a distinguished theatre director described the plethora of international festival co-productions and collaborations to me as 'a kind of bland cultural mush' ....
This is a nice, succinct and insightful five minute Tech Crunch interview with Jim Lucchese, CEO of music recommendations service Echo Nest. Regular readers of mine will know that I favour Last.fm when it comes to taste inference and recommendations, but Luchesse makes a very good case for the company and frankly, with clients including Spotify, Nokia, EMI and Clear Channel they're surely on to something.
This little piece is reposted from my own personal blog, DGMFS. I don't re-post from there very often, but it struck me that the underlying thought here about the current state and possible near future of the record industry would be of interest to some of this blog's readers.
Over on the professional blog of my consultancy Unthinkable, I’ve been quoting liberally from Distrust that Particular Flavour, the first anthology of non-fiction from the man who pretty much single-handedly reinvented science fiction at the turn of the 80’s and has been writing solidly for the thirty years since: William Gibson.
Gibson is deeply insightful on a bewildering variety of topics whose only catch-all is surely “human culture” (strictly lower-case c). He’s especially strong on music – both its praxis and the cultural business around it – and I write this as someone who emphatically doesn’t share his enthusiasm for punk (although I’m with him in his unabashed love of Steely Dan).
In any case, I found myself nodding fiercely at these lines, taken from a speech given to the Director’s Guild of America in 2003:
Some futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and non profit) will eventually become a musician’s only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And technologically finite.
It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying business model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a complex interaction among several.
This is spot-on, even if drawing no partuclarly forecast-y conclusion (as he says elsewhere: “The day I reply with anything other than... 'I haven’t got a clue’ [to the question of what the future will bring] please, shoot me.") None of us truly knows what’s going to happen to the role of the professional musician, but we do know that it is about to change profoundly, as it is for all professional artists, and the impact of this on the musician’s actual output – that is, music, or art more widely – is something we ignore foolishly, although ignore it most of us surely do.
I am already pretty excited to see Universal Music Group throwing its considerable weight behind making the web more open and useful - it's even more gratifying to note that this work is being spearheaded by former members of the team I was privileged enough to lead at the BBC in a similar initiative. Let me catch my breath and explain.
The project that more than any other defined my former role as Interactive Editor for Music at the BBC was that of the BBC artist pages (here's an example)- creating, with clickable tracklists (another example), a central glue for all of the BBC's branded music offerings (radio stations, programmes, festivals etc) that served at once as navigation and aggregation (and, we hoped, a good SEO strategy to boot). What's more, we were keen from the start to make these pages last, and so we adopted the web-scale identifiers of MusicBrainz to ensure their longevity, as well as their interoperability with other parts of the Internet. I have bored on about all this in severalplaces.
Musicbrainz furnished a ready set of metadata about artists and their discographies that also enabled us to scrape Wikipedia for biographies and pull in relevant BBC News stories (by means of inferring Musicbrainz IDs via links to official artist sites). It also theoretically made us interoperable with a number of digital music services - notably last.fm. But one of the frustrations of the project was the fact that the data in Musicbrainz, being based on commercially available releases, was only as good as the ability of its community of contributors to get hold of and input that data.
Like Wikipedia's editors, the MusicBrainz community are numerous, passionate, smart, quick, and largely self-regulating. But the thing about being a broadcaster is that we routinely got our hands on new releases - and indeed releases by commercially "new" artists - before they were sold, and therefore before the hive mind of MusicBrainz could get a purchase on them. The solution seemed obvious to me - get the labels to input their data directly into MusicBrainz (either directly or via APIs), meaning that they had control over the data that's out there on the Internet, as well as a ready-made structure and repository for their own data (plus it would save an awful lot of data entry by the BBC). But that in turn yielded a problem of its own: how to get the labels to play? I confess it's not a problem I was able to solve during my tenure.
It seems the solution was staring me in the face all along if I had only had eyes to see: embed a cadre of very clever people in the labels and let them do the heavy lifting. Step forward James Cowdery and Martyn Davies, both of whom I was lucky enough to have in my team at the BBC. James, as Universal Music UK's Innovation Manager, has been working with his predecessor Martyn, now evil genius behind Six Two Productions, to develop the Artist Gateway, using MusicBrainz IDs to create pages populated with data from Universal as well as from elsewhere on the web.
Now I should acknolwedge here that there are no current plans to include pre-release tracklist data in the Artist Gateway. Personally I think that's a shame, but I understand that established models are slow to change. But this is a huge step forward nonetheless towards creating a common language for music metadata online.
A more general caveat is also appropriate: clearly I am bringing a rather warped and personal interpretation to this project, which is of course driven by the strategic needs of Universal rather than my preferences and whims. Plus it's early days (the Artist Gateway isn't launched yet), and I can't claim detailed inside knowledge of its likely contents or technical architecture. But the very fact that it's happening is heartening indeed.
Those of you who either read this blog - or my own non-professional one - regularly, or know me personally, will be unsurprised to learn that one of my daily Google alerts is for "Meshuggah". For those not in either of the categories above, Meshuggah are a death/math metal outfit from Sweden and pretty much my favourite thing on the planet.
Anyway, Meshuggah are a pretty unprolific bunch so most days the alerts aren't too interesting: links to illegal download sites (bad, bad people) or to an off-Broadway show called "The Meshuggah Nuns" (mad, mad people). Granted, the last couple of weeks have been rather more active, what with a new Meshuggah album and UK tour announced in the spring (don't expect much sense from me in April, by the way).
Anyhow, in among the announcements and the piracy and nun-based comedy, last week up popped this little video:
My first thought was to fire off an email to the rest of the UC team: "This is all our theses come at once." Less concisely: it struck me that the video combined two things we very often demonstrate and discuss in our various seminars and workshops, namely bedroom shred guitarists and music-based gaming. For more on the former, see mine and Justin's essay in the anthology Creativity, Money, Love.
But my second thought, on looking more closely was: actually, what the hell is this?! I mean, yes, it's clearly a video of three people playing some music game version of Mehuggah's 'Bleed', but er, how? That is, how did it come to be that 'Bleed' was part of some video game in the first place? A few more clicks and I had even more questions. What is an FBFC? What's Elite Rhythm Gaming? What's a full combo? What's a full screen? And on and on.
Now for anyone properly familiar with Rock Band Network: read no further, write me off as a latecomer. But I mean really familiar. If, like me, you've kind of heard of RBN and think you know enough about it to delve no further, think again.
Here's a little precis of the network's origins and development and some thoughts it's prompted in me.
Games developer Harmonix Music Systems launched Rock Band in 2007. The game essentially followed in the footsteps of Guitar Hero, but added drums and bass guitar. The accepted story runs something like this: the first game came at the height of the rhythm game boom, which you might recall was blowing up massively at the time, but sales of subsequent releases dropped as the bottom fell out of the market, or at least as the mainstream games playing public moved on to new pastures, social games in particular.
Well, yes, to a point. But the journalists writing about the death of music games were of the same ilk as those who'd said they were the saviour of the music industry in the first place. The record industry is always being promised salvation, from ringtones to Spotify, but to my mind the real story here is rather more interesting: it's another step in the wholesale reinvention of the entertainment industry. Because somewhere in this muddled history Harmonix launched Rock Band Network.
The initial idea was straightforward enough and one well-tried in games as diverse as Singstar, or Little Big Planet: the distribution of new in-game components and features over the network (in this case, as in Singstar's, those features being songs), allowing fans to play new material without having to wait for a new physical release. In marketing terms: a neat way to retain brand loyalty.
So yes, simple enough, conceptually; tough technologically, however. In fact, Harmonix teamed up with Microsoft in order to deliver new content over various networks (and it's worth noting that RBN is still rather more successful on XBox than Playstation).
But it was evident pretty quickly that Harmonix couldn't cope with the demand they'd created. One sure sign of that: pirate sites were filling the gap: the invisible hand, nature abhorring a vacuum and all that. So Harmonix came up with a new strategy. For a start they did a deal with two of the communities creating pirate games (ScoreHero and CustomHero) and next opened up the development platform to third parties, effectively allowing bands, managers and labels to create their own RB versions of their songs and distribute them through the network - all with full QA procedures in place, of course.
And this is when it gets interesting. An entire subculture of Rock Band Network devotees springs up, with its own language, rules and informal distribution networks. For an example of the last list look no further than the Elite Rhythm Gaming Network on You Tube.
Oh, and if you're still wondering about the lingo I cited above, a combo is a correct combination of notes and therefore a full combo, or FC, is a complete play-through of a song without making a single mistake; an FBFC is a "full band full combo", that is, a complete run through of a song by all three players without a single mistake from any of them; a "full screen" of one of these is a video which captures all three players' "playing". OK?
Meanwhile specialist music blogs are as breathless in their anticipation of new RBN song releases as they are about actual, well, new songs (take this headline from Metal Underground: "New Metal Songs Come To The Rock Band Network This Week.")
So…. what to make of all this? And why am I so fascinated by it, excited even? Well, the answer is multi-faceted but I think I would break my brief observations out around the following themes:
New Business Models What's in it for the labels, and bands, for the record industry people that get involved? Well, there's "brand extension", of course, spreading the word, reaching potential audiences. And of course there's cementing existing fan loyalties. But there's something more tangible here, too: the artist or label takes 30% of the sale price of the song. That might not sustain a career, but it could be a significant part of a portfolio income strategy - which is, let's face it, pretty much the only one a musical artist can meaningfully pursue right now.
It's yet another meganiche I've written elsewhere about what Justin and I have called meganiches: areas of cultural activity which are apparently so specialist as to elude all but the most fleeting (and often scathing) of mainstream press coverage, yet which have passionate active participants numbering their millions.
Interestingly, there's a big crossover between RBN and at least one of my other hobby horses: metal - after all, we came in on Meshuggah. I'd warrant that there's something of a natural fit: a certain nerdy, overwhelmingly male, detail-obsessed, self-consciously countercultural personality.
But it goes beyond metal. Take Umphrey's McGee, for example. Chances are you've never heard of them; they're a US psych-rock jam band that come on like a mash up of Frank Zappa and the Police (really) and that have an utterly devoted fanbase who attend their hundreds of gigs a year. The band's Kevin Browning wrote interestingly recently about the role of technology and building the band's career. It's unsurprising then, that the band, I gather, have considered releasing their new album in its entirety as RBN songs.
This stuff is HARD! A couple of years back, Clay Shirky coined the term "cognitive surplus" to denote the vast swathes of time people in the developed world could get back in their lives to do interesting stuff if they only gave up TV (I'm boiling things down here, to be sure). Now it's a moot point as to whether mastering a song on RBN is creative in any way, but it sure is active. Check out commentaries from posters on the Elite Rhythm Gaming YT pages for evidence of that!
Creative or not, this is passionate, engaged and vital activity.
Could we harness this for other ends? It strikes me that rhythm gaming is edging ever closer to the act of playing music - for real. In the early days of Guitar Hero it was often pointed out that the controllers bore no resemblance to a guitar in anything other than cosmetic terms, and that being good at the game did nothing for your musical ability, beyond perhaps a vague notion of engaging with the basic concept of rhythm and timing (I can certainly report that as a - I hope - proficient guitar player I showed zero aptitude for the game - zero). But the guitar controllers are getting closer (and indeed, instrument manufacturers like Fender are endorsing them) and when it comes to the drums, with due respect to drummers, drumming's just hitting stuff in time, right? In all seriousness, the RBN "drum kit" is not significantly different from the practice pads many drummers use.
Is it possible then, that at some point, rhythm gaming will use, effectively, real instruments? I think it is, and indeed, some prototyping has already been done. At that point, rhythm gaming will become, to all intents and purposes, no different from bedroom shredding - which is mostly covers-based in any case - only perhaps with a little more structure. We've argued that the flaunting of one's musical prowess through posting clips on YT should be seen as a potential pointer for educationalists. The coming together of rhythm gaming and bedroom shredding I posit here is a fine example of what has been termed (rather inelegantly, to be sure) the gamification of learning.
I've got a few other things to say at some point about how some of these RBN performances are being built into dubstep remixes - really - but that's probably enough from me on the subject for now. A couple of final things. If anyone stumbles across this post who's actually an RBN user I'd really appreciate your responses and thoughts. And for a sense of just how big this really is, just take a look at this list on Wikipedia of all the songs currently available on RBN. Like I say: meganiche.
UPDATE: Jeff Webster - @weffjebster - has pointed out something of an error in my quick history of RBN, and that's that the original version of Rock Band also added vocals as part of the group. Thanks for the correction, Jeff.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 11:12AM 