In the two upcoming posts I want to refer to two cases, which aren’t hot news any more, but which prove how traditional players in the music industry have problems with handling the new rules of surviving in an internet-driven digital age.

The first case is about the popular country singer Taylor Swift. Last September she was still the darling of the general public after she was rudely interrupted by Kanye West during the VMAs (MTV’s video awards). However, more recently she made a bad impression during the Grammys by embarrassingly singing out of tune. The story spread like wildfire on the internet. The Washington Post posted a sampling of Twitter comments about her performance.

@Borowitz Report Satan Chooses Taylor Swift Performance as Ringtone

@questlove dear kanye im sorry

@Borowitz Report: God Hoping Taylor Swift Does Not Thank Him

@jfdulac Wifey, listening to Taylor on the #Grammys: “She couldn’t even get into the chamber choir at my high school singing like that.”

@Borowitz Report T-Pain Hired to Autotune Taylor Swift at 2011

@idolator How suitable: that guy from #americanidol introduces @taylorswift13, who ” we have to say ” sounds a little pitchy, dawg.

@harvilla taylor swift’s career singing on live television should’ve gotten an “in memorium” nod

@Kiarri Last year the big battle was between Rihanna & C Brown. This year the fight was between Taylor Swift & pitch.

@jjjrrr Dear Taylor Swift, the music store called, you left your pitch on the counter with your lip gloss

@jeffstearns Taylor Swift? More like Francis Scott Off-Key, am I right?

@feliciapollack Taylor Swift can’t sing. She sounds like she’s playing “Rock Band” in her basement.

@JenRBoyd Oh boy. Taylor Swift’s pitch is flatter than a pancake tonight. Bless her heart

@ianfrancisbush I am starting a disaster relief fund to get Taylor Swift a chromatic tuner.

As Lefsetz writes in his analysis, the abominable performance didn’t get much attention in the mainstream media, but the story spread quickly on Facebook and Twitter. Some even say that it might ruin her career. Taylor Swift is a product of traditional music business: a young girl who is surrounded by a team making marketing plans in a meeting room. As Lefsetz puts it in his typical style:

So you can sit in your marketing meeting, calculate how you’re going to placate radio, but there’s a shitstorm blowing somewhere you’re not even paying attention. (…) Yes, as oldsters decry Twitter as a waste of time, a place where those with no life delineate what they ate for breakfast, these same supposed peons are ripping their clients a new asshole.

In the digital world, authenticity is key. You can’t fake anything and you must deliver when you are on stage. Taylor Swift underdelivered and the public formed its opinion. People have always had their opinions, but until recently they would only say it to their family sitting in the living room. Nowadays they post their opinion on Twitter or Facebook and they reach an audience of a couple of 100 people. Those people maybe even didn’t see the show, but watch the YouTube movie and further spread the story amoung their audience.

Exactly that is the power of new media such as Facebook and Twitter, and it is a power that may be underestimated by most traditional music business people, who carefully construct a tv and radio image for a young, unexperienced artist like Taylor Swift. Don’t understand me wrong: clear thinking about your image and shaping a thorough communication strategy is also very important in new media. But be aware of the fact that this image must be authentic. You must be able to keep it consistent in all circumstances, since there could be someone with a camera standing behind every corner, ready to upload your faux pas to YouTube. Show your vulnerability, be real, and don’t grow faster than you are capable of. That is probably the lesson that we should learn from the Taylor Swift story.

This is so so true!!

I just repost the whole message from Hypebot:

“Musicians should concentrate on being musicians.”

“How can I make music when I’m expected to spend all my time on Twitter and Facebook?”

I’m sorry if this comes as a surprise, but it has never been enough to just make great music. Every generation of musicians has had to face their own challenges which forced them to go beyond creation and recording.

Frank Sinatra made movies to reach a bigger fan base. Elvis’s hips and haircut were as much a part of his success as his recordings were. David Bowie learned that image and imagery could propel him to greater heights. After Saturday Night Fever, dance steps helped propel many live shows and for a time MTV made being visual an important component of success.

Whether it’s getting in a van and giving an endless string of memorable performances or sitting on the phone for hours talking to journalists, there have always been skills beyond just making music that, if not required, certainly made success more likely. – Bruce Houghton

So when Amanda Palmer tweets her latest exploits and Imogen Heap spends hours answering questions in a forum, they are just doing a modern version – their own version – of costumes, haircuts and dance lessons.

Great music is where it all begins and ends, but in between the path to success is always changing.

Some time ago I talked about the problem of speaking two languages on social platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

Many of us Dutch-speaking social media users have to deal with a situation where we express ourselves much better in our native tongue, but we also have a bunch of international followers and we don’t want to overload them with messages in a language which they can’t understand.

I think I found a humble solution for this problem on the Twitter platform. I registered an account on Twitter, @nlds, which is short for ‘Nederlands’ (Dutch). This is the deal:

Of course, this only works if all my Dutch-speaking followers start to follow @nlds. I’ll start tweeting about that and I hope everybody will like my idea (and retweet it).

It’s quite clear that this system can also be applied to other languages. Just look for a straightforward and short twittername. Or maybe Twitter itself should take care of this?

Steve Lawson from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

In de bovenstaande video wordt echt eens heel goed verwoord waarom Twitter interessant is voor muzikanten. Andrew Dubber interviewt Steve Lawson. Ik wil zelf wijzen op twee dingen:

Stel: je vertrekt binnenkort naar een zonnige bestemming om rustig op het strand te liggen. Of je hebt om een of andere reden heel veel tijd om urenlang lekker te lezen. Maar je hebt uiteraard geen zin om je nog eens aan Anna Karenina of De Naam Van De Roos te wagen. Nee, je wil als ambitieus muzikant helemaal mee zijn met de nieuwe ontwikkelingen in de muziekbusiness en eindelijk eens begrijpen waar al die fuzz rond Twitter op slaat. Dan heb ik interessante leesvoertips voor je klaar.

Je zult op dat tropische strand wel een computertje of Kindle nodig hebben… Of je steekt een pak uitgeprinte pdf’s in je valies.

Hier vind je een hoop boeiende pdf’s om je weer helemaal up te daten over wat er gaande is in de muziekwereld.

Bob Baker duikt ook nog eens op met een uiterst uitgebreide pool van resources over Twitter en muziek.

Lezen maar!

Ik houd me zelf niet bijzonder goed aan effectieve blogging guidelines zoals daar zijn: ‘Schrijf blogposts volgens regelmatige intervallen’. Het is behoorlijk lang stil geweest – als je met veel dingen tegelijk bezig bent, is het soms moeilijk om voor alles tijd te maken – en nu schrijf ik heel kort na elkaar.

Vandaag waren er namelijk een aantal interessante dingen te lezen en daar wil ik vandaag toch zeker even naar linken. Behoorlijk uiteenlopende onderwerpen.

1. Goed plannen en duidelijke doelen stellen
Ariel Hyatt geeft op Music Think Tank een aantal goede raadgevingen om in 2009 je efficiëntie te verhogen. Een beetje the American touch uiteraard, maar soms helpt het wel.

2. Twitter apps
Indie Music Tech heeft het over vijf Twitter applicaties die je als muzikant van pas kunnen komen.

3. Music bloggers
Hypebot legt je uit hoe je muziekbloggers moet benaderen. Zoals ongeveer alle contacten op het internet: voorzichtig en stapje voor stapje, zoals je met je nieuwe vlam zou daten.

It is quite obvious that Facebook is the fastest spreading social network at the moment. According to Inside Facebook the growth of the platform last year was enornmous in some countries: Italy up 2900%, Spain up 600%, France up 400%, Switzerland up 400%, Argentina up 2000%, and Indonesia up by 600%. The Facebook Marketing Bible shows even more detailed data. In Canada 30% of the population is on Facebook, in Norway 25% and in Australia 18%.

That made me take a look into the possibilities of Facebook for musicians and bands. How can you as an artist optimize your presence on Facebook and enhance the interaction wit your fans?

In fact, there are three types of pages available on Facebook:
- a personal profile page
- a group page
- a fan page

Alas, if you want do something meaningful with Facebook as an artist, you need all three of them.

For a long time groups were the only way on Facebook to gather people around a shared interest, such as a band. Unfortunately, there is not much to show on a group page. You can feature a group picture and a text description, there is a discussion board and a wall, and that’s all. There is no space for ‘rich’ media such as photos, videos and music, quite important aspects for a group of fans who gather around a music band. On the other hand, it is a big advantage of a Facebook group that you can message all the members, who get the message in their inbox, and that you can create events and invite your group members (interesting if you have gigs to announce).

Because Facebook was aware of the shortcomings of groups, the platform launched fan pages in November 2007. The great thing of a fan page is that you can add ‘rich media’ to your page (photos, videos, music) and all the interesting applications (such as iLike) that you can also add to your personal profile page. Fantastic, you’ve set up your fan page, a couple of hundred or thousand Facebook users acknowledge that they are fan of your band. But what’s next? How do you communicate with them, if you have something interesting to say about the band? You can send an ‘update’ to your fans. Unfortunately, these updates are buried somewhere far away in the fourth tab of your inbox (the ‘Updates’ tab) and you get never notified about a new update. I think nobody ever reads them and most people don’t even know they exist. Conclusion: communication zero. It is better to have a Facebook group and send news via a group message. Those messages get delivered to the main tab of the Inbox and you always get notified on login how many new messages are still unread.

In the beginning I said you need three pages to promote your band on Facebook. Yes, you also need a personal profile page, because there is a very powerful communication tool there that you will not find on group or fan pages: status updates. These short messages in which you tell what you are doing, will really become the most popular way to communicate and stay in touch with people. The hype of so-called ‘life streaming’ is also the essential part of the fast rise of Twitter. Dedicated fans of your band would be very happy to receive message like ‘Ready to go on stage’ or ‘In the studio to work on new songs’ in their Facebook newsfeed. Unfortunately, this is not possible with a fan or group page. In fact, it is forbidden by Facebook’s Terms of Agreement to set up a personal profile, if this profile represents a band or group and not a real individual. But what will you do if you want to make use of the powerful status updates?

To conclude, I have the following advice for the Facebook developers, if they really want their users to interact with fan pages of music bands and artists:
- Make it possible for fan page administrators to send messages directly into the fan’s inbox, such as with groups, and not into the updates tab
- Add the possibility of status updates to fan pages, status updates which can be delivered to the fan’s news feed
- Make it possible for bands to automaticaly deliver news to Facebook via RSS or external services such as Ping.fm.
- If everything is set up in this way, offer the opportunity to merge group pages, fan pages and personal profiles which were actually set up by a band

I know Facebook is very anxious about people being spammy and will probably think that their users’ inbox and news feed will become to cluttered with al those updates and messages. The solution is simple: let users (un)check a tick box when they decide to become a fan.

- Do you want to receive messages into your inbox from this page?
- Do you want to receive status updates into your newsfeed from this page?

Also, give users the opportunity to change their settings every time they get a message or a status update. In this way, users will decide themselves whether the page is too spammy or not and this is completely in line with the Facebook philosophy.

Facebook might also object to my suggestion of importing news via RSS or external services, because they want everyone to spend as much time as possible on the Facebook platform. However, it is ridiculous to expect that artists will have an online presence on Facebook alone. They have to be on all important platforms. Therefore, it is in everyone’s interest to make the life of artists easier. If they don’t have to spend time on technical disadvantages, this will improve the quality of the content and musicians are always considered as superb content creators around which many people gather. In other words, such an approach will become a benefit for artists AND Facebook users.

As you noticed, last week I started blogging in English. In the future I will write posts in Dutch (for my local audience) and in English (for a more international audience). Therefore, I created a new RSS feed with only the English posts. Feel free to switch to the English feed.

The original feed wil contain both Dutch and English posts. I guess the Dutch-speaking audience will be happy to read in both languages. Drop me a line if you want me to set-up an only-Dutch RSS feed (Laat het me weten als je enkel de Nederlandstalige posts wil ontvangen!).

Some time ago, I also pimped my side bar with icons which can help you to find me on Twitter, Delicious, MySpace and Facebook.

I wish you a happy reading!

Yes, this is my first post on this blog in English. Recently, I faced an important dilemma. Should I stick to my local audience and keep communicating in Dutch or should I take grasp of all the opportunities that are crucial to the internet and take a global approach? This is a dilemma which is also an issue for every band with a presence on the internet. It’s absolutely great that, due the international aspect of internet, my band Colorless Green Ideas has fans in Russia, Brasil and China. But how should I communicate with them? If I always write and talk in English, what is the chance that I alienate my local audience and lose a part of my cultural authenticity? For authenticity is an important factor in the image of a music band.

A discussion about Twitter on Music Think Tank was the trigger for my considerations. People told me that I shouldn’t worry about local European or Belgian followers on Twitter and that I should think globally.

Fine, but the first problem is language. My mother tongue is Dutch, and not English (a problem many English natives don’t think about). Until recently I twittered in Dutch, because it’s easier for me to write witty, catchy status updates in Dutch. Not because I am awfully bad in English. I’m really very sensitive to good language and writing, and that’s why I feel that I cannot bring the subtleties which I master in Dutch writing into an English text.

The second thing is connectivity and authenticity. At this moment, most people who follow me, also speak Dutch. This is certainly true because I post my updates simultaneously to FaceBook and Twitter via Ping.fm. It’s a little bit ‘fake’ that I speak to them in English (which I do now, most of the time). Wouldn’t this make them to disconnect?

Some things are just too local for other people to understand. Last week I wrote the following comment “Hilke heeft stramme spieren van de boekenbeurs af te breken.” First I need a dictionary to translate this into English. I know “spieren” are “muscles”, but “stram”? In the dictionary I find “stiff joints” would be a good translation. But the sound and alliteration of “stramme spieren” is something I lose in the translation… What a pity! Next is “boekenbeurs”. This is a book fair, which has a really big appeal in my region. It is the biggest event for writers, publishers and book lovers in Flanders. Thus, in English this would be “Stiff joints after taking down the book fair”. But this is completely pointless. In the Dutch version this makes people curious, because Boekenbeurs is something they can relate to and they’ll wonder what I was doing there (As a matter of fact, my employer, a small organisation for writers, had an nice stand there, an oriental hotel searching voor 1001 love letters. I helped taking down all the boards of the construction and carrying al the stuff into the van).

Another example is a blogpost I wrote some time ago on my band’s blog. It was about how I should approach people who I just meet on the street to talk them about my music. I wrote that I regularly travel by train and use the metro and I mentioned some specific geographical data, which make sense for people who live in my region. The main theme of the post was how I recognize the people who could be interested in my music. Can I pick them out just by judging their clothes and looks? I talked about a girl who sat in front of me in the train. She didn’t seem to be the right type, but might this be a misjudgement? I wrote she was reading a comic based on ‘De Avonden’ by Gerard Reve, a very famous novel in Dutch literature, and afterwards she glanced through a catalogue of Mango, a clothing store. And that detail made the whole picture: she was the type of girl that wore clothes by Mango, a brand that I don’t relate to drum’n'bass, the type of music I make.

To sum up, I wrote an engaging (I hope at least) story about this girl on the train and put some details in it that gave it an authentic flavor, made it a human episode from my real life, embedded in my own environment and cultural background. Obviously, I mentioned some data (Antwerp, Groenplaats, Gerard Reve, Mango) that are only comprehensible for people who share my cultural background and don’t make much sense for an international audience. Should I have written the blogpost in English? No, it wouldn’t make much sense. But then, how can I engage with those few fans in Slovenia, the UK and Brasil?

To conclude, this is my dilemma: should I address an international audience and write things that cannot go as deep into elements of my specific environment, culture, etc.? Or should I stick to my local, Dutch-speaking core audience, where I can show more authenticity, linguistic cleverness and relate to ‘insider’s information’?

I decided that in the near future I will experiment with both to see what the results might be. From now on, I mostly twitter in English. On this blog I will keep writing in Dutch for my Dutch-speaking audience, but sometimes I will write English posts (in the category ‘English’) on matters that have an ‘international’ relevance, like this very post you are reading now.

Just give me some time to reorganize the RSS feeds as a result of this new approach. In the meantime you can spin around your thoughts on this subject matter in the comments. How do you solve the dilemma between a global approach and cultural authenticity?

De laatste tijd ben ik op heel wat tips gestoten over Twitter. Als we hier in Europa de Amerikaanse golf blijven volgen, wordt dit the next big thing na de inval van MySpace en Facebook. Vooral interessant zijn de informatiebronnen die het bekijken vanuit het perspectief van een artiest of van een ‘brand’. Ik vermeld al even twee boeiende links.

Geeks guide to promote yourself with Twitter
An artist’s guide to Twitter

Het is wel even lezen. Ik moet het nog wat laten bezinken, mijn eigen Twitter wat verder opvijzelen en dan kom ik binnenkort misschien nog eens met een goede samenvatting.

Het lijkt me alvast een goed idee dat jullie mij gaan volgen op Twitter: @colorlessgreen