It’s Still Who You Know
This is a long and meandering thought. But the bottom line is that life, and the music industry, or the world of music, or whatever, is now, and will continue to be, about who you know. Filters. Recommendations. Relationships. It’s all the same. There will not be a technology that replaces the value of a recommendation from a trusted friend or associate. That’s the future of all information exchange and it’s especially true in the music business.
We see a lot of different systems that are trying to end-around the value of the personal relationship. To build a proprietary algorithm of some sort or the other that will take the place of the dreaded middle-man. But I just don’t see it happening, or, at a minimum, it won’t happen very quickly.
Systems are hard to build. Systems that you will trust to make recommendations on major decisions are even harder and harder to learn to trust. Mike McCready even admitted as much when he said, in his comment on this blog,
While we use some computerized filtering, you will see as we move forward that it is merely a small component of how we’re going to be classifying, matching and filtering recommendations.
The point is that even with a company whose ostensible sole purpose is the creation of a scalable automated filtering system for “what’s good” you still need humans. You need someone to call. Someone you can trust.
Have you used Google recently? Would you trust Google, the world’s best search engine, to make a recommendation? I wouldn’t. I would trust it to recover something I already knew existed but I wouldn’t trust it to recommend the best restaurant or the best song. Especially if it was an important decision to me. For example, if I was a writer and I was about to pick which band I wanted to write my next blog post about. I wouldn’t leave it up to Google. Someone would probably need to make a recommendation to me. Someone I trusted. Like a PR agent.
I think when push comes to shove, decisions are made based on personal connections. It’s still better to know the staff at iTunes than just to upload the music through TuneCore. It’s still better to get to know the folks at Pump Audio or wherever and that’s the true value of the existing music industry institutions. Their relationships. They have relationships that you don’t have and they still control the keys to the kingdom.
Here’s another reason why it’s important. Because great songs are commodities. There are lots of them. So if there are lots of them, factors irrespective of the quality of the song will lead to their selection and their promotion. And again, this is where relationships come into play.
There are many many conclusions and implications of this fact. One of them is not to leave your future in the hands of recommendation systems. You’re going to need to get out there and build some personal relationships. Another is that there is, and will continue to be, a role for gatekeepers, whether or not record labels exist. Influencers and connectors whose stamp of approval will lend credibility to your efforts. It’s important that you get to know these people. Final and most interesting conclusion which is that, because relationships matter more than we sometimes like to admit, old formats may perservere longer than one thinks they should.
So albums will not disappear as quickly as Bob Lefsetz says. Because the relationships you need to cultivate to generate awareness need a coherent narrative and the album provides that and therefore it’s still the best way to get noticed. Put differently, the anchor piece of content on Pitchfork is still the review of an album. So if you want to get noticed, you need one of those (an album) and you need the relationship in place to get the review. Kinda convoluted. But true.
April 29th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
[...] keep coming back to the value of personal relationships. The value of a web of trusted referrals. People to help you out. People that will do stuff [...]