David Garrison // Blog

A quick post in case you're a fan of Youssou N'Dour.  He just spoke at a premier of a new film called "I Bring What I Love" that chronicles the controversy surrounding the release of his Grammy Award-winning album, "Egypt".  It's an inspiring and beautifully shot film with great music. Worth seeing! 

If you're in NYC, he'll be making another appearance at the BAM screening tomorrow at 2pm. 

I'm easing into the panels here at SXSW, so this post may seem a bit marketing and businessy, but I thought you all might be interested in hearing some of my thoughts from panels and discussions we’re having before those thoughts are clarified, solidified, culled, prioritized, and applied.
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I’ve been here just over 24 hours and I’m already struck by the lack of clarity in the market around the definition and application of social media in general, but user-generated content (UGC) in particular. 

THE FALLACY OF PERVASIVE BROAD “SOCIAL MEDIA” AND "UGC" LABELS
I often overhear marketers and brands talking about how they are (or are becoming/integrating) social media into their offerings:  it would seem that we’re moving colloquially toward a bad spot where “social media” means anything that involves people. 

The challenge is that defining it so broadly makes the line extremely blurry; there’s no distinction between posting a comment or testimonial and, say, collaborating on a film online using only video generated from the camera on your laptop.  More than that, an overly broad and unspecific definition implies that anything a person posts to the web is social media and, by extension, that because people post the core editorial content on most sites, a website itself is inherently social.

I’m of the opinion that the market will eventually work out something it’s comfortable with and that it doesn’t need me to define social media at a high level.  I will, however, note that I believe the line lies somewhere around [a] interactions primarily occurring between users vs. just between users and a site, [b] structure that encourages interactions between more than one user (so it has the potential to be a social setting vs. an intimate one-on-one discussion), and [c] is multidirectional (so interactions have more than one axis). 

My bigger concern is the impact a broad definition has on how we look at and talk about UGC.  The UGC panel I went to yesterday epitomized the problem:  too often, organizations don’t (or won’t) differentiate between different types of UGC and the reasons people create it.  If we don’t differentiate, we run a very real risk of not reflecting the creative process of the users and offering the right tools to facilitate the creativity that makes social interactions so enormously interesting.

After talking to several other organizations (for and non-profit alike) about their communities, I’ve begun to see two important points in working with UGC. 

EXISTING VS. ORIGINAL CONTENT
The first important distinction for an organization to make is between discussions, activity, and content that focus primarily on using existing content and those that center on original content (or content that the person creates without incorporating media created by others).

Organizations that fail to do this will end up with either underlying brand issues, technology/usability issues, or process issues.  A great example is YouTube, which falls prey to the first and second:  it both has a lot of great original content that gets lost among the poor-quality repostings of people’s favorite TV shows and hasn’t addressed some of the key underlying audio issues (e.g,. mono audio) that would drive many more serious users to post more completed content.

THE DYNAMIC OF COMMUNITY INTERACTIONS
More and more, the way people interact in a UGC setting influences the type and format of media they contribute. At a high level, interactions fall into three broad categories:

Observation + aggregation.  Basic interactions such as commenting and tagging media.   Examples include any site that allows basic comments, feedback, or reviews:  Netflix, Facebook’s photo tagging.

Distribution + dissemination.  Interactions focused primarily on viral dissemination of content or content sharing and hosting.  Examples include sites that encourage sharing insights or content organization:  Flickr, Twitter

Creation.  Advanced collaboration-focused interactions. Users not only post content they’ve created, but allow other users to engage during and around the creative process, whether that’s music or essays, design or film. The market will start paying more attention to these sites, in part because it’s where the content for other sites will increasingly come from. 

I have some initial thoughts for how organizations can approach social media - and UGC specifically, but I’ll save those for another posting.

The final post from a piece I wrote after a panel on photography got me thinking about the relationship between musicians and the people who capture images of them.

Insider Access
There have been a lot of changes in how people watch and interact with a band and one of the most significant ones is the camera-phone. We've all heard about the democratisation of information, as in journalism (and music if you've hung around Indaba for any length of time), and it's very clear that it's changed the dynamic of the concert experience - except perhaps at certain venues in Japan, where, according to the panel, watching through your phone is still considered rude.

For photographers, this is an important trend, since there are suddenly boatloads of people recording different elements of the session who previously would've been just listening. When everyone's a shutterbug, it means that photographers need to be just that much better; it means they're pressured to take even more insightful or distinct photographs - ones that are more appealing or stylistically differentiated than they've ever needed to be before.

Musicians should care, too, because there's a marked change in the composition of people who capture and spread the images that become a performer's public-facing brand. At a practical level, the accessibility of technology and the prevalence (and credibility) of blogs means that a $300 camera can now get you the access only a professional photographer used to be able to get. "Write a blog and say you're the chief photographer", says Natkin, who pointed to 67 (I'm assuming he didn't really count) photographers covering REM at Stubbs as proof of the expanded media landscape.

And yet, there are a few practical points that continue to differentiate the creative work of elite photographers.

Longer access. Many venues only allow photographers in for the first three songs. But that's not as hard-and-fast as you might think. As Natkin notes, "Given that the point of setting out a play list is to build up and get warm, most photographers aren't allowed to shoot the best part of a show." See if you can negotiate your way into shooting the whole show. You may be surprised to find you're the only one left - for no other reason than that you thought ahead to ask. Bands are your allies here, since they're probably saving the best for last and they'll want that captured.

Context. The show doesn't just happen on-stage. Having a relationship with the band both gives you more pre- and post- shots and gives you insight into when the most representative shots will occur.

A sense of what's cool. With the continued shift toward digital and reductions in marketing budgets, photography is feeling the heat. More than ever before, people only want to pay for what's cool and what will resonate. And, with the openness of the Internet, they can be picky; they have access to so much material that, if they don't think you're good enough to get them "cool-in-a-shot", they can take the DIY approach, trust their own instincts and go somewhere else.

Along with the fact that a goodly proportion of people deciding who to hire for record companies are young and look for signals that reflect what they think is cool, this all just means that professional (and semi-pro) photographers need to be able to show different styles and content types. So, when you think about landing photo gigs, consider that you're more likely to be successful if you [a] generate interesting insights in more than one genre, [b] generate interesting insights around more than one part of the show, and [c] generate interest insights that will resonate with the person making the decision.

How Do You Take a Good Photograph?
This is what it all comes down to. Here's what the panel had to say.

Wright. Be ready. If you don't have a camera ready to go and with you, you've lost the moment. It's a real decision each day whether you're taking photos or not.

De Wilde. Try to have fun with the people you're with. Timing is really magic. Someone famous once said, "There's nothing worse than a sharp photo of a fuzzy concept."

Natkin. There's always a decisive moment. Don't take shots around it. Wait for it.

Weschler. Be passionate about your subject - it shows. There are two types of photo: spontaneous shots and planned shots. Love the first. Prepare for the second.

The fourth post from a piece I wrote on the way back from SXSW. A panel on photography got me thinking about the relationship between musicians and the people who capture images of them. It made me wonder where photographers see Not-Thems fitting into that relationship. 

The Artistic Equation: Creation + Experience = Art
Artists have any number of visions of success: from economic winfalls and public recognition to changing people's lives and influencing other artists. Some modernists [gasp!] even say they do it for creativity's sake - to get an image out of their Selves. In many ways, it's a weird notion, that we each have unique and intensely personal reasons for doing art. 

Not surprisingly, the flip side is also true: we each have distinct things we appreciate about art; distinct things we expect art to do for us; distinct things we look for in art. And, to make things worse, we usually have more than one expectation of art.

You may, for example, want art that's bluntly political (e.g., Andy Warhol's Mao) at the same time that you want art that merges primitive and classical form (e.g., Modigliani's Nu couché de dos). With little inherent contradiction, we love seemingly random combinations of genres like jazz and death metal or funk and Bollywood.

There are two related points worth emphasising here. First, while people are different, there's almost invariably overlap in what we appreciate. And the implication is that my making art (at the extreme) purely as a means of disgorging into the world the blurred image of the evening I broke up with someone doesn't mean you won't appreciate my work as representative of the romantic soiree you spent with someone else.

Second, identifying what's likely to resonate with people still only helps solve for one half of the artistic equation. That's both the easier half and the harder half. While we're fascinated by the artistic process (the first half of the artistic equation), we tend to focus on people's appreciation of art (the second half of it).

Make the Bands the Recipients of the Shots
So why do you as a photographer (or musician) care about all this? Because the images you take (or pose for) are the product of your position on the equation. Applied to a backstage or offstage setting, for example, shooting solid candids gives you shots that bands themselves want. Get shots they're proud of or want to give their moms. That's probably a good way to get them to like you being around.

Many photographers think that, so long as shots get them the insights into the music and players they're were hoping for, they're all good. But there's the observer to consider. Post-modernism eschews the idea that you can create art in a vacuum. In the end, I tend to think that, since you're kind of stuck thinking about the person who's going to see your work, you might as well take a second to think about what they'll like about it - even if you immediately discard what they want as not consistent with your artistic objectives.

I suppose, when it comes down to it, the point is that you have choices to make. Sure there's the same old one contrasting internal and external objectives, but there's also another one that relates to what you'll do to get access to the artist. At its core is the idea of degrees of "selling out". If you want access to, a relationship with, or the trust of the artists you're capturing on film, don't forget that there's always the band's perspective to consider. Why do they want you there? Why does the audience want you there? Is it worth taking shots that they want and will covet in order to get deeper into the experience of them as musicians?

So, assuming you buy all this, what does one do? Thinking about what others are looking for - stepping away from your own objectives and perspective - is unnatural. You won't get it right away. You may never do it a lot. And you will never entirely do it. But you can get the idea in a venue you already know: the concert itself. Next time you're taking a shot of a musician, turn your head and watch the audience. It's an eye-opener; always different.

Take a moment to watch the people. What are they watching? What are they looking for? Why are they there? What do they notice aside from the band? Each other? The building? Take a moment to play on this, if only for commercial gain. The gist is that, even as a crowd, we have egos. We like to know that someone else cares about what we think, what we want, what drives us, what we aspire to. We like to see ourselves reflected in others and others' work. Take a picture of the crowd. And see if it doesn't give you a perspective outside your own.

The third post from a piece I wrote on the way back from SXSW. A panel on photography got me thinking about the relationship between musicians and the people who capture images of them. It made me wonder how musicians and photographers think about different elements of that relationship.

Money Makes the World Go Around - Sometimes Too Much So
We all have a perspective on money - its value to society, its symbolism, its corrupting or liberating influence. Some see it as an enabler, others as a distraction, others as both. But, for artists, it's a loaded topic.  Money implies objectives other than artistic ones.

Panel members suggested that they felt that not focusing on payment early in their careers improved the quality of and nature of their product and reflected their reasons for doing photography. Wright, for example, didn't even do music photography until he was old enough to retire. Natkin started because he liked the music itself and wanted to get into things for free.  De Wilde started out just taking photos with friends, some of who were musicians.

I suspect this really just goes to the greenfield point again - art for art's sake.  None of the panelists said they do photography for the money, although all have seen economic success come from it. And, while it may seem obvious to those of you who are artists, it's worth noting for the rest of us that not having a monetary goal necessarily means you have another one; not being distracted by money means you're more focused on something else, like the image you're capturing.

Now, I'm aware that the implication here is that young photographers should focus on their craft and success will follow. Frankly, I'm not sold on the idea that money comes entirely in its own time and fashion. I think, per the proverb that luck is the combination of preparation and opportunity, that successful people do things to position themselves to reap rewards.

What you do to position yourself is up to you, but creativity and discipline are requisite. Natkin, for example, talked about how he broke onto the scene by making sure he was at every show possible. Having been invited to shoot Prince's birthday party, he figured he'd be one of many photographers at the event, which wasn't in NYC. But, because it wasn't in NYC, when he got there he found he was the only photographer who'd bothered to show up. That was a couple days before Purple Rain was released. Prince had worn his new outfit for the occasion and, when he went into seclusion for the next six months, Natkin was the only one with pictures that could be marketed.

I don't think anyone on the panel was implying you should disregard money or not try to set yourself up to be successful. Instead, they were alluding to the idea that we often either reject success outright because it "distracts from our creative genius" or run headlong into success thinking we're big enough to handle it.

It seems to me that our greatest successes come when we work hard to position our work in the most favourable light (often requiring that we follow more than one path simultaneously - what the financial world calls "mitigating risk") and also acknowledge that the path we choose really does impact our perspective.

My second post from a piece I wrote on the way back from SXSW.  A panel on photography got me thinking about the relationship between musicians and the people who capture images of them.  It made me wonder what both musicians and photographers can do to develop that relationship.

Just Being There
There's a trick to being there at the right time for great shots: don't announce that you're the photographer. If you're lucky, people may just assume you're with the band.

I'd certainly come across the idea before that the moment is only captured or experienced by those that are present and watching. It's ingrained in our popular culture - in language, like "those who win are the ones who simply show up;" in movies, from "Being There" and "All the President's Men" through to "Run Lola Run" and "Amores Peros"; songs, from On the Street Where You Live to For What It's Worth; and the written word, from democratised journalism and non-fiction, like Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate, to theatre and fiction, like Romeo and Juliet. But I suppose I hadn't recognised that showing up doesn't always mean the same thing. The line that struck me on the panel was Wright's. "Others announce that they're photographers, the band stops what it's doing, stands in a corner for a couple clicks, sends the person away and goes back to normal, which is when I take shots."

The point is that photography requires timing, a relationship and a degree of comfort. De Wilde, for example, suggested that success is the musician having an almost friend-like trust in the relationship. Getting there for her means capturing a moment they both enjoy. Like a good conversation over a glass of wine, de Wilde's photos are an experience the artist wants to relive. As Beck, for example, was becoming increasingly famous, he started getting shot as a weird star and she built a solid relationship by doing several softer takes that made him realise she appreciated who he was off the stage.

Proposing ideas that challenge an artist's image of themselves, however, is a delicate task that can quickly alter a relationship. Most experienced music photographers bring new ideas to an artist first, working with them to develop the idea and ensure they feel natural in any staged settings and at ease in their natural settings.

Capturing people (never mind musicians) in natural settings and poses takes patience and unobtrusiveness, but not necessarily loads of time or set-up. Natkin described how he often doesn't have any communication with an artist. For example, finding himself backstage with Erykah Badu, he set up rudimentary lighting backstage, motioned her over before a rehearsal, took 12 quick shots and sent her off after 3 minutes. In the course of the shoot, the two didn't say anything to each other, which he suggested was important in that it didn't distract her.

De Wilde tells a story of shooting Built to Spill, a band that doesn't like being photographed and just wants to get on with making music. Told that they "weren't going to shoot for more than two hours," she decided to just start shooting against a mural they were standing in front of to get them "warmed up". With Deathcab for Cutie, she realised that what would best represent their character would be to make it seem an accident that they ended up in the shots. Photographers like Natkin and de Wilde play to the idea that fans want to see inside the creative process and feel like shots weren't planned - a this-is-them-in-real-life-type deal.

What struck me after listening to the panel talk about this was that "being there" can occur whether you're taking candids on the fly or getting an artist to put on an orange furry coat for effect. It depends on what's appropriate for the artist, but, when it comes down to it, it's really about finding ways to either capture people in their natural environment or capture their response to being in a new one.

Key Points 

• Build trust with the people around you. Don't intrude by overshooting, but don't be afraid to just hang around with people until they stop watching you
  
• Discuss your ideas with labels and artists first and then develop them together. There's generally a reason - a "base truth" - that they're uncomfortable with something
  
• Eye contact - in all its variations - is one of the most striking signals of a person's trust
  
• Blur the line between when you're shooting and when you're not. Make shooting candids easy for the artist by not forcing them to "get ready..."
  

I recognise that this post comes a little after the fact, but I've been busy absorbing SXSW for the past week. Matt and Dan covered a lot of the broader insights that we, as a team, drew from SXSW 2008, so I wanted to revisit a specific panel. I started this as a single piece, but it's turned into a real beast, so I'm going to post it as a series over the next couple days.

Music Photography
For those of you who know the Indabans, you're aware that several of us are enamoured of the visual image. Jesse, Gordon and I, for example, are partial to stills, while Chris goes in for the moving picture.

So, when we saw that there was a panel on music photography at SXSW featuring Paul Natkin, Thomas Weschler, Autumn de Wilde and Tom Wright, we were pretty stoked. While I don't have the glossy slide shows that made the panel inspiring, I thought you might appreciate a quick summary, if only because it'll get you thinking about what generates the best images of you as performers.

For the Aspiring Photographer: Consider the Long-Term
The panel's recurring theme seemed to be that photographers can make hay in the long-term, but that (with some exceptions) they get screwed in the short-term. As you work your way to being successful, here are two things to remember.

1. Irrespective of expectations of eventual greatness, you really need to like photography and the people you're around
   
2. In any type of art - including music and photography - there are two broad categories of artistic undertaking: commissioned art, undertaken with a commercial purpose in mind outside the art itself, and what I'll call greenfield art, which has an inherently artistic objective
   

One set of resulting questions is clear. Do you develop relationships with the artists and audiences who are the subject of your work, with the labels and marketers who pay for your output or both? Is there a necessary priority among those relationships? Is your emphasis on a commercial product or on an artistic one?

Tom Wright, for example, noted that his approach - taking photos that trace artists' personal growth and character development - hadn't always gone over well with organisations that might commission pieces, in part because his singular focus was on the musician. All his immediately lucrative work focused on the accepted, existing public image of the artist.

To illustrate, he showed a photo he'd taken of The Faces, shot in silouette. The label had hated it. Not showing the faces of The Faces, they said, seemed excessively ironic. Irony was a characteristic it didn't want associated with the band.

The point to take away is that labels, which exist to make money, are naturally concerned with the marketability of the artist. Generally speaking, this means finding ways to consistently communicate an album's theme or emphasise given strengths of an artist's character. In an effort to maximise commercial activity, they look for images that reflect the brand they've built around the artist.

Often, though, this is in contrast to the image that a photographer actually wants to capture. For a music photographer, the point is generally to express a progression of character, to capture a story in an image, to convey a belief or perspective on a relationship. The idea is to represent the artist the photographer gets a glimpse of, glowing halo, damned warts and inspired normalcy alike.

If you're looking to be a substantive photographer, the point is not that this is a choice about whether or not to sell out. It's that you should think about why you're taking the photos. For any number of reasons, images that fall into the greenfield category tend to have greater value later on in a musician's career. Given that, consider what your objective is, enjoy the moments you capture and, if your aim is to sell your images, make sure you think about what your client and their audience want to buy.

But, along the way, make sure you take some that you'll want to look back on later. Chances are, someone else will want to, too.

Key points

• Be patient
  
• Enjoy the music, the people and the moments you're capturing
  
• Take the photos you want to take and supplement them with some shots that will resonate with labels and fans 
  
• Take images early on and throughout a musician's career. The initial images as well as those showing progression will be the ones you'll care about later, since they'll give you insight into who the performer becomes
  
• Be prepared to not be respected and/or not make money until well after the bands you follow are famous
  

A friend from Pequot Ventures, Sam Hodges, asked me yesterday about ESPN's recent decision to not use ad networks and what I thought the upsides and downsides of using them are for small, vertical consumer sites.  Below is my response.  Thought it might give you some insight into how we think at Indaba.

S,

There are a bunch, but a few below off the top of my head. It's a very real decision for any startup and depends entirely on its specific situation, although there are common factors. Glad to give more details if it'll help.

As you might guess, you can build an easy calculation based on percentages and CPM rates which lets you weigh the immediate revenue opportunity against positioning issues and brand erosion. My point of view is that for many startups, selling the entire banner ad inventory isn't going to be the deciding factor in their success.

As sites grow, it's also important to remember that this isn't necessarily an either/or decision. Whatever you do, stay away from blind networks - you'll waste your money on them.

Pros

Ease of execution. Doesn't require sales or significant service. Brings in relatively consistent revenue. Sites usually don't sell all their space (e.g., a piece by Mediaweek claims 20%-70% goes unsold) and this is a good way to increase utilisation with a relatively small investment of time up front.

Immediate revenue. Revenue generally flows sooner than if not associated with a network.

Reach. Gives a good sales person more time to focus on strategic campaign development and the chance to connect with partners you might not otherwise have a reason to talk to.

Credibility. With the market generally ("We have brand X on the site"), with advertisers (most experienced digital marketers will ask whether you work with a network) and with investors (implies structure and a more stable revenue source).

Insights.  May result in interesting connections or insights, based on solid analysis, that you might not have arrived at. Some say that this alone means it's worth always having an experiment running with a network.

Benchmarking. Gives you a sense of your relative value, although for many sites (e.g., 2nd- and 3rd-generation social networks) this is biased data.

Cons

Brand control. It's hard enough for a small brand to protect its positioning. Ad networks don't really give a damn about who they place, as long as it performs (that is, after all, part of their value proposition). Even if an advertiser buys category placement with a network, it's not site-specific. The degree of control is something that's still being worked out in the market, but the problem won't ever go away.

CPM rates. Often lower than you'd negotiate on your own, since you're a commodity and aren't there to represent your strategic value.

No relationship. A site doesn't really have a relationship with its advertisers.

Customer control. As per above, advertisers have less input into the placements. That means you're driven toward an executional relationship, rather than a strategic one. This is a big factor for many sites' (e.g., Indaba) decisions.

Talk soon,

David Garrison
Chief Marketing Officer

indaba music
268 bowery | suite 3 | new york, ny 10012
phone.212.217.9795

Indaba has always been about giving musicians flexible tools to manage their musical lives.  If you've created a session, you've encountered our use of Creative Commons licenses.  Rights management is a complicated and very real issue for artists both online and offline.  We've tried to make things more transparent by supporting Creative Commons' rights standards.  

Today, Creative Commons posted a piece on Indaba featuring founders Matt and Dan.  We're glad Creative Commons is around, is offering forward-thinking tools and services like this and likes what we're doing.  Check out the piece on the Creative Commons homepage.