serendipity

Musical serendipity in a digital world….

April 2, 2011 By Dan Thornton

My former Absolute Radio colleague Adam Bowie recently wrote about serendipity in music and books, and it’s been stuck in my head like a particularly determined earworm for a while. I’ll wait here while you go and read it.

The Record Shop’ courtesy Nicoze on Flickr (CC Licence)[/caption]

Adam’s experience is that record and book shops provide an element of serendipity missing in online retailers, and this is also a familiar comment on news services, and information via social networks which connect you with friends likely to share your world view.

It’s interesting because of a crossover – Adam is fairly adept and accustomed with technology in various forms, and is certainly a user of most new tools for music and audio-visual entertainment. He’s also a very keen photographer, which itself is an interest rooted in technology and gadgets.

At the same time, I’ve had the type of trainspotter passion for music which was celebrated by the likes of Nick Hornby, with records and cds filling rooms, filed in alphabetical and chronological order. Music magazines ranging from the NME to Guitarist filled my teenage bedroom, the ‘Evening Session’ was required listening, and the hint of a good band appearing on a TV music show would require sitting through the other 27 minutes of tedium in barely-contained excitement. And 10+ years after I’d programme the family video recorder to tape ‘Raw Power‘ in the early hours of the morning, I couldn’t stop myself mentioning to my friends that I’d shared a lift with presenter and then Mojo Editor-in-Chief Phil Alexander.

‘Serendipity’ courtesy Tojosan on Flickr (CC Licence)

So how does musical serendipity work without record shops?

So how has digital serendipity led to a time when long train journeys to London just to visit Berwick Street record shops (and possibly get served by Martin Belam years before we ever met), transform me into someone who didn’t buy any records during 18 months actually working round the corner at a radio station and yet has such a surplus of music to hear that it probably isn’t achieveable in my lifetime?

No Media – websites, blogs, radio, TV, books:

Strangely, despite the huge wealth of niche blogs and websites available, I rarely read them. Mainly because there’s already an overwhelming amount of tech and marketing stuff to read, plus a huge surplus of books recommended by bloggers and friends. The exception is when they appear as a result of a search for someone I’ve heard about but haven’t been able to locate. I do occasionally read and re-read books about artists and genres, and search out records mentioned – the majority of which are at the back of the highly recommended Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guralnick.

Instead, the Related Artist rabbit hole:

I’ve often tweted about the fact I’ve fallen foul of the biggest risk when working from home – falling into the Related Artist rabbit hole on Spotify. Although it tends to be flawed when dealing with big mainstream acts, the old rule of six degrees tends to mean you can soon start finding songs and artists you haven’t encountered, or hadn’t yet listed to. The Spotify inventory is still a bit patchy, particularly when you get into more obscure and niche genres, but I’ve had some pleasant discoveries, including some slightly esoteric research into Peruvian punk music, or moving from punk through to psychobilly and punk/country crossovers.

And when Spotify fails, there’s the backup of Last.fm, which I’ve long held to be the musical Wikipedia, more than any type of online radio service. There’s a far wider range of the genres I tend to end up exploring, and enough of a sample of most to let me know whether to search further. Even if autoscrobbling can lead to embarrassment when I end up playing songs for my partner or son and they end up recorded forever on my profile because I never remember to delete them. Plus, despite it’s abject failure as a social network, Myspace is still pretty useful for finding a huge number of bands.

New services:

I occasionally use Blip.fm, which provides extreme randomness in the manner of a crowdsourced electronic John Peel. I’ve occasionally get some mileage from Soundcloud. But it’s actually Mixcloud, which for me might as well be renamed ‘HeavySoulBrutha radio‘.

Digital + People:

Like most people, I’ve got at least a few friends who are heavily into their music (@mattcharge happens to be an excellent DJ for example, and @pjeedai may be the whitest expert on obscure British hiphop before you stray into Tim Westwood territory). Only recently I discovered a very professional and respectable journalist I’ve known for years happens to have an obsession with Scandinavian Death Metal, whilst one chat with a marketing agency descended into an hour of the merits of hair metal.

And all of these people distributed geographically and professionally are able to share their recommendations with me regardless of whether they can be bothered to send me a C90 tape recorded from the radio, or want to risk their prized blue label Stax 45s in the mail.

But the funniest thing has been impromptu sound-offs. Recent Jodanma meetings were disrupted by my suggestion of an official Jodanma entrepreneurial soundtrack (available here on Spotify – add your own suggestions), and two days in client offices have involved ‘name that movie theme’ and ‘cheesiest rock’ competitions. Everyone in each situation was able to pull up their streaming service of choice, their digital music collection, or a quick Youtube video and jump in.

The prospect of DRM was long feared as ending the ability to share music. Despite the fact that some artists chose to allow their music to be distributed via Creative Commons, the other result was an ‘iPod sharing/swapping’ trend in playgrounds around the world.

‘Mother & Daughter Flashmobsters’ courtesy drewleavy on Flickr (CC Licence)

And retailers?:

I’ve occasionally had recommendations from particular record shop experts, or spotted something interesting when browsing, but I’m not sure the actual amount of discoveries has been much different to seeing the various related items on any ecommerce site. Adam’s right that the personal recommendations are based on previous purchases, so aren’t going to recommend something from an unconnected genre, but those tend to come from the sources mentioned above.

Considering I’ve had record shop assistants express disbelief at my seemingly random selection of CDs – “No, none of them are presents, and yes, I can enjoy thrash metal, Irish folk music and obscure 70’s funk”, I’m not sure an algorhythm could ever hope to cope.

Which is probably why the serendipity of music in the digital age has to come from the same place it always has – from other people exposing you to their music and sharing it. Whether it was mixtapes and bootleg cassettes with photocopied inlays being swapped around, or a friend’s dad enforcing a course of Pink Floyd indoctrination every time he gave us a lift to school, that method remains the same, but the potential pool of influencers is much enlarged, just as every aspect of our social circle is enlarged.

Footnote:

None of this means that I don’t still enjoy browsing record stores, although my sole purchases these days tend to be particularly obscure vinyl. By the same token, I still have an addition to visiting the likes of Foyles and far more esoteric bookshops, such as one devoted solely to motoring books. But the serendipity effect of a generic mainstream retailer such as HMV or Waterstones has been completely replaced by digital encounters for me, and judging by sales figures and the precarious state of most of them, the end of the mainstream High Street entertainment shop probably isn’t far away.

The most bizarre offline coincidence…

August 13, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Just had the strangest moment when catching the London Underground on my way home, and thought it was odd enough to share – and perhaps show the weird way the world works offline for a change.

Bearing in mind I’d only just bumped into @simoncollister on the train today after 3 months of commuting, and we both use the same line to get to work every day, it made it even more surprising.

I left work later than planned for various reasons, jumped on the Tube, and was stood deep in thought about various work-related projects when I suddenly heard my name just before I was due to get off the train.

Not only was it a former colleague and old friend that had spotted me in the same carriage, but the fact that I hadn’t seen him for about 3 years after he left to work abroad, and the fact he’s only in the UK for a couple of weeks just shows how weird life works sometimes.

The serendipity defence of magazines and newspapers is a myth

April 6, 2009 By Dan Thornton

There are several reasons why the print editions of newspapers and magazines will continue for a while longer in there current forms before evolving into something new to survive alongside the increasingly dominent internet and mobile content networks.

But the serendipity argument isn’t one of them, despite the fact it’s so often wheeled out. Unfortunately, when you spend some time thinking about it, it becomes clear that the argument is based on a load of old cobblers.

The argument is that by reading a newspaper or magazine you’ll find things you didn’t realise you would enjoy reading or needed to know.

Which is true.

But the flipside of using this argument as a justification for print publications is that using the internet/mobile to find content will only give you exactly what you want, the majority of the time.

Which isn’t true.

It’s a reasonable assertion if you only consider search as the mechanism for finding content on the internet/mobile. Given a reasonably accurate search string, Google et al will generally give me a reasonably accurate list of returns for the thing I want.

But I don’t just use search. In fact, I’m using it less and less.

The assertion falls down as soon as you use any social tools for the simple reason that humans are not powered by algorithms. Despite the reasonable assumption that the majority of people will share content because it is relevant/appropriate to the recipient, the judgement of relevance/appropriateness is a subjective one on behalf of the sender – which means you can end up with all sorts of stuff.

And that’s only the active senders – now add in the network that shares links on social networks as a broadcast because they found it interesting, and someone in their network might be interested, but they don’t know who, or can’t be bothered to target it individually.

Then add in the lucky dips of social bookmarking tools, RSS feeds, and the entire linking ecosystem.

And it’s always been the case offline:

Think about birthdays and Christmas. Close family and friends might send you incredibly relevant, thoughtful presents, but as the distance grows between you and the sender, the random factor increases exponentially, so you can end up with all sorts of good and bad presents.

That’s the random discovery of things you never knew you’d like, by your network – not by a brand of ‘taste makers’ and distributed by a publication.

And it means basing your survival on the following assumptions:

1. People will have the time and desire for something outside of their interests when there’s a huge abundance of highly relevant material taking up their limited time.

2. People will want something outside of their interests which hasn’t be supplied by friends, family, colleagues, acquintances, or the Stumble! button.

3. Anyone who enjoys this discovery will find it engaging enough to pay before discovering whether or not it’s worthwhile, and will then find it enjoyable enough to keep paying, and perhaps engage with the surrounding monetisation – usually advertising.

Really?

There is a future for providing services which allow for assisted discovery of content – whether by human means or computers (e.g ‘related items’ or ‘things you might like’). But the days of being able to charge purely for those services are rapidly disapearing.