Curation (E)

0:00Hello, everybody. This is the king of rock and roll, Alan Freed with the choral rock and roll dance party and the big beat in popular music in America. So gather the gang around for a rock and good time with our own big rock and roll bands. If it weren't for Alan Freed, we certainly wouldn't call it rock and roll. And we probably would have a very different take on what popular music is supposed to sound like. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo. him though.

0:36Alan Freed lived a heroic, short, and controversial life in the public eye. Many people credit him with popularizing the term rock and roll. He nurtured and built the careers of many artists. His show, which would have been a total breakthrough for him on television, turning him into the first Casey Kasem slash Dick Clark was canceled after four weeks because it featured a black musician dancing with a white woman. But what Alan Freed is best known for is wrecking his career by doing something that curators have been doing since the beginning of time. In 1959, he got in trouble with the law and ultimately kicked off the airways for payola.

1:22Payola, not illegal at the time, was the common practice of record labels paying DJs to feature their songs. It mattered because DJs determined what was going to get listened to. There were only a few radio stations in every town. There was no Spotify, there was no YouTube, there was no Sirius. all there were were a few radio stations in every town. A song that didn't get played didn't get heard, and a song that didn't get heard didn't get bought. And so it was a sensible thing for a record label to pay the program directors and the DJ. Unfortunately for Alan Freed, people who weren't crazy about rock and roll and people who thought that the curating DJ should be an independent agent decided to put an end to it.

2:15There were congressional hearings. There were laws passed, and Alan Freed's career went downhill. He died less than 50 years old from cirrhosis of the liver, unknown in California. So we begin with this question. Was it okay for Alan Freed to get paid to promote some records and not others? So let's go forward a bunch of years. I come out with a book called The Dip, maybe 10 or 15 years ago. I retain the audiobook rights. It was easier in those days because they didn't sell that many copies. And I called up Steve Riggio. Steve's brother was the CEO of Barnes & Noble, and Steve was always an active player on the scene there.

2:56And I said, Steve, can we meet and talk about this book? And so I did a deal with Barnes & Noble. You could get the CD of my book, The Dip, at the cash register for nine bucks. A really good deal for Barnes & Noble because I sold them the copies for$2 each. Barnes & Noble made a huge profit by putting that CD at the cash register, more than they would have for somebody else's book that went through a normal publisher. Or consider the end cap at your local supermarket. That's what people in the food business call the end of the aisle. If you go the next time you're in the supermarket, you'll see that there's Pepsi lined up in huge rows at the end.

3:42Or maybe it's Coke. How come it's sometimes Coke and sometimes Pepsi? Well, the answer is simple. Because Coke or Pepsi take turns paying the supermarket money to feature their product on the end cap. What's going on at Barnes & Noble? What's going on with Alan Freed? What's going on with the supermarket is all the same thing, which is if you have power to put an idea in front of people, it is entirely possible in a world based on scarcity that you will sell that power to the highest acceptable bidder. Now, the word acceptable is important because a curator doesn't last very long if they're busy selling out to people who are selling something lousy.

4:25So, curation. Curation, as we've learned in the first two minutes of this podcast, can be easily misused. It can be misused because what you can do is go to Chuck Berry and say, you know that song Maybelline?

4:47I'd like to be a co-writer on that song and get royalties forever. And if you do that, well, then I'll play your record and make it a hit. you come out ahead, and so do I. I hope we can agree that that's not good public policy, that we don't actually want creators to have to pretend other people contributed to their work just to get their work heard. Well, you can say, this only happened a really long time ago. Well, on Brian Koppelman's podcast, The Moment, songwriter Richard Marks explains that his very first song, he gave Kenny Rogers co-writing credit because Kenny Rogers told him in the studio, if I don't get co-writing credit, this song is not going to be on my record.

5:43You get the idea. But back to this idea of power. Where does power lie in a society that's based on ideas. Because power used to be about, did you have authority over a lot of people? Did you have a huge number of employees or a mighty factory? Until recently, power lay with someone who could decide what we were going to talk about next. So the invisible editors behind the TV shows of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, so the A &R people at the record labels who decided who was going to get a record deal and who wasn't. And yes, Radio Shack. 1983, flew to Fort Worth, Texas for a meeting with Radio Shack.

6:30At the time, worldwide, Radio Shack had 9 ,000 stores. They were interested in putting our product, the computer games that I developed, in 3 ,000 of their stores. If 3 ,000 stores carry three units each of three titles, do the math, that's 27 ,000 pieces of software ordered with a gross margin of$10 each. It was a quarter of a million dollars back when a quarter of a million dollars was real money. And much bigger than the$270 ,000 was the fact that those 3 ,000 Radio Shack stores were going to be visited by millions of people. It was a turning point. I just discovered 1990, just seven years later, the number one producer, not just seller, but producer of personal computers in the United States was RadioShack.

7:27Why? How? They weren't just in the battery business. Radio Shack's distribution might gave them the power to curate, the power to decide which computer was going to get sold, and thus the power to actually make those computers and vertically integrate all the way down to assembling the chips. Curation matters. Curation changes what's in front of us. It changes what we listen to. It changes what we believe. And curation has always been driven by scarcity. There's only one contemporary art museum in Buffalo, New York. There's only seven important radio stations to listen to in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There's only two newspapers in this town or that town.

8:15That curators generate value because there's a scarcity of places to get our information. If you are curating the front page of the New York Times or curating what's on the CBS Evening News, what you decide to move up or down changes things. Walter Cronkite, the beloved newscaster from CBS for all those years, he's known primarily for two things, at least by me. One is his coverage of the space mission. And second, his insistence on covering the Vietnam War, moving it up, curating the news during the 1960s to share the enormity of what was happening with video with the American public. This was a brave act.

9:03It wasn't easy to do. That's what great curators do. They don't take payola. What great curators do is they put the truth in front of people who need to hear it in a way that changes the culture. But curation has real problems. The biggest problem with it is it silences outsider voices. The curator tends to get conservative over time. Why? Because if you take too many risks as a curator, you lose your audience. If you lose your audience, you lose your power. Now, there were some curators who were proud of the fact that while their audience wasn't large, they were early adopters. It was their job.

9:43If you were the curator at the Museum of Modern Art, your job was different than if you were Philippe de Montebello, the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art because the Met is art for everybody all the time, it's the canon it's the good stuff let it be understood first that the answer is coming from someone who does not own an iPad on the other hand but I have access on my Dell computer to the Prado's website to the Bruegels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and now to that astonishing website of the Ghent Altarpiece with something like 20 ,000 pixels per square centimeter of the Ghent Altarpiece, which is to say that you are experiencing nothing.

10:37You are looking at simulacra. You can only experience an original because the simulacrum, no matter how wonderful it is, lacks the virtue of authenticity. But MoMA, MoMA only exists to challenge convention, to be modern, to be different than it was yesterday. But let's go back to Radio Shack. At one point, 30 % of Radio Shack's revenue came from selling CB radios. CB radios didn't represent a point of view on Radio Shack's part. CB radios represented a chance to leverage 3 ,000 stores. You've got to sell something. So in many retail environments, curation is simply about what's going to sell this week.

11:28Or consider the scientific journals. Scientific journals have a long history of rejecting important papers, breakthrough papers. Scientific journals are inherently conservative because they understand that if they publish too many breakthrough papers, sooner or later, they're going to let one through that they probably shouldn't have. And then the curator fears they will lose their credibility and then they won't get to be a curator anymore. Okay, you can probably see where this is going. The question to every answer about the culture is, yeah, but what about the internet? The internet has changed all of it.

12:10The first step in changing it was saying to curators who had previously been borrowed from owning a scarce resource, here, build your own. And so CD Baby, Derek Siver's brilliant website, enabled him and his team to curate independent musicians who had CDs that just couldn't get shelf space at Tower Records. Or you could build your own online bookstore. Most likely, you'd have a blog. What a blog said is, here, you have a platform. Here, you have a microphone. Go find an audience. Earn an audience. And then you get to curate what you're going to publish. So instead of a few columnists in the New York Times vying for a Pulitzer Prize, now there are 10 million, 20 million, 40 million writers, each curating what they want to talk about.

13:14In the TV business, it took a couple steps. It went from three TV networks to cable TV. And what cable TV said was instead of curating for the middle, you can curate for the edges. If you want to put up stuff that's going to make people angry, if you want to put up stuff that's not true, if you want to put up stuff that is simply for a tiny group of people, well, here, here's a TV network just for you. Curate it all you want. And you can say whatever you like about whatever TV network you want to criticize. What you cannot say is they did not curate. Of course they did. ESPN stood for something.

13:54Home Shopping Network stood for something. It reminded you of what it was. It was another curator. So we took a huge leap. We took a huge leap from in any industry, 5 or 10 or 20 or 30 people curating what we were buying, what we were hearing, what we were seeing, to a thousand times that many people doing it. But built into this new regime was the same thoughtful conservatism that said, you better be careful. Because if you go too far outside what people are counting on for you, if you don't do your homework, if you don't check your work, your power as a curator will begin to fade. It's interesting to look at the arc of Mehmet Oz.

14:42Dr. Oz, a respected doctor from New York, began by speaking up eloquently on behalf of placebos, on behalf of new treatments like using acupuncture in the operating theater. But then Oprah shared some of her curation with him, giving him a platform. And what he discovered was that talking about things like green coffee beans got him a bigger audience. More than 9 million people a week tune in to watch Dr. Oz give medical advice. The cardiothoracic surgeon has been criticized for promoting fad diets. And now I've got the number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. And frequently recommending unregulated products.

15:27It's called Yacon syrup. But the latest criticism is about his seat as vice chair of the Department of Surgery at Columbia University Medical Center. Ten physicians from across the country want him fired. They wrote a letter accusing him of promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain. So he began curating what he was talking about without the rigor that his colleagues in New York expected from a doctor of his reputation. Even so, the blowback was heard that if Dr. Oz wanted to maintain his affiliation with the New York medical establishment, he couldn't simultaneously be making unproven promises about herbs and other tinctures.

16:13But then it changed again because we entered a curation-free zone. What the founders of Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites discovered is that if they broke the connection between the audience and the creator by making it look like they had followers and friends and likes, but actually reshuffling attention every day, they could force people who were used to being curators into becoming ever more dramatic in the work they do. ever faster and ever less careful. Because if you are first, if you are noisiest, if you are angriest, if you are the loudest microphone in the room, the algorithms would reward you with more people showing up.

17:06And so you've got anti-vaxxers who are actually hurting the lives of children, putting stuff up on Facebook with no actual scientific proof about what they're saying, but because it touches a nerve and because it's easy to spread, they get a bigger audience. And there's little or no incentive for them to become conservative about their point of view because the more extreme they make it, the more of an audience they get. And so if we are chasing popularity or chasing monetization, the pressure has flipped. It has flipped from being a reliable curator who doesn't take payola, who is very careful about what they are picking because they want a reputation for being careful about what they're picking to a different environment.

17:56Amazon did the same thing with the Kindle. There used to be 50 ,000 books published in a typical year. The number of books in print was perhaps 10 million. Now, there are a million books published every year and that number is going up and the number of books in print keeps going up because nothing goes out of print. That dynamic means that carefully curating what gets published by Penguin, by Random House, by Simon & Schuster, by Macmillan doesn't really pay. Just ship a lot of crap. Ship and ship and ship. Don't worry about whether any particular title holds up because it's all in the miscellaneous bucket.

18:41And so what we're seeing is that in many cases, the reputation of the curator isn't as important as the algorithm. And so now it's coming home to roost. It's coming home to roost in matters that really make a difference, in politics, in public health, in the way we as a culture communicate with one another. Because if curation doesn't work anymore, if there is no center, no reliable place to go, then panic can take its place. Because there's no place to look where we're confident that someone has been really thoughtful about what they're going to say next. This is why I think it's so important to turn off Twitter.

19:28Use it as an amusement device if you like. But it is not the unfiltered sort of news you think it is. because there is no proportion between how often you hear something and how important it is. There is no relationship between how often you hear something and how true it is. That what happened when we organized Wikipedia is that the folksonomy of organizing it beat the taxonomy of Encyclopedia Britannica, that the reliability of making edits quickly when an error showed up actually beat the old slow system of annual cycling and edits, that the searchability of Wikipedia was dramatically better than the searchability of the encyclopedia, not to mention how powerful the crosslinks are, that you can go from one article to another relevant one.

20:25But all of that is maintained by 5 ,000 curators. There is only one article in Wikipedia about paella. And there are several people who have devoted many, many hours to making sure that the argument about where paella came from and whether or not it is supposed to have sausage in it, they're looking out for you and for paella's reputation. If someone wants to build another page about paella, they can't. Wikipedia has built into it an inherent conservatism. Show your work. Prove it. Where is the source? And so that one article about Paella is the one article about Paella, curated by people who care about it.

21:11Is every article in Wikipedia as good as it could be? Of course not. In fact, I think it's fair to say that none of them are. But all of them are better than the alternative because this system of 5 ,000 volunteer editors pitting themselves against each other for status, for contribution, creates an environment where curation can thrive. This is the opposite of what we're seeing in the open, manipulated, dark pattern social media web. Because in those places where people seek to reach as many people as possible, all the incentives for thoughtful curation start to fade. Now, there are magical exceptions.

22:01If we think about Tina and her Swiss Miss account on Twitter, Swiss Miss doesn't point out. to lousy stuff because Tina is a curator at heart. Tina Eisenberg knows what she likes and is happy to share it. And no, there is no available payola. You can't bring her something lousy and pay her to promote it because Swiss Miss understands that as soon as she starts doing that, she will lose the very thing she's worked so hard to build, credibility, trust, and attention. So where do we go? Where do we go when the world turns upside down, when panic reigns, when loud voices are pushing us to do the wrong thing?

22:47Well, I think where we need to go is back to this principle of who said it? Why do I trust them? Have they been wrong in the past? Do they show their work? When they are wrong in the past, do they point out how they could have done better next time? There are plenty of people who would like to criticize as, quote, the mainstream media. But the thing about the mainstream media is it's curated, and we know who the curators are, and we can see their work, and we can judge it on a curve. And you can look at what they're saying and say, you know what? They tend to miss this part of the story. You know what?

23:25They tend to exaggerate that part of the story. But we know who we're hearing from, and we know what we're dealing with. April Fool's is coming around. April Fool's used to be the best internet holiday. Some of my favorite blog posts came from others. I've never had one that I loved. Fooling me deeply on April Fool's Day. And I think we can announce it in 2020. April Fool's is officially gone. It's officially gone because the last thing people want is to be fooled. Because we're getting fooled every day already. And so now it's on us. It's on us to bring back curation. It's on us to bring back who do we trust, why do we trust them, and how do we create an environment where there's an incentive for them to remain trustworthy.

24:13Thanks for listening. Stay healthy. Here's to peace of mind. We'll see you next time. Thanks. This is Rock and Roll Radio. Come on, let's rock and roll with the Ramon. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston. Hi, Seth. This is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question.

24:51As always, I love to hear from you, especially now in this time when it's so easy to get disconnected. If you've got a question, I hope you'll visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K. And click the appropriate button. Hey there, Seth. It's Chris Hill in Virginia. First of all, thank you for everything that you do. So last week, you spoke of large, scaled corporations finding an opportunity in the marketplace and then taking advantage of it. You used the example of McDonald's with real estate, creating franchisees' opportunities to be successful, thus creating convenience for customers.

25:29With Home Depot, it was scaling the products and the size to then offer competitive prices and a one-stop shop for customers as well. So I guess what it seems you're suggesting is that they're leading with these ideas and the opportunity versus much of your work is grounded in the ideas of generosity and trust. I think one of the main reasons why we appreciate and respect and admire folks like Danny Meyer and Union Square Hospitality Group and Trader Joe's, among other companies, is they lead with these two ideas, which you so eloquently speak of frequently. But then, is that necessary? It seems like certain companies don't have to have those things in place based on what you suggested.

26:18I'm struggling with the tension, struggling with the two ideas and how you scale something without leading with these two main factors, whether it's internally or externally creating a culture that people want to rally behind and be a part of. Thank you so much for all that you do. Cheers. Thank you, Chris, for giving me a chance to clarify what I was getting at when I was talking about business models. Here we go. There are many different business models. I have spent 20 years encouraging people to look at an overlooked one. It is the business model of trust and attention, of generosity and care, the business model of humanity, of being the one who's worth paying extra for, of being the one we would miss if you were gone, the business model of building an asset around acting like a leader.

27:09But that doesn't mean it's the only business model. There have always been business models exploited by capitalists that don't meet most of our standards for how moral leaders ought to lead. But what I saw coming 20 years ago, and what keeps being demonstrated over and over again, is that this business model, where you give up authority and control in exchange for leadership, where you have a chance to do work you're proud of, it's undervalued. There's an opportunity around every corner that when we show up with this business model, the cost of being in the market is lower. The upside of being part of the community is higher.

27:52So you can call me an optimist, but I believe this business model will continue to grow. As we atomize organizations into smaller units, as entrepreneurs compete not to have the most employees but the fewest, It's the linchpin. It's the leader. It's the person who is connected and trusted who's going to have the leverage to bring something to people who need it back to the market as a listening device. It's easier to use the market as a listening device if people trust you and want to talk to you. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.