Why Your Favourite Band's Fans Might Not Be Real

0:00What on earth is going on in the music industry? As we hit the middle of the year, we've had mid-summer's day and mid-year album review lists are dropping. I thought it might be a good moment to reflect on what on earth is going on because I'm right in the middle of working on a new campaign for The Anchoress and her records are in August and I'm right in the thick of what works, what doesn't, Like, is radio still important? Yes. How do you get on playlists? No one seems to know. And what are the things an artist should be focusing on in order to cut through online? And one of the big topics from this year has been fake fans and companies which you can go to who will essentially help you gain the attention economy to help you cut through the algorithms.

0:49and we talk a little bit about that in this episode with Hannah Kellett who you might remember was our guest before Christmas talking about the year in tech and some of the big stories of last year. This episode we do cover a lot of ground. We cover spatial audio, third spaces, we cover clipping which is essentially cutting bits out of podcasts and cutting things out of videos and artists taking bits from interviews and all sorts of things to cut through. We talk about third spaces like youth clubs and pubs and we do touch on the Geese are a psyop article which I have discussed. It's been on this podcast before but this is quite a wide-ranging conversation but I hope for anyone that's stepping outside of the industry and looking at their favourite band and wondering why they look a bit crazy at the moment or why they're doing certain things.

1:43Hopefully this podcast episode will really help you click into what is going on and that's everything this podcast is about about making a better future for music and a better future for the world in general and for those of you listening you won't know that hannah turned up in a hate yachts not dinghies hoodie and we had a really wide-ranging conversation i learned so much and i'll be back at the end of this episode to reflect this episode is brought to you in partnership with kobuzz and as listeners of this podcast, you're going to be the first to know that they've extended their partnership with us for another six months, which means every episode of this podcast comes with a companion playlist, usually put together by me.

2:23This episode will be our mid-year reflections on some of the best music of the year so far. So if you go to dranninsound.org forward slash playlists, you will find that playlist featuring a bunch of tunes that I've really enjoyed. And a few things I've asked Emma Wilkes, who does our newsletter, to contribute too. If you go there, dranninsound.org forward slash playlist, you will also find a 30-day free trial, the checkout Cobuzz, the ethical music streaming platform, who pay a little bit more than all the other platforms, and they have really high quality audio, which having just got some new headphones, I am really, really loving hearing stuff at extraordinary quality, which my previous headphones did not quite do justice to.

3:05So this is the Jorn and Sound podcast, my conversation with researcher, academic, journalist, writer, decent human being Hannah Callot from Media Research, also works with Abbey Road and all sorts of other things and she'll introduce herself in just a second.

3:33Hannah, welcome back to the Drown and Sound podcast. You're in a very short list of returning guests. Previously, we spoke about fans and tech, and we're going to probably talk about pretty similar topics today. I don't have a big agenda for this episode, but what this podcast is about, is about fans understanding where the world's at, where we're going, and what they might be able to do to prevent bad things happening. and I guess bigger than that looking at the music industry as a microcosm of the rest of society so big tech social platforms they impact everything everywhere AI especially is an insidious thing that I use as someone with neurodivergence I'm apparently in this like rare group of people that are very critical of AI but a very big adopter of it so So if we just remind listeners a little bit about who you are, the different hats that you wear and like, and then we'll talk a little bit about the importance of research.

4:35Sounds great. Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me back. Really great to be here. So, yeah, I have a couple of hats. I'm a senior analyst at Medea Research, which is a market research company in music and digital entertainment, where I focus a lot on social platforms, AI, emerging tech, fan behavior, audience behaviors. And we have a very future focus at our company because everyone has all the data they could possibly need and then some. And our job is to basically figure out the why behind the data and help people actually plan for what to do next. I also do some work with Abbey Road Red as a startup mentor.

5:18So that tends to be a lot of music tech startups. Could you remind people what Abbey Road Red is? Because I think in the industry people are aware of it, but it's like their tech incubator. Is that what it's called? Yeah, it's like their incubator. So obviously Abbey Road is like the label that everyone knows with the Beatles on the wall and the big studio where they recorded like the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. But they also do incubation of startups. I think they work closely with like Grow Music and sometimes with the BPI. So they have like a sort of mentorship program where people like me from across the industry basically can sit in with some startups and give them some advice.

5:59Often I just tell them like how to make their PowerPoints better. But also like helping pull out like what data is useful to them, what they should be looking for. and it's kind of cool for me and my research as well to see what people are building next and what's working and what they're struggling with. It's really consistent with Abbey Road because like at the birth of recording some of the most pioneering tech like obviously with the Beatles like they were using things right at the edge of what was possible at the time and pushing technology forwards and I think when Dolby Atmos came through and Surround Sound I feel like Abbey Road was pretty core to that And like, I think I went to a demo at Abbey Road probably about 12 years ago of a set of headphones that I still don't think exist that could map any room so that what you were hearing through the headphones was mapped to the space you were in.

6:53Yeah. So they tried to set it up as Pink Floyd would have recorded money. Yeah. And the cash register was by my feet. and if you moved your head it was spatial audio but it was they were trying I think for virtual reality in particular trying to place you in the space and the room yeah so they could you could be listening in the room that you were in which they did the first bit and then they moved into a cathedral and the entire sound and feeling of the room changed and like if you closed your eyes there was much more space around me than actually the room probably as big as the one we're in now was yeah and that was like a piece of tech they were invest like I guess investing resources in rather than like sums of money and it always felt to me like oh that's great like this tech must be coming down the line and that was 12 years ago and I'm sure elements of it have probably been compressed into like what the Apple headphones do when you move your head and you have a sense of space spatial moving sound what kind of projects can you talk about that you've seen come through the the kind of pipeline there is there some exciting tech on the horizon um well to be fair i'm fairly new at it so i've only worked with with one or two um of course you have like a bunch of ai startups um there was one a guy i was speaking to recently they're building sort of like spatial audio but in vr spaces yeah a lot of these kinds of developments do end up being kind of back end.

8:27So like licensing to bigger people, but trying to create like a more defined soundscape within a virtual space. So the demo he was showing me was kind of like being in like a Fortnite world, one of those are Fortnite Island. But it was just like playing with the sound and you can move around. I I was working with one called Pro Studio Time, which was kind of like an Airbnb for recording studios, which seems to make a lot of sense because you have a lot of artists going on tour. They're like, you know, I'm in a city. I have an idea. I want to do something with someone else. Where can I go? Yeah.

9:08So there's still kind of like the gamut across actual physical hardware is obviously the hardest one to break into, especially in like a sustainability minded. climate to a degree because if you want to make good tech you kind of hit like the end of a runway very quickly because people buy it and it's great and they don't want to buy another one yeah um and then you become like manufacturing obsolescence and that's obviously not so great um so yeah um pretty pretty versatile space but yeah and with different research you're doing I got excited the idea of Apple launching glasses with headphones in and the idea that the kind of filters that we see on Instagram, the kind of AR filters could be something that'd be part of live shows.

9:55And there was again, like 10 years ago, I think Eminem did something if you held your phone up, you saw a giant Eminem above the stage. That tech still hasn't really come through. Is there anything you've seen that's on the kind of near or distant horizon that you think people, that you're excited about or that you're seeing like the industry is drifting towards? That's a good question. I think a lot of it becomes, one of the things maybe that's a little bit less enthusiastic is a lot of stuff becomes very gimmicky very quickly. At the end of the day, a lot of the problems are just like economic when it comes to fans.

10:35Everyone's like, oh, we need to do this cool new thing with the show and like let's solve this problem that's like not a huge problem, but it's like kind of a thing and it's like the bottom line is that you need people to like turn up have a good time um and like be present in the space and you can put a phone in the middle and try and like counteract like people being on their phones or you can just put stickers on the phones or whatever um and a lot of it's just like oh fans just don't have as much money anymore because young people are all like jobless and broke i guess one of the things why i've thought the idea of being able to have a screen in front of your eyes, like a layer, was when you see an artist take a hundred trucks on tour and one of those trucks is basically for something that's going to be used for one song.

11:22If there was just one song during a set where you looked through your phone and there was like an amazing special effect and that saved the band taking two or three trucks, like to what extent could the industry make touring more sustainable? Like, I don't know. I feel like there's a shift that needs to happen. And we're not going to get 60 ,000 people in the arena or 10 ,000 people in the arena wearing a pair of Apple glasses. That's 20, 30 years down the line, even if that's likely to happen. I think Meta's creepy glasses have made the idea of adopting wearable tech that we put on our faces a little less likely.

12:01um also i had the creepiest advert for the meta glasses it would describe them as poolside glasses oh i was like i was like why would you want to market these glasses with cameras on as something that people wear by the poolside i bookmarked it and i've screenshot it and um in fact um eliza who does cheer up love the harassment campaign was posting about the glasses recently and i was like I've saved this in my like file there's like a folder on my phone where I'm like at some point this creepy advert needs to be kind of publicly shaming and she was like back public shaming of tech being weird yeah and I was like I just sent it so she was posting I was like can you believe this is how they marketed them yeah it's only like a year ago as well um anyway that's an aside but like I think that the act of going to a live show hasn't changed since I was a teenager um sound has not changed that much in venues there is now immersive sound it shows but they're very rare like the production on a stage has not changed that much apart from i mean again like 10 years ago saw lady gaga play with like essentially a far a fairground ride as like part of her live show but people could have done that like 20 30 years ago like one of the biggest changes on stage is the wireless tech that allows people like I interviewed Paramore once and they said oh yeah because we don't have cables on our guitars now we can do like forward rolls and flips and stuff with a trampoline yeah because we don't have to worry about the cables getting dangled um I guess like as an organization and as an individual like you're part of lots of people gazing into what's coming next but it does feel a bit for the first time in a long time there's just a lot of conversation about ai and there's not like we're seeing the social platforms and maybe we could talk about this next like sort of dwindling in terms of their usefulness and importance and like i'm in the middle of at the time of recording the anchor s records out in august i'm trying to make sense of what we should be posting when we should be posting it how we reach new audiences versus how we engage the existing audience.

14:19And I worked for four years in just doing social media at the BBC. I'm pretty clued up on what we should and could be doing. And we're seeing stuff that like spending hours like making something and it does nothing. And we're doing like something Catherine makes on her phone for like in next to no time and it's doing like okay numbers but it's like the bits that spike like even with this podcast like the clips that have done disproportionately well were not the clips i thought would do disproportionately well lots of things we clip because we think they'll do well and they don't and it's like what are you seeing with like the shift in the industry and the shift with social media is there anything you can sort of because i think from a fan's perspective they see their favorite artists post stuff and you're like why are they posting that crap and it's like often because that's what they need to post yeah yeah yeah um loads of different thoughts in many different rabbit holes from that um one just going back to um the lack of any fundamental changes in how like things like live shows and events happen um there's a lot of like iteration for the sake of like we're innovating invest um and it sometimes comes at the distraction of the core of the thing which is like the reason you go to a live gig is to like be part of something like be present have a great time um you know you can make something gimmicky like oh hold up your phone and there's like an m &m but i've been to a gig um there's a band ale storm where their bit is they have a giant rubber duck that they pull out like halfway through and like pass it around the crowd and it's it's fucking great because you're not just there with like your phone it's like passing it around and it's like a whole thing um lcd sound system has its like massive disco ball that takes up like half the stage and that's cool because it's it's like physically there um like fat dog they all like get down and they do like the little crab thing and so there's an act of like being physically present that I think is so important to these live events.

16:40And it is a response to the digital world we're living in a lot of the time. It also predates it, right? Like these things have always been things. And then we got so like fixated on, ooh, digital thing, very cool. Which is a necessary period, right? Because you need people really interested to develop like these cool things. And I think we've kind of reached a natural point of like, okay, we've kind of like figured a lot of this stuff out now. We can kind of start picking and choosing what of it we want to keep, what of it we like. And then the attention kind of needs to start turning back to, OK, but what is this for?

17:11Like, are we using the digital world to enhance the physical one or are we using the physical one as fodder for the digital world in a way that's actively deteriorating the physical experience? I've been to recently two gigs, Polar Opposites. One was like. Very small, smaller artists, and everyone there was like filming it on their phone. and to a degree I got it because obviously smaller artists like needs to be more like present to grow his footprint so he can go on tour more. But also it felt like I was backstage at a music video and not like I was in a crowd. I was like the internet is in the room with us.

17:50Like the real audience isn't even here. Like this is really weird. And then I went to another one where like first song everyone's already in like the mosh pit. And no one has their phone out. and you're like this is obviously it's not going to appear online so you think this kind of thing maybe doesn't happen anymore um but you know you can have these two experiences and they're very different to live but one looks better on social media than the other one so i think our perceptions can get a little bit janky there especially when it comes to social media um when we talk about like how social media itself is changing it's become so much more focused on like passive entertainment packaging these things for consumption when you're doom scrolling in bed yeah um which then actually deteriorates like the social usb like i'm now spending you know maybe i'll dm some friends but less and less time is being spent doing that and more is being spent just like uh content content content and then now because of ai uh like meta's own ai tool is um oh you can just generate videos and you go on and you're like what is even on like is any of this even real I mean Spotify just announced that you can make AI podcasts.

19:05So this podcast could be, they could literally listen to this and go, oh, there's much better five minute version. We're just going to literally clone what we've discussed and turn it into a real podcast. Exactly. Is this clip even real as someone scrolls past it? Yeah, even on the clipping thing, the New York Mag and I think it was The Verge both published earlier early in may sort of like these bigger pieces about um clipping as a model so there's essentially um like discord channels um a bunch of different places where basically creators who have these meme accounts these like content farm accounts will look for programs and And it'll be someone unknown will say, look, you get paid X amount if you clip like this TV show or this artist or this set or whatever.

20:03Or this court case. Apparently, the Johnny Depp Ember Heard case was big for this. Yeah, there's a really good episode of both Matt Bernstein's podcast, A Bit Fruity, and Caroline Kwan, who's a Twitch streamer, has talked about it a fair bit. And Taylor Lorenz and Kat Tenbarge. they've all been really good at covering the i mean a decade now of essentially clips and false engagement like boosting things and boosting narratives because there's a tortoise podcast about the johnny depp case yeah and they dove into like where some of these accounts originated from yeah and like they found that there were some accounts that previously had been posting about the Saudi government and then flipped into posting in English.

20:48And then weirdly Johnny Depp opens the Riyadh Film Festival not long after the case. And there was a theory in that podcast, not to spoiler if someone wants to listen to it, but essentially that they wanted to show that women in the West were acting a certain way. And like the Chapel Rhone smear campaign that happened recently, that felt quite artificial. Like the footballer dad yeah jude law's um daughter being told that she couldn't get a selfie or something yeah it turned out to be a different security person had nothing to do with chapel rome and that was within 24 hours we knew that but for a whole week chapel rome was being dragged online yeah people were posting videos about how she got into a fancy school and it turned out she got a grant or a maintenance grant or something and like anyway there's a whole other thing but i think in amongst the clips like we can see how you can shape a narrative because if you can i mean there's a company called floodify i don't know if i can i think i might have seen that from something you posted and like you can literally just book someone to flood the internet yeah with a certain narrative well it's um it's the cheapest um cheapest way of doing advertising right now because it's like$1 CPM.

22:05That's per thousand views or so? Yeah, it costs per me, so it's a thousand, which is super cheap. Yeah. And it's like kind of a gray area legally depending where you are because a lot of them don't say that it's an ad or they kind of hide it. And a lot of it kind of is organic because it's like, okay, so you've paid. These people have signed up to the program. They're posting the clips. Some of them go viral. enough accounts are posting about it because of it that the algorithm picks it up people then like real people then see it and go oh this is a trend like maybe yeah i need to hop on the trend you need to hop on the trend and then they'll post it and then people in the comment section will see some of the seated comments because there's like three kinds of campaign there's just the clips there's clip plus uh caption which kind of shapes the narrative and then there's like comments so people who go on and like spam yeah the comments like oh my god best set i've ever seen the justin bieber coachella one so one uh a real thing that was already quite big but then was like apparently boosted unclear by whom because again it's not like the origin is not necessarily clear but um then there's like a promotion behind it that makes it go even bigger uh and then you have like another thing that's people commenting like oh my god best set ever and then everyone reads it and their brains automatically process and go oh yeah best set ever like really big thing yeah and once you kind of see that i think there have been theories for a long time but this was the first i've seen where someone's actually gone through and done like an investigation on how this actually happens and how prevalent it can be and like how much money has been spent i mean there are people that study disinformation that have been talking about this stuff since cambridge analytica a decade ago yeah and i think there's a lot of understanding of how like far right bot farms work yeah how like russian disinformation works yeah but i don't think people realized it had become a marketing strategy of the music industry and the billboard interview with the guy from chaotic good um turned into a month of think pieces but only because there was a substack written about it by an artist and i went on the drums podcast to discuss this story and about how the band geese are a psyop i think was the oh yeah yeah i think it's the headline and um but the thing that i found really interesting was that was an interview that took place at South by Southwest.

24:23A week later, a substat came out, not much noise. And then another week later, I think the Verge, Wired, the Guardian, they all started running news stories on it. And then people started creating social videos inspired by the Guardian article or the Wired article. And a lot of people wanted to slack off geese because they came out of nowhere in theory, an industry plant and like all those things. But it's like, but the clip that's kicked it all off was just the guy from Kurt at Goods saying as a marketing agency, we make fan accounts that look like fans that post about an artist. Then people hear the music.

25:03If they like the music, they become a fan. If they hear the music and they don't like the music, they don't become a fan. And I think that as a strategy, I can understand why people are doing it. But I don't think it, I guess it feels like as a music fan, you just assume that the other fans posting about music out there are real and i think it hopefully is a good wake-up call because if you see loads of reform comments like underneath something or like stop the boats and all those kinds of things then you start to realize oh these are just a load of people sitting in a bunker in moscow or in a bot farm in the philippines or like i guess most people have seen those videos of like i think i think there's one with like 300 phones in front of this person and they're just scrolling like tiktoks and it's like and that's what the internet or social media is becoming which feels yeah and i guess if someone studies it like is there a way to combat it do we have to it's the only way to be them join them like what what are you what do you kind of advise as an organization or are you just merely going this is what's happening well it's i mean it's it's happening so fast right like the problem with like advocating for certain strategies for success on social media is the minute they become well known they stop working because the issue of it is clutter and cut through uh if everyone's successful no one stands out and if no one stands out you don't have any one who's successful because being successful means you know in relation to everybody else um so the clipping worked because it was the ability to kickstart you from like doing pretty well with a core fan group to like big mega mainstream everyone's talking about it it's like the new online water cooler moment um there's kind of two ways of looking at it i think because this has now become like super common knowledge because it's much more high profile that clipping is a thing probably going to see more companies more artists more creators um and more people who want to just make money by running these platform accounts uh doing it which means more clutter which means it maybe stops working as well um equally it's like you know if you're committed to doing it organically that growth is a lot stronger it doesn't fade as quickly it doesn't have that like negative of kickback when people go oh wait geese is a psyop plant right um industry plant well um you don't have that if you're doing it like organically and just like steady and like look i've got my core fan group that's all i care about that's all i need um what is interesting is that meta's just announced a series of subscriptions so you can do like facebook plus instagram plus or whatsapp plus and they're crazy expensive uh no i think they're like 3.99 oh okay this is not the same thing then yeah so there's meta verified yeah which is still a thing and that's still the like um better like tech support if you're like account recovery support um and if you've got a big account it's in the hundreds of pounds not yeah yeah yeah it's it's like a very like niche um offering right um so the plus so the plus is like so uh i forgot what the facebook one does but the Instagram one is like somewhat like also annoying like lurker stuff so you can see how many people have like reviewed your stories like so more than once on aggregate but not like specifically so unfortunately you can't stalk and see if your ex is not the stories it's not that but you can you can see okay so like eight people have like rewatched my story a couple of times you can view people's stories without it showing that you viewed them so you can now like stalk people without knowing ghost mode um you can keep a story up for longer you can um create so at the moment it's like or if the free version is you have like post to all friends or you have posts to close friends and this one is like you can make different lists um so like my first thought was oh i could do that one is like the professional list one is like the close friends list one is like school friends whatever like you can kind of tailor what kind of list which was like google circles whatever it was called like a decade plus ago which was actually like in a weird way like not a bad idea it was it was actually the list of things it was offering was surprisingly quite compelling because i'm like oh these are things that someone who's like a very consistent user probably wants and like wishes they had um and it's it's quite a cheap also someone that's got a lot of time to organize their followers or their yeah yeah like once you get over 100 followers it's like that's not going to be something that's manageable but i guess say i could help like for instance i i did a like scrape of my um follow following or followers i can't remember to just to try and find like how many photographers music journalists like just trying to like go oh okay this person follows me i didn't know that i could send them a dm now and i think not having that knowledge of like even who your followers really are is kind of a bit annoying unless you happen to be online the day that some i don't know like the day when rivers from weezer follow dranninsan on twitter like i might have missed that if i didn't check twitter that day um and i think that like the tech is sort of getting it's not as clever as it could be and it's not as sophisticated as it could be and it often requires a lot of time investment yeah because like for instance on linkedin like if i'm posting about music there's a whole bunch of people that follow me for like music industry news and things I mean I don't cut through to them very often but there's also a bunch of people that are journalists and in the media and sometimes I might post more about that yeah but I'm just down to beholden to the algorithm deciding to show it to one or the other which is such a fickle thing and it used to be much easier you posted I mean not to be like aging myself here but like OG Facebook you know you had your different groups like you knew everyone you were connected to like these things are so intrinsic to the experience and then you know they keep removing that like steps of removal to the point where we've wrapped all the way back around and you're basically going to have to pay a monthly subscription to have that OG experience, which is like true of every tech thing from the 2000s, right?

31:31Like, you know, video streaming, like music streaming, like everything went from, oh my God, it's free. Like as a millennial, you're like, oh my God, yay, free things to, oh, now it's getting like kind of bad to like, oh, now you, now you pay for it. Okay, great. Oh, now you pay for it. And you have ads and you're like, wait, hang on, how did we get here yeah but it's also things like on spotify like the anchor s for instance i think she got about 10 000 followers but only went on to about a thousand release radar playlists and that's meant to be the playlist of people that follow you yeah and it's like so we're paying and we've only done a small campaign just to test it but like the marquee and spotlight campaigns are about 30p every time someone clicks yeah like you need to get a thousand or more streams to make that 30p justify like a return on investment yeah yeah like and it's to reach to reach the people who've opted to follow because a few years ago it was like get your followers up yeah so therefore you can get your music consistently to the audience that are a fan and even now that doesn't even work on spotify yeah it's it's tough because i mean if everyone's trying to do it and everyone's using the same tools and then everything gets cluttered and then no nothing nothing um can cut through just seems to be like this recurring pattern of difficulty that we have because even like the pivot to newsletters just means everyone's getting more email i do subscribe to so many newsletters that are all so good and i have no time to read like any of them like every once in a while i'll like click on one and be like oh yeah i haven't read this in ages and i'll be like oh my god this is the best like i love garbage day or like the London centric is like one of my favorite like London based ones subscribe to both of those they're great but like the Dranin Sandman we know about 45 to 52 % of people that subscribed open our email each time which is a really high open yeah yeah yeah and but what we don't know is do they actually read it or do they just open it have a quick skim I'm also a chronic abuser of the Gmail like mark all as read feature because I hate having the unread notifications yeah but that wouldn't count as opened oh okay so yeah it doesn't count on the other side yeah it's uh like I have an email address where my newsletters go and I don't often even get time to open that email address yeah yeah I don't know I feel like for every like you say for every action there's a reaction and the media fragmenting into rather than having 30 people write for one publication having 30 newsletters you can't sustain subscribing to 30 newsletters yeah versus one magazine.

34:03And I think that's something that I think we're going to see a little bit of a shift in. I don't know if you've seen this platform. We might try it. It's called Trust Fund, where you can subscribe to like multiple newsletters at the same time. Okay. And I think you can also do it. Yeah, I think you've heard something about this, yeah. And I think it's just allowing like small groups of people with crossover of audiences to cross-pollinate their audiences. Like bundles, basically, yeah. It's like we're going back to the TV broadcast. Yeah, exactly. TV bundle. no I mean it's it's such a thing especially when you have like the fandom conversation how do I get my fans to support me better and I think the like creator subscription individual creator subscription obviously the Patreon model inspired a lot of people to be like oh maybe we can make this more mainstream but when you actually add that up as a fan you know especially with how good Discovery is you might have like dozens of people that you love and want to follow and would love to support but when that's buying each of them a coffee once a month that's a lot of coffees yeah yeah and it's like if you're wealthy that's different isn't it and it's like there's never a income or wealth based price yeah it's the same price for everybody yeah which is why i think it's so important as a creator to um kind of have brackets like uh open it so people can support as they can um i had a presentation at um balifornia last year i was like talking about super fans and how do you even define those and you can do it in terms of time effort and money uh they're kind of the three like metrics and people who don't have a lot of money might have a lot of time which you can kind of monetize through ads or engagement or getting them to share people who don't have a lot of time or money but they might like really invest a lot of effort when they do and those are the people who like turn up and are there and like make I don't know fan tributes or their own t-shirts or um have more impact like even if it might be less often and then the people who have a lot of money just like go out and they're like yeah subscribe like you know um and ideally you can kind of meet people where they're at uh because also you run the risk especially now where you focus too much on like high earners and you that's actually a pretty small proportion of the population.

36:26I think the data in the US like Q2 last year 10 % of the population made up like 50 % of all retail spending. So you're looking at this like smaller and smaller and smaller proportion and then it's like oh Gen's Alpha will fix it. It's like yeah well Gen's Alpha is still using their parents' credit cards. And then they go out into the job market and it's like, well, you know, they can't get jobs. So suddenly they don't have any money. And then it's like, oh, well, nobody's turning up to gigs. No one's buying drinks. No one's buying merch. Like no one's supporting. And it's like, well, yeah, because, you know, they can't afford to.

36:58They also know a creator personally, statistically speaking, because everyone can be a creator. So they're just doing it at home. Like, you know, which pros and cons, like creative accessibility and diversity, but also like no one can actually make a living off of it. Yeah. And I think that like the blue dot fever conversation has not been connected to the cost of living crisis. Yeah. Because I think there's a lot of people in the music industry that are on their like 60 grand a year, 120 grand a year jobs. Yeah. That haven't quite realized that most people are either unable to find a job. Yeah.

37:32In a job where they spend half their income on their rent. Yeah. And the other half on travel. Yeah. And food. and it's like okay so where's the 400 pounds to go to a show or 150 pounds to go to a show even the 80 like for someone who's just out of university and you know doesn't have a full-time position somewhere like that's a big spend for them yeah and then also if they go and then it's like 10 pounds for a drink so then they can go but they can't afford to have more than a drink and then also like everyone's on their phones because it's a really big profile thing and then it becomes this whole like feedback loop of oh this isn't so great which is why everyone's focused on like oasis and like the big the big bands that are a bit um older and more nostalgic because you can appeal to a higher earning audience basically and also you kind of know what you're going to get with a band where they've got several albums yeah if you're going to go see an artist that's maybe not released a debut album yet or is released one and a half records and you're like they're going to play for two hours i'm only going to know like four songs yeah like do i want to spend 40 pounds like going to see them versus 80 pounds to go see a band that i've been a fan of for 20 years

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39:28It's interesting seeing like Daftones' rise at the moment. i know they're the most consistent so deftones and nine inch nails two most consistent bands i mentioned on this podcast but it's like they've now become a nostalgia band but they've also got the same kind of thing like metallica have like a new generation discovering them yeah and like that i don't know it's not really angst it's like a sexy rage that deftones have like i think is quite universal and like people are going to enter into that different it's not you weren't around at the moment in time this band came out so you're not going to get it.

40:00There's something about the confidence that you're going to go see something special that's not always guaranteed if you're going to take a punt on a 20 pound gig. And I think we're not hearing enough about well if you live in, I don't know, Guildford say, do you even know that the boiler room's there? There was a conversation I had with someone saying that even the music students because of COVID, the generation before them that didn't because of COVID, they didn't have the hand-me-down knowledge of... because there were no gigs on. So they didn't know that there's a great grassroots venue there that's had all sorts of huge names play there over the years.

40:40And if you pop in, you might see someone that's going to be Adele or Coldplay that like 10 years before they're playing festival headline slots. And there's a lot of interconnected issues in music but I guess one thing I was going to ask you is because you've studied gaming a fair bit like do you think something like putting on gaming nights in these venues so that people go in and discover the venue and check the listings of what's coming up and just like hanging out in the space because I feel like when I was younger like I put on a quite few all-ages gigs and I don't see those advertised as much anymore and like because you get that bug for live music yeah but if venues are over 18 and you've never you don't you don't know it's there you've never an excuse to go yeah if your mate's school band hasn't played the venue like how are you going to get people into the ecosystem of music i guess is the bigger question is there something you've seen with gaming or anything that's yeah i think it's a really interesting topic because there's so many stressors around it um i think we forget sometimes the gravity of the fact that we all live through a global pandemic for like three to five years that changed life pretty drastically and some people would remind us that we're not completely out of it yeah there's still like legacy impacts i mean arguably last year i mean blue dot fever this year is kind of off the back of last year there being so many live gigs for pretty much the first time since covid like last year as someone who loves going to music like live music it was crazy it was great there was something every weekend was a bit overexpensive but like because it was kind of the first and back it was a little more accessible and then this year everyone kind of goes like oh boy like and that reflects really heavily in culture for young people like culture is something shared and passed down it's like you're when you're like a teenager it's someone's older brother or sister like buying you guys like the first pack of beer it's like you go to university and someone from the next year up takes you to like oh this is the cool nightclub this is how we behave like you set precedence and we lost that because there was no one to share it with or learn about it from so these kids are like growing up in an era where they're trying to piece this back together through TikTok and YouTube and Instagram, which doesn't respond.

43:09Like it doesn't, it's not, it's like trying to learn how to be a person through like an instruction manual, you know? It doesn't really work the same. Have you seen the theories around indie sleaze? Like the reason why young kids now really like it is because they can see an image of what going to gigs was like without phones and people just being in the moment. Like I remember someone saying like seeing on skins, like people going to like a Foles gig. and Crystal Castles or everywhere else it was they had on. For them, they're like, oh, okay, that's what you do when you go to a gig. They don't know, and then we get mad at them for not knowing, and it's like, how would they have learned that?

43:47And I think, especially when we talk about local venues as opposed to gaming, so instead of going out to local spots, they went online, and online is inherently globalized. It's not local to you anymore. Again, OG Facebook. But like it's it's so global centric. So I mean, the bit when you live in London, right? Like, OK, it's great to scroll and see like, oh, there's a school restaurant. Oh, I can go for a walk in this park next weekend. And then you realize, oh, it's just gone viral, actually. So it went from being this really cool spot that someone went to and took a video of to something that's going to have a line like all the way out the door and down the street because everybody saw the same video.

44:3150 ,000 people have seen. you know and then the truth is like if you just walked around your neighborhood block you probably find something equivalent if not cooler and but no people don't but don't make a video about it don't make a video about it don't make a video about it um but people don't they don't know to do that um or if they are doing it it's not making it online kind of by design or by happy accident because that keeps like the vibes in check um and so yeah you have a problem with like local venues because these kids are like, oh, I see on Instagram, like I would need to go travel like all the way over here or like all the way over there in order to get like the cool thing.

45:09And it's like actually just go to the local spot. And where gaming comes into it is that fundamentally these kids just want to like, or people in general, it doesn't have to be kids. People just want to hang out with their friends and do stuff together, which requires third spaces, which weren't present during COVID and are increasingly pricing us out. and gaming is a space for them to do that. You know, they like go online, chat with their friends over the headphones. Maybe they'll be on FaceTime. Like, oh, let's do this mission or this mini game or whatever. Like that's why Roblox and Fortnite are so massive.

45:45And the gender divide isn't even there anymore. Or did a report recently on this. And more girls 16, 19 actually use Roblox than boys do. And these have become their like third hangout spaces. so I think we conflate like and do they like is instead of being on the phone with your friends you're just building something in roblox together or wandering around roblox yeah you're like doing an activity together as opposed to just like just chatting or just like watching something very passively and I think we conflate this very easily with like oh they don't want to go outside anymore they want to sit in the room and play video games it's like well no they don't really have anywhere outside to go that they know of and the video game is where they can hang out and the social media is where they're just like you know blah blah blah and that's appealing like there's an appeal to the friction and the enjoyment of actually like participating in an activity so I think to answer the original question which is like can we revive these spaces by like throwing game nights or something potentially if that's something but I think the the broader issue is not that they're more interested in games than they are in music it's that the games are a place for them to hang out yeah so you need to kind of revive like a physical culture of like going out and participating um it's always i always find it fascinating like um i never played what's the thing workshop um the gaming thing that people play where they like literally like are building elks and things minecraft no the real world thing they have on high streets oh i don't know i feel like it's called like gaming workshop or something okay um and people play world of warcraft and things like that and that is being present in the space to play it it's a bit like i guess chess or something yeah yeah like so i i do wonder whether like we're seeing a reaction to doom scrolling in the more people are buying magazines like i don't there's not enough data out there yet but i had this theory two years ago that magazines are gonna have their vinyl moment.