How good a representative of overall popularity are music forums?

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cyst

Guest
Been thinking this afternoon about the relevance of message board popularity, and whether it neccesarily follows that internet hype and sales of cd's and vinyl are directly linked. Running off the concept that music forums are [at least in my experience] prone to adopt and idolise certain artists over others, do forum endorsed acts sell more records and is there any way of checking sales figures for underground scenes?
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
I only really know two message boards well- Dissensus and ILM. I suspect that within certain fields they can be extremely useful in terms of bumping sales, or getting stuff to the attention of opinion formers. But in a mass-market sense they are extremely marginal-- and even when they discuss mainstream music it is from perspectives that the mainstream would view, I suspect, as perverse (see ILM's rolling teenpop discussions). Therefore the discussion surrounding Burial, or Junior Boys, say definitely helped put them on the map, helped move Burial's album to being reviewed in broadsheet newspapers and print music mags, helped it get to be an album you can have delivered within 2-3 days from Amazon.co.uk... but only in limited terms. Its also difficult to pull apart the influence of messageboards alone from bloggers, as they are often interlinked.
 

tate

Brown Sugar
Good question, cyst. I've always wondered if there were any way to quantify the influence of blogs and message boards on album sales, and if there were, who has that knowledge and what are they doing with it? My suspicion would be that any attempt to measure message board influence would be merely impressionistic (e.g., gek's comments above), but who knows, perhaps there are crypto-sophisticated means for monitoring such things. Obvious examples in the US such as Pfork's support for bands such as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Tapes N Tapes, etc etc illustrate a direct impact, with quanitifiable sales numbers, though I'm not sure what those numbers are, or if they are ultimately probative of anything at all. Perhaps the Junior Boys crowd around dissensus know something about this.
 
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N

nomadologist

Guest
learned in audience research class that it's really hard to track internet media consumption, compared to TV and print media, which seems counter-intuitive. they're working on it though. spot buying ads for blogs and webzines is a crap shoot.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
All I can say as hard facts in the case of Burial is that initially it was a difficult to get hold of album, and post-net-hype it was a slightly easier to get one. The exact numericals, and how they might be attributed to various sources of comment is probably impossible to precisely calculate. I think comment is more evasive of assessment than straightforward "click on the link" advertising.
 
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I would say threads linked to a pay per download site would have more chance of completing a sale than a mail order buy the whole CD/vinyl type of affair. You might in the former get a spontaneous buy of a one off tune. I tend not to trust peoples opnions of tunes on forums. I've lost trak of the number of times I've checked stuff out only to be disappointed and think 'where the fuck is this guys head at, that tune is shit ???'

on another forum nearly every thread about a tune or an artist is mostly a one liner to the effect of 'large up yo chest, big tune' but really :slanted: . I don't think that would neccessarily translate to a sale. It's more of an awareness thing and a oneupmanship on having heard the tune first and pipping the next poster on the fact by starting a thread about it.

Not even myspace can translate a hit into a sale and what with the global downturn in CD sales and vinyl being pretty much boutique I can't see that things wil improve for hard copy sales no matter how much of an amping they get on a few boards.

I do see industry spam giving it a go though. Something like those text based promotions. I tried it with our stuff just to see what would happen. I attempted to get 10 people to post links to our preview stuff on 10 different boards and send me the links to verify, then I'd send them a CD or links to hi bit tunes and if 2 posters on the boards they linked to did the same I'd send them a t shirt.

It didn't work out that well but I reckon it can and be more effective than mailing out promo release spam. If you hit up a few hi profile boards you'd probably reach more people, be less likely to piss them off with junk e-mail, make a personal connection with your audience and your net equivalent of a street team would get something out of it as well.
 

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
It depends what level you're talking about as to whether messageboard/blog culture affects album sales.

If you think how totally oblivious we dissensians are to bands/acts being hyped on a message devoted to, say, emo (to pick a niche genre at random) ... you can see how marginal messageboard culture is in terms of wider reach. The reason I don't know what emo bands are hot is because I've got no interest in that genre - if I did, I'd seek the information out. If that rule doesn't hold for pop/rock/indie, it's because it's part of a mainstream culture that people absorb passively. Britney Spears and Pete Docherty are unavoidable unless I walk around with a sensory deprivation device on my head, despite my having next to no interest in thier music. Albums like Burial are never going to enter mainstream culture in the same way, and no amount of blog/forum action will change that.

However, what it can do is eliminate global boundaries - so only a very select group might be interested in Burial in the UK, but if you extrapolate that to every country with internet access and collect all those fans, you're talking about a pretty sizeable number of potential sales for an independant label - maybe 30,000 or so. Most of those are people who indie labels would have absolutely no hope whatsoever of reaching without the internet.

Major labels use mainstream media channels to try and seduce or hoodwink people who aren't really interested in thier acts into buying the product anyway - think of all the Jamie Cullum-type CDs people will get bought for christmas and only play once. Indie labels operating in niche genres can't afford to be anything like as ambitious - thier main goal is to seek out people who already want to buy thier record, and simply let them know it's available. For that purpose, forums & blogs are brilliant.

However, once they get through to those people, they encounter two massive problems - both caused to some extent by the internet. The first, obviously, is how to convert that interest into sales; that is, how to get people to buy the record instead of pinching it in some way. Downloading is a really complex phenomenon, but it does seem to affect indie labels more than majors - partly because thier customers tend to be more techno-savvy, but every year the mainstream catches up and this becomes less of an issue. A much bigger factor is that majors spend a huge proportion of thier marketing budgets on point-of-sale stuff and in-store advertising - that is, marketing that will reach people only after they've decided to buy something; the challenge then becomes to guide their eager wallet towards your artist, not someone elses. Contrast to the indie consumer, sat at home on the net, surfing soulseek and chatting to thier mates who maybe already have the record they want, which is the situation most will probably be in when the message reaches them. Far more difficult to turn that into a sale than someone wandering around HMV with a £20 in thier hand. But the defenders of download culture are also right to point out that the general health of forums and blogs, and this whole global communications network that can be accessed for next to nothing, depends on the free flow of music. So a lot of indie labels find that what the net gives with one hand, it takes with the other.

The second problem is that the internet seems to have accelerated everyone's attention span, so that artists only have to be out of the public eye for a few months and people totally forget about them. Think of an artist's public persona as being like a big, heavy flywheel, and when they are in the public eye that flywheel is spinning round quickly. Major labels can afford to let the wheel slow down over time while the artist is out of the limelight recording or whatever, then when they need to they can give it a mighty heave, in the form of a massive marketing spend, to get it back up to top speed again. Indies can't afford to do this - they might have given everything they've got to get the wheel spinning in the first place and they must make sure it doesnt slow down, so they keep having to nudge it all the time to maintain a steady speed. In the real world, this means constantly releasing new music, updating blogs, touring, etc - not really expensive, but very draining, and there's a real risk that you'll just run out of fresh things to say and do, so the audience gets tired and drifts off. Lots of dance labels suffer from this, and only the really clever ones manage to get round it. People are naturally attracted to novelty, and that doesn't make life easy for labels trying to build a sustainable long-term business model.

For ten years I've been waiting for someone to come up with an on-line indie music model that addresses these problems and manages to harness the benefits of the net for underground music whilst minimising the downsides, but nothing has come along so far. One day someone will probably crack it, but I think people are starting to realise that these traits have much deeper and tougher roots than was previously thought.
 

hint

party record with a siren
All I can say as hard facts in the case of Burial is that initially it was a difficult to get hold of album, and post-net-hype it was a slightly easier to get one.

Not sure what you're getting at here. It was certainly available from Play in the first week of release, for example.
 
C

cyst

Guest
Interesting to see that you think that threads don't translate to sales Undisputed, initialy i was thinking in terms of the scenes which, perhaps because of their small fanbase, rely heavily upon the net as a tool to both market and inform in the abscene of print media coverage. For example how relevant it was that say that on the DubstepForum a Search for Scuba yeilds 512 results whereas Skream gets 1903. Does this mean that Skream records sell approx x4 the amount? If Wiley comes in for an avalanche of abuse on RWD does it affect his popularity etc.

GFC that was fascinating, some of the things you mentioned i have long suspected [as someone who has occasionally used the net to promote music] the fly-wheel analogy inparticular. The continual neccesity to churn out progressively better tracks cannot be good for quality control.
 
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