policybythenumbers: Culture

Mapping the sneakernet

Friday, April 3, 2015

In March, internet researcher and designer An Xiao Mina published a fascinating piece on The New Inquiry about "the sneakernet," a concept that addresses the nuances of connectivity and the myriad social methods through which people exchange culture, access, and information. In the article, she shares an anecdote from a research trip to Northern Uganda, a region where residents had no access to the electric grid or running water and access to 3G internet was limited by both availability and affordability. She writes:

At night, residents turn on their radios, and those who can afford Chinese feature phones play mp3s. One day, I heard familiar lyrics:

Hey, I just met you
And this is crazy
But here’s my number
So call me maybe

I turned my head. A number of young people gathered around a woman rocking out to Carly Rae Jepsen’s "Call Me Maybe," a song that owes so much of its success to the viral power of YouTube and Justin Bieber. The phone's owner wasn't accessing it via the Internet. Rather, she had an mp3 acquired through a Bluetooth transfer with a friend.

Indeed, the song was just one of many media files I saw on people's phones: There were Chinese kung fu movies, Nigerian comedies, and Ugandan pop music. They were physically transferred, phone to phone, Bluetooth to Bluetooth, USB stick to USB stick, over hundreds of miles by an informal sneakernet of entertainment media downloaded from the Internet or burned from DVDs, bringing media that;s popular in video halls—basically, small theaters for watching DVDs—to their own villages and huts.

In geographic distribution charts of Carly Rae Jepsen's virality, you'd be hard pressed to find impressions from this part of the world. Nor is this sneakernet practice unique to the region. On the other end of continent, in Mali, music researcher Christopher Kirkley has documented a music trade using Bluetooth transfers that is similar to what I saw in northern Uganda. These forms of data transfer and access, though quite common, are invisible to traditional measures of connectivity and Big Data research methods. Like millions around the world with direct internet connections, young people in "unconnected" regions are participating in the great viral products of the Internet, consuming mass media files and generating and transferring their own media.

What does this have to do with public policy? At the end of the piece, An explains how understanding connectivity as a spectrum, rather than a binary, can inform policies and strategies for outreach and access. To illustrate this, she uses a vivid water analogy:

Like water, the Internet is vast, familiar and seemingly ubiquitous but with extremes of unequal access. Some people have clean, unfettered and flowing data from invisible but reliable sources. Many more experience polluted and flaky sources, and they have to combine patience and filters to get the right set of data they need. Others must hike dozens of miles of paved and dirt roads to access the Internet like water from a well, ferrying it back in fits and spurts when the opportunity arises. And yet more get trickles of data here and there from friends and family, in the form of printouts, a song played on a phone’s speaker, an interesting status update from Facebook relayed orally, a radio station that features stories from the Internet.

Like water from a river, data from the Internet can be scooped up and irrigated and splashed around in novel ways. Whether it’s north of the Nile in Uganda or south of Market St. in the Bay Area, policies and strategies for connecting the "unconnected" should take into account the vast spectrum of ways that people find and access data. Packets of information can be distributed via SMS and mobile 3G but also pieces of paper, USB sticks and Bluetooth. Solar-powered computer kiosks in rural areas can have simple capabilities for connecting to mobile phones’ SD cards for upload and download. Technology training courses can start with a more nuanced base level of understanding, rather than assuming zero knowledge of the basics of computing and network transfer. These are broad strokes, of course; the specifics of motivation and methods are complex and need to be studied carefully in any given instance. But the very channels that ferry entertainment media can also ferry health care information, educational material and anything else in compact enough form.

An Xiao Mina is a product owner at Meedan and an internet researcher with The Civic Beat.

Visualization: The Atlantic's Class-divided Cities Series

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

In January, Atlantic editor Richard Florida kicked off a series of posts called the "Class-divided Cities." Each post includes an analysis and map visualizations of socio-economic polarization within different areas of US cities.This divide is seen most clearly in where members of each class live. A recent report from the Pew Research Center found that residential segregation between upper- and lower- income households has risen in 27 of America's 30 largest metros over the past several decades. Compounding this polarization between rich and poor neighborhoods, the share of middle-income neighborhoods has declined substantially.[...]To get a better sense of the scale of the divide in American cities, my research team at the Martin Prosperity Institute — relying on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey — plotted and mapped the residential locations of today's three major classes: the shrinking middle of blue-collar workers in manufacturing, transportation, and maintenance; the rising numbers of highly paid knowledge, professional, and creative workers in the creative class; and the even larger and faster-growing ranks of lower-paid, lower-skill service workers. For the next few weeks, I'll be exploring the various divides in some of America's largest cities and metros.The series began with New York, and yesterday, San Francisco became the 11th.

List of city analyses, in the order in which they were posted:

ZERO1: At the Intersection of art & technology

Monday, October 22, 2012

A few weeks ago, we announced our co-sponsorship of a fellowship with ZERO1, an organization that aims to inform strategies for research, development, and creativity via provoking challenges that address the complex world in which we live. ZERO1 recently launched their Garage, envisioned as a platform for creative minds from the arts and culture, business, science and academic sectors to interact, engage, and empower change. There’s a natural synergy here: the Internet and new digital technologies and platforms are creating extremely fertile ground for artists to create, share, finance and promote their work. Kickstarter alone boasts 30,000 successfully funded projects, the vast majority coming from artistic, content-creating categories: music, film & video, design, art, theatre, and writing & publishing. ZERO1’s massive network from a huge range of fields could have a powerful impact on public policy issues affecting art, technology and culture.We asked Joel Slayton, ZERO1 Executive Director, a few questions about how and why ZERO1 works and what they hope to accomplish.Q. What do you hope to achieve through the launch of the ZERO1 Garage? What kind of change to you hope to inspire through the launch of the Garage and through supporting artists? A. Facing the challenges of the 21st century requires new forms of creativity and innovation from climate change to human rights to sustainability. The mission of the ZERO1 Garage is to apply the principles of artistic creativity to these real world challenges. We believe that art, at the frontier of technology, broadens our critical understanding of the world by provoking new ideas, experimentation, and creative strategies. Artists inspire the possibilities that shape contemporary culture, sustain what matters most, and open and motivate society to better itself. The ZERO1 Garage is envisioned as a platform for risk-takers from the arts and culture, business, science and academic sectors to interact, engage, and spur innovative change: part incubator, part research lab, part exhibitions center.Q. Art and technology live in increasingly overlapping spheres, with heavy influences on each other and dramatic shifts in the content communicated through each. How as the internet specifically changed the way that people create and consume art? A. We believe that artists—artists/engineers, artists-scientist, artists-designers, artists/technologist—are the new provocateurs, and an untapped source of social innovation. Clearly, things get interesting where disciplines rub up against each other. ZERO1 is first and foremost a network supporting these sorts of collaborations. What we hope to achieve is to harness the tension/friction between disparate fields from arts to industry to explore how these intersections can yield new and fresh ideas. Contemporary art is informed and inspired by a rapidly evolving techno-cultural public(s) which is, of course, shaped by the realities and challenges of the Internet and its impact on society (local/global). The Internet continues to be a serious terrain for artistic exploration including issues of protocol, creative process, subject matter, and new forms of participatory and social engagement. The role of the artist is that of the provocateur, whose goal is to challenge the status quo, disrupt expectations and to inspire alternative solutions.Q. Artistic production can be a type of “data,” qualitatively and creatively informing policy debates by introducing new perspectives and modes of thought and consideration for an issue. In your view, what’s one of the most pressing policy issues and how does art, science, design or technology inform that debate? What kind of policy action do you hope that creativity can inspire?A. One of the most pressing questions involves understanding how to shape open data policy interactions to push the boundaries of online or networked culture by addressing contemporary social challenges. Realizing this ambition requires innovative public/private partnerships that serve to enable new opportunities for cultural production and therefore beg the question of new legal rights and mechanisms that will ultimately empower the public. Artistic experimentation (as it was for with the emergence of the Web) will unquestionably inspire deeper understanding and critical assessment leading to more robust and informed open data policy initiatives.For more information on ZERO1 and their ongoing Biennial celebration’s exhibitions and performances in the Bay Area, visit www.zero1biennial.org.

Measuring the Social Benefit from Digitizing the World’s Out-of-Print Books

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Rahul Telang, Professor of Information Systems and Management and Michael D. Smith, Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University.The ability to digitize out-of-print books has raised numerous contentious issues like copyright ownership, the market potential of digitized work, and who controls of the resulting revenues. These issues are even more troublesome when the original copyright holder cannot be readily identified. Throughout this debate the focus has been squarely on the rights of the authors and publishing companies. However, digitization projects can generate tremendous social value (benefits to society at large: publishers, retailers, and consumers). We have been working on a project to estimate the economic value of digitizing out of print books. Our motivation is to provide economic estimates of the potential benefits of digitization to society.Historically, due to the fixed costs of printing, books have been printed in large print runs, and reprinted as necessary based on expected demand. Once demand dropped below a threshold, the book would go "out of print." In a digital world, while there are fixed costs associated with digitizing the book, they are significantly lower than the print. And once digitized, the cost of producing an additional copy is essentially zero. This allows older books to remain available to the reading public, not to mention the advantages of digital books in terms of searchability, portability on digital devices, and the wide selection and immediate gratification.To estimate the value of digitization, we matched a sample of out-of-print books to a sample of observationally similar books that were previously out-of-print books but were recently released as eBooks. Using standard techniques in economics and statistics, we matched the books in the two samples to infer potential sales and associated societal benefits of digitizing out of print books.We find that the value associated with each individual book is, as expected, relatively small. A typical out of print book can expect about 1.5 sales ($12 revenue) per week. In a “print world,” such small profits would render them unviable. But since digitization changes the economics of “printing,” we find that aggregating this value across the estimated 2.7 million out of print books produces large potential gains. Even with conservative approach, we find that the total revenue gain is close to $740 million per year. Accounting for all costs still leaves approximately $460 million in profits to the publishers and authors. Moreover, we find that the expected value to consumers (a.k.a. the consumer surplus) is about $860 million per year. While these estimates are approximations, the key point is that such an exercise could result in enormous public benefits to society. Unfortunately, current copyright laws that served us well in a physical world are straining at the seams to adapt to a digital world. Copyright laws that allow users to share, loan, rent, and browse physical books are not readily transferrable to a digital environment. How to balance these capabilities in the new digital world intelligently and fairly is vital to releasing the full potential of digital marketplaces, which as we show, are large.

Measuring innovation and creativity in the Internet era

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Innovation is not just about science and technology. It's about arts and culture, too. Technological development and the arts have always had a symbiotic relationship. For example, the videocassette recorder (VCR) led to new markets for movies and television. Computer animation was once considered by some to be just a novelty until Pixar came along and redefined the entire genre of animated film.But how should creativity be measured in the Internet era? Many traditional measures of creativity tended to focus on particular industries, rather than content creation by individuals. This made some sense in the past—producing and widely distributing content was expensive, something only a few broadcasters, newspapers, record labels, and studios were capable of. But today the Internet allows anyone, anywhere to instantly connect with an audience of billions, and more content is being produced on more platforms than ever before.Researchers are only starting to come to grips with this challenge, and today the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the international business school INSEAD have made an important contribution. In its annual Global Innovation Index—a report that ranks 141 countries based on their innovation capabilities and results—WIPO adds new measures of creativity online. Specifically, the report measures the creation of online content by including two metrics focused on the creation of Internet sites—generic top-level domains and country codes TLDs—and two metrics focused on online participation in the creation of content—Wikipedia edits and YouTube uploads.This does not solve the problem of how to measure online creativity, let alone its relationship to innovation. But we hope more people will follow this new report's lead and develop methodologies for quantifying online creativity and its contributions to innovation. Robust data are the bedrock of public policy, and 20th century metrics are inadequate measures for the 21st century economy.As part of the report, WIPO also gave Google the opportunity to offer our thoughts on the role that the Internet plays in driving creativity, and ways to improve measurement:...output metrics need to more rigorously account for the sheer quantity of art being produced. Today, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, and there are 440 blogs for every autobiography available on Amazon. Yet, if one is measuring only traditional, professional distribution channels, this creativity would not be part of the picture. You can read our chapter, and the whole report, here.Derek Slater is a policy manager at Google.

Off the charts: Examining musicians’ earning capacity in a changing landscape

Friday, June 1, 2012

Many observers are quick to broadly declare technological change a good thing for musicians, especially when compared with the music industry's past of bottlenecks and gatekeepers. While it's true that musicians' access to the marketplace has greatly improved, one thing is less clear: how have these technological and social changes impacted musicians' ability to generate revenue based on their creative work? For the past year and a half, the nonprofit Future of Music Coalition has conducted a research project called Artist Revenue Streams: a multi-method, cross-genre examination of how musicians' revenue streams are changing, and why. We gathered data on how musicians make money from disparate sources via 80 in-person interviews with a variety of musician types; financial case studies based on actual income and expense statements from a handful of full-time musicians; and a widely distributed online survey that was completed by over 5,300 US-based musicians and composers. Read more about our methodology and population of study here.One of our stated goals is to better understand how technological and social changes of the past decade have impacted musicians. Whether it's a composer’s ability to write, record, and digitally deliver tracks to a filmmaker in Los Angeles, a band selling music directly to fans through its website, or a jazz player communicating with fans on Twitter, our findings suggest that emerging technologies have had a significant impact—both positive and negative—on the way musicians organize their careers and how they make money.The chart below highlights one set of findings from our survey: musicians' comfort level using technologies for common musician-related activities.

Generally, 50% to 70% of survey respondents were "comfortable" or "very comfortable" employing technology for these tasks. The chart shows the greatest consensus around using technology for promotion (68.7%) and for connecting with fans (69.4%). There are many ways that musicians can easily use technology to do this, whether via Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook. A healthy portion—56.9%—were equally comfortable using technology to distribute and/or sell music. But it's worth noting that 31.2% of survey respondents answered that they are not using technologies to distribute or sell their music. Some readers might find this puzzling since uploading tracks to TuneCore or building a Bandcamp page is technically easy and inexpensive. But for some artists, questions about how technology enables fan connections or music sales are simply not applicable because of differences in career structures. For example, a chart-topping pop musician's career varies greatly from that of a first-chair orchestra violinist, or a professional session player, or a film and TV composer. There is a huge array of music creators in the US, some whose careers don't involve building fan bases, selling merchandise, or being directly involved with recorded music sales.This subset of non-users is a singular example of a key overall finding from this Artist Revenue Streams work: the community of music creators is large, diverse, and specialized. This simple realization may be the one of the most important takeaways of this research. It encourages advocates, technologists, and music fans alike to think more broadly about musicians, about the range of engagement with technology, and to more seriously consider the issues affecting different parts of the community. More importantly, it's a clear mandate to include an array of musician stakeholders in the policymaking process.Kristin Thomson is a consultant for the Future of Music Coalition and co-director of the Artist Revenue Streams project. Access more project data at money.futureofmusic.org.

Visualizing Economic Recovery: G+ Hangout Debate

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

At the end of March, we announced a data visualization competition we’re co-sponsoring with the Guardian Datastore.On May 15, we’ll gather three economic experts—Martha Lane Fox (lastminute.com, Antigone), John Kao (Institute for Large Scale Innovation, Daily Beast), and Larry Elliott (Guardian)—in a Google+ Hangout to discuss ways that the world’s economies might recover from the current recession as well as which countries are creating positive climates for new technologies. The Guardian’s Simon Rogers will chair the Hangout debate.The Hangout be broadcast via Hangouts on Air, which will stream live to Google+ and to YouTube.We want to know what you want to hear our experts talk about! Use the comment field on the Guardian post to let us know!

Arts, science, and reaching 10^X

Friday, April 13, 2012

It’s hard to comprehend the scale of the Internet. One hour of video uploaded to YouTube every second, 250 photos uploaded to Facebook every day, 440 blogs for each autobiography available on Amazon, and more than 1 trillion unique webpages on top of that.

But in the aggregate, what is the power of the Internet? What do all those numbers really mean?

This isn’t a new sort of question. Artists and scientists have worked together for a long time to try to make sense of the complexity in the world. One classic example is Powers of 10, the 1968 short film written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames that the Library of Congress has since selected for preservation for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."Today, the film may seem odd. It’s not particularly magical to see a camera zoom 10^24 meters up and shrink down to the size of a proton in a carbon atom.

But at the time the film was released, its producers saw it differently. The filmmaker’s grandson had this to say about the intent of the film’s producer, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM): "IBM believed that if you educate society, you not only do a positive good, you also create a group of people who are better able to appreciate the work and products of IBM." In this case, “The film conveys a holistic vision of the universe and really helps people grasp the concept of 'scale' and its importance in understanding our world.”

IBM couldn’t explain scale just by writing an equation or drawing a diagram for people. Facts alone wouldn’t impact most people. They had to turn those facts into knowledge. They had to show people “a holistic vision of the universe,” not just tell them about it.

And IBM wasn’t alone. For instance, in 1966, Stewart Brand led a campaign to get NASA to release the very first photos of the Earth as seen from space, in hopes that the images would help people see the world differently.

IBM and Brand both believed that their blending of science and art could lead people to see themselves as part of a much bigger community, and that the collective action of that community would be more powerful than the sum of the individual parts.

So what could demonstrate the power of the internet community to itself? I don’t know, but if we can figure it out then the sum might be greater than the individual parts.

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager

My data’s bigger than your data

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Perhaps the hottest lingo in Silicon Valley these days is “big data.” Once upon a time, the only folks who needed to worry about massive, unstructured (or semi-structured) data sets were scientists running weather simulators or investment banks designing high-frequency trading strategies. Not anymore.

The New York Times recently ran an article on the increasing ubiquity of sprawling data sets, and the growing need for analysts who know how to work with them. Yes, some of this is hype. But the underlying trend is an incredibly important one, and it’s not a fad. I’m talking about the rise of data-driven decision-making.

For millions of years, humans have gotten by on our skill at making semi-informed hunches. To be fair, as a species we’re really good at it. We don’t always understand how everything connects, but a combination of intuition, experience and logic leads us to reasonable conclusions more often than not.

The world we live in, however, is getting more complicated all the time. Just about everything moves faster, and societies and industries are more interconnected every day. At the same time, the amount of “data noise” is growing exponentially. The 2011 Digital Universe Study reports that in 2011, humans created of 1.8 zetabytes of data (1 zetabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes). By 2020, we’ll be producing 50 times that every year. Extracting meaningful signals from that earsplitting noise, and using that information to make smart, informed decisions, is among the most critical challenges of the 21st century.

Needless to say, the arts are not at the vanguard of this trend. Art itself is among the most analysis-resistant of human activities, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that our field tends toward a fondness for intuition and a distrust of cold analysis. Alas, this is a luxury we cannot afford if we want to remain relevant in the future. To thrive in a big data world, funders, policymakers and even individual arts administrators need more and better information about the context in which their work takes place.

Fractured Atlas has been working on this problem for a couple of years now, on a couple of different fronts. The centerpiece of our strategy is Archipelago, which is a technology platform for cultural sector data aggregation, visualization, reporting and analysis. Archipelago cross-references data from the IRS, the US Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Cultural Data Project, mailing list co-ops, Spaces and original research, among other sources. The result is a multi-faceted tool that can help funders, policymakers, advocates and even individual organizations get a more comprehensive picture of the cultural assets and activity in a given geographic region. Think of it as Moneyball for the arts!

Of course, we’re not the only ones tackling big data in the arts, nor are we naive enough to think that any single tool can crack this nut. But hopefully we’re doing our part to nudge the field towards a better informed, more analytical future.

Posted by Adam Huttler, Fractured Atlas's founder and Executive Director

Urban planning and artistic culture

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Roughly 600 cities account for 60% of global GDP, according to McKinsey, and while continuing urbanization creates its own set of challenges, it also brings with it significant opportunities to improve the wealth and well-being of people, including artists. It’s important that we start viewing urban planning—including issues like housing policy and zoning ordinances—as part of what will drive a thriving, diverse artistic culture.

Cities are important for artists of all stripes. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser puts a fine point on this in his book The Triumph of the CIty. Big cities mean bigger markets—these large audiences help cover the significant fixed costs of New York’s Broadway, London’s theater district, as well as other acclaimed and costly cultural centers. At the same time, “city size also enables smaller, more experimental live theater to survive. The Second City [comedy troupe] began in 1959 in cheap Chicago space that had once been a Chinese laundry." Second City went on to act as a farm league for shows like Saturday Night Live; more generally, “live performance is connected to the spread of innovation in cities because the first stirrings of a new artistic phenomenon are almost always performed live long before they are distributed electronically.”

Today, the Internet is creating more economic opportunities for artists, including those who can’t make it to the big city. The suburbanization of America in the late 20th century was paralleled by the rise of mass artistic products—think popstars and blockbuster movies that served a very broad audience. For artists that have niche audiences (say, ukelele players), the costs of producing, distributing, and marketing one’s work could have been prohibitively expensive to reach a broad set of potential fans, and, without a large local audience, that art may have simply gone unproduced. Now, artists and fans can connect online in new ways that were never before possible.

If we want to create a thriving, diverse artistic culture, that means more than focusing on copyright and media policy. It also means focusing on how we design cities and create incentives for how and where people live. In other words, if the rent is indeed too damn high, then that has consequences for culture as well.
posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager

Think Quarterly: 21st Century Copyright

Monday, April 2, 2012

At Google, we rely on data. But numbers don’t get (most) people excited, stories do. And we want to get people as excited about the web’s potential as we are. That’s why we launched Think Quarterly—to share our insights and inspirations.

Our latest issue is dedicated to Creativity. The web is the driving force behind an unprecedented creative revolution. There are now more than 800 exabytes of digital information in the world—videos, photos, music, text. Sixty hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. This is our creative output; the sheer volume is overwhelming.

This raises important questions, which senior vice president and general counsel Kent Walker explores in “21st Century Copyright.” How do we encourage the democratization of creativity while protecting original work? Which frameworks should we embrace and which do we need to reject? How can technologists, consumers and lawmakers navigate this new world? Read it here.

posted by Allison Mooney, Think Quarterly Editor

Jack and Jill the Innovator, Episode 6

Friday, February 17, 2012

Next up in our Jack and Jill the Innovator video series, which puts a spotlight on a diverse array of innovators and gives them an opportunity to tell their stories: an interview between Jennifer Muhawi and Phesto Dee, two musicians building their careers online.

Both have been professional musicians for over a decade. Since Phesto has been using the web for years and Jennifer recently started building her social media strategy, we thought it’d be interesting for Jennifer to interview Phesto and learn about his successes. The interview was conducted on Google+ and recorded with Camtasia.
The discussion tracks some of the key themes of the Future of Music Coalition’s Artist Revenue Streams project (which we wrote about recently). Phesto has used the Internet to reach his audience, build a brand and make money. That said, as with any technology, there are also new challenges. In Jennifer’s case, she points out that she now has an abundance of options to reach her fans directly, and it can be hard to know which one is best for her. But artists are adapting to the medium, and the ones that do are reaping increasing rewards, both personal and financial. As Phesto says, interacting with fans can be hard work—but it’s fun, too.posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager at Google

Artist revenue streams: Measuring musicians’ money

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Despite the notion that in many ways the digital age has been detrimental to singers and songwriters, the truth is that more musicians are creating more music and distributing it in more ways than ever before. There are also more opportunities to make money, but how precisely are artists taking advantage of them? There are traditional metrics to measure the state of the music industry, like number of albums sold or number of spins on the radio, but they’re ill-suited for the digital age. They don’t help us understand whether emerging digital technologies are helping artists take home more money.

The Future of Music Coalition’s (FMC) latest research project, Artist Revenue Streams, begins to tackle this challenge by exploring the ways that new technologies, like digital music stores and streaming services, impact US-based musicians’ careers and changed musicians’ earning capacities over time. They plan to release a dozen white papers that explore the specific outcomes from the data they collected via surveys, interviews and financial snapshots.

As in any business and as always in the arts, musicians face challenges in making a profit. At the same time, the report counts 40 different revenue streams that artists can harness, and artists can tailor these to fit their own work. Of the 5,000 artists surveyed by FMC, 42% earned all of their personal annual income from music. The breakdown of this data will ultimately allow artists to assess the value of both traditional and digital technologies and services that contribute to total income for musicians. As both new and established artists plot their course for taking advantage of the increase in digital revenues, understanding which slice of the pie to invest time, energy and money into is an important, strategic move.For example, the first round of FMC’s data explores the changing relationship between artists, brands and earnings, making it clear that musicians’ decisions about a wide range of factors, from merchandising deals to corporate support, have an impact on their artistic reputation with fans, brands and funders. Policymakers can learn a lot from this data, too. Artists and entrepreneurs are creating fantastic new content, products and services online, and existing copyright laws both support and encourage this creativity by protecting artists from infringement and helping them secure fair compensation for their work. The Artist Revenue Streams project specifically has cross-genre and geographic layers of data that enables policymakers to see where laws and the market are already working well—as well as where targeted, narrowly-tailored solutions can help support artists.You can read more about the FMC project here, stay tuned for more findings. Posted by Brittany Smith, Policy Associate at Google

Music metadata in the Commons

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

In 2010, I began a year-long mixed-methods study of MusicBrainz, a community music metadatabase with companion open source software that cleans up the metadata on digital music files. Studies have been conducted on various aspects of commons-based, peer-produced projects, notably free and open source software and Wikipedia. But MusicBrainz is unique: MusicBrainz contributors play the role of information scientists for this data commons, working as digital librarians, standards-setters and catalogers of music.
Understanding what drives people to voluntarily curate and contribute to a data commons benefits our overall understanding of how these commons work. If we find common characteristics among a few successful data communities, we can inform the design of data commons for other domains so that they are more likely to thrive. What follows is a snapshot of some of the more interesting findings. Full report with methodology is here, and a quick presentation deck is available here.

The importance of open source
MusicBrainz editors believe that information resources and music metadata should be free (see table). In interviews, they discussed openness as a “philosophy,” and knowing that they are building a bigger and better project useful to others works as an intrinsic motivation.

One editor describes the process of using and adding data as a “virtuous circle.” He contributes to a variety of peer-produced projects, including Wikipedia, and called himself “selfish” when asked why he contributes to open source projects. He said, “I think people who really value things will want to ensure they continue. And there are two ways you can do it. One, you can use your wallet. The other one is, if it's an option, you can contribute and make it a better thing.” Another editor echoed that sentiment: “I get to benefit from MusicBrainz and this is somewhat of my payback to the community.”

Discovery through Contribution
Several of the editors I spoke with told me stories about having discovered an artist or a collaboration in the process of interacting with the data, whether by browsing or editing data. One of my hypotheses was that because of the patterns of exposure, editors who have discovered an artist through MusicBrainz are likely to have entered on average more edits—spending more time with the database—than those who have not.

To test this, I compared the means of those who answered “Yes” and those who answered “No” against the log of the number of edits entered. Results, shown above, support the hypothesis that those who have discovered an artist through MusicBrainz have made more edits on average than those who have not. Engaging with the data benefits contributors beyond just providing accurate music metadata.

Where are the women?

My sample was overwhelmingly male, and follow-up interviews indicated that most of the editors active in communication channels are male. This gender disparity is not unique to MusicBrainz. This NetworkWorld article cites several sources that showed lower female participation in F/OSS projects and in Wikipedia. This is definitely an area to explore further.

by Jess Hemerly, Senior Policy Analyst at Google

From Mixtape to Playlist

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Ten years ago, consolidation in the U.S. music radio market was seen as a threat to creativity. Today, media markets are increasingly more fragmented, vibrant, and competitive than ever before, in ways that were unpredictable just a few years ago.
Recently, Billboard Magazine published an article about “the best ways for emerging [music] acts to get the word out.” Number 1 is being the featured free single on iTunes. YouTube is #2. Pitchfork - an online music magazine that just twelve years ago was a tiny operation in Minneapolis - is #3. Traditional radio airplay doesn’t even make the top 10, except for the “free listen of the week” on National Public Radio’s website.

This article reflects a broader shift in the way music is produced, distributed, marketed, and consumed:

Technology is empowering artists: Data suggests that more music is being commercially released than ever before, and quality appears to be as strong as ever. That’s partly a function of technology lowering the barriers to creativity. More than half the price of a physical CD went to covering the cost of physically making and distributing it. Today, artists are manufacturing entire albums on an iPad, and releasing them directly to music fans online.

Technology is empowering fans: Fans are flocking to online platforms that allow them to customize their listening experience. Between 2006 and 2009, overall music purchases increased by 50% in the U.S., and global digital music sales revenue has grown to over five billion dollars, a 1000% increase over the last six years. It’s true that total sales revenue is down, but that’s largely a result of fans shifting from buying $15 albums to buying individual songs for 99 cents. Today, most consumers are buying or streaming songs a la carte to customize their own experience (and there’s a bigger pool of money than one might think).

Fans are becoming tastemakers via social media: Music is social -- between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled, from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion. Research by GartnerG2 predicted that in 2010 at least 25% of sales would be attributable to features like fan-to-fan recommendations.

But this isn’t a complete shift. Even though the roles of traditional record labels and radio stations are dramatically changing, they continue to play an important role in the ecosystem as they are adapt and thrive on the Internet.

What can be done to clear the way for the next great online music service? Alongside smart enforcement, music rightsholders and start-up innovators are keen to fix licensing. The music industry is leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table due to inefficient licensing, and a recent survey of investors found that decreasing the cost and complexity would expand the pool of investors in digital content services by 83%.

In other words: if music and tech work together to accelerate the shift to new music services that give artists and consumers what they want, then everyone wins.
posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager at Google