Joseph and the amazing hidden Talents - be your own A&R !

This post is about talent in a user generated content world. It's sort of influenced by the Digitise or Die talk earlier in this week, a piece in the Washington Post I read about on Guy Kawasaki's blog, and a TV program the kids are fascinated by, the search for a Joseph (as in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat).

Take the Washington Post story first. Guy summarises it:

Basically, the Washington Post convinced a world-class violinist named Joshua Bell to act like a street musician to see how many people would stop to listen to him play and how many would donate money.

He would play his $3.5 million violin made by Antonio Stradivari in 1713. It must be a helluva of violin because it has a name: “Gibson ex Huberman.” The Violin Maker is filled with stories of how violins come to be named, by the way. (Should I give my MacBook Pro, made by Steve Jobs circa 2006, a name?)

Bell played pieces like “Partita in D minor for solo violin,” the Johann Sebastian Bach composition. To summarize: this experiment involved a world-class musician playing Bach on a Stradivari in a Washington D.C. Metro station at 7:51 for forty-five minutes one Friday morning while approximately 1,097 commuters walked past.

What do you think happened?

The answer is that he went unrecognized and unrewarded. What does this mean? Maybe that people make assessments about quality based on context and the rest of the herd. (The Violin Maker mentions a story, perhaps apocryphal, about how another world-class musician played a concert with a cheap violin, and the audience had no idea that he did so.) Or, maybe it illustrates what happens to people who are around politicians, lobbyists, and lawyers all the time…

And then there was the Digitise or Die discussion at the London Book Fair.....one of the issues noted was the increasing production of "beans books" - basically crap written by slebs to sell on the shelves of supermarket booksellers like tins of beans, to be consumed like tins of beans. This is apparently threatening to drive out the more delicate and beautiful literary flowers - the Literary Long Tail.

There was another point made by the CEO of Faber that essentially blogging was great because it relieved them of having to wade through the huge amount of manuscripts of earnest attempts by wannabe writers, as all these people were now writing it in the blogosphere.

....and making movies and podcasts and music, and distributing it over the New Digital media.

So are these wannabes untalented? Not necessarily. Firstly, as Guy points out, talent is about context. There are enough similar stories about wine cognoscenti fooled by plonk, art panels by kids and chimps etc etc - fame is very context driven, but talent is different, its about ability.

But its also about opportunity.

The "Joseph" search essentially allowed many people - from enthusiastic amateurs to trained singers and thespians - to take part in a national search for a person to play the role of Joseph in the musical. After screening auditions they whittled it down to about 40 and in various (televised) rounds it's being whittled down further, its now at about 11.

Sure there is a lot of drama in the whittling process, but the thing that hit me last week in the last 12 run-off was pretty much all those people were pretty damn good, and their backgrounds were pretty random - clerks, brickies and supermarket attendants as well as trained people among the finalists.

Point being that there are a lot of people out there who, for various reasons don't have access / know how / etc and in the past would never have got heard. In other words, "talent" is far more common than we think, the issue is giving it access. Traditional Media, with its (artificially?) high access costs, has tended to create an artificially high value for talent, and has tended to reward those who could pay the price to access that media, rather than talent per se.

What is happening with the New Media is cost of access is falling, and thus more of the talent pool will out - the closed shop is being prised open.

That this is potentially disrupting the traditional Meedja system is a given, much e-ink has been spilled on that...what is more interesting is what it means going forward.

Does it mean that the value of talent will fall, or does it mean that value is constant but everyone will only get their 15 minutes of fame before the next one comes in?.

Or will this just mean that the New Media will follow form and eventually be "stitched up" by people who can pay the New Prices - who have made early reputations, have access to Big Media, to marketing funding etc etc.

So...step one is to incentivise all the talent. If today's rights systems are unworkable, or lead to unwanted outcomes, how to make it work for them?. But how can all those 12 Josephs be incentivised to let their talent shine?

In my view today's Rights systems are more about keeping current aggregators' value artificially high - the actual amount of money in the chain that goes to the talent is quite small in most cases - so large swathes of cost can theoretically be removed without actually disincentivising the talent....and in theory some of that surplus could go to fund more talent

ie if for eg music was 1/2 the price would one spend less or buy twice as much (I would buy twice as much) and if the artist still got roughly the same amount thats twice the number of artists supported per $ or £ spent

For this to work, it is key to be able to find that talent at a lower search cost than today...(I will take it as read that cost of music production is massively lower, by definition)

Traditionally, artistic media have tended to follow power laws (eg Zipf's Law), driven (sometimes manipulated) by the way our social networks tend to select according to what other people are doing - ie for mass popularity - the tyranny of democracy.

Great for governing, less great for discovering great talent. Can search engines or social media help?

Sheer volume makes it harder to find those fascinating niches through all the noise - there is some evidence of this even now in emergent mediums such as the blogosphere, where early-in players continue to grow simply by being easy to find, but do not necessarily have the highest quality content anymore.

Sadly, the "big" search and social media sites seem to be increasingly "gamed", so are becoming less efficient - the signal to noise ratio is going down.

But all the while a lot of us are continuously out there discovering this new talent over the web - new writings, new music, new videos - but how do those who like what we like find us, and how do we find those who are finding the stuff we like in an increasingly congested and gamed space? If we can't the risk is we increasingly get channelled down the massed paths of the dominant social networks.

So if today's (fairly crude) social media technology is now part of the problem, how do we tweak it to be part of the solution?

How to harness our own Inner A&R Men in this search?

It seems to me, at any rate, that there will need to be an emergence of trusted "taste aggregators", people (or social subnetworks) who can be relied on to find great talent that I will like. This is not the same as "Friends of Friends" networks, nor "Peopel who bought this also boiught that" systems - it needs to be more discerning and thus needs some form of "ungameable" critical input.

This is not an argument for going back completely to the Old Media's "editing" function, but it does seem that the optimum is some sort of approach that actively prevents the re-emergence of strong power laws in talent recognition and navigation, as clearly the level of talent in the Long Tail is far far higher than the "traditional" models would have us believe.

To make it work, seems to me that it needs:

- more sophisticated knowledge about me
- a capability for serendipity that is (imho) missing in most of todays social networks
- a certain ability to be "discerning" - anyone patented "discerningness" yet?
- higher levels of proof against "gaming" by vested interests or payola plays

Thoughts?