The Wisdom of Crowds

[Andrew Dubber]

I've had an amazing example of the wisdom of crowds come through New Music Strategies this week.

A woman called Ellen from a band called Worldwide Groove Collective wrote a comment on an old post of mine, about why you shouldn't worry about piracy.

In a nutshell, she was outraged that I would say such things. How DARE you... etc. It's her intellectual property - and the tens of thousands of people downloading her album without her permission were thieves... and so on.

I thought it made a really interesting case study, so I composed a new blog post called But if they steal it - how can I make money?, which re-presented her comment (and moved it to the top of the front page), then attempted to address it.

Over the past couple of days, New Music Strategies readers have left almost 50 66 comments and counting.

That's not the interesting bit. I've had that many before. More sometimes. What's fascinating is the depth to which many of those comments go - and the extent to which some of the commentators are being really incredibly helpful to Ellen in suggesting great ideas to help her turn this worrying situation into an opportunity.

Crowd consultancy
There's something like 15,000 words of (mostly) really helpful music business advice for Ellen and musicians like her, less than 20% of which were written by me, the blog's author.

There are, of course, a couple of negative comments in there (I don't pre-approve comments or moderate other than to remove outright spam after the fact) - but the overwhelming tone of the responses is an attempt to genuinely contribute to the pool of advice and knowledge available. There's some really great stuff in there.

I'm really pleased with that outcome - and I think it illustrates the principle really nicely.

[Jason Hall]

Oooh. Now - being a want-my-cake-and-eat-it kinda guy - would it be too much to ask for both?

[Andrew Dubber]

Well, at the risk of coming across as a complete self-promotional animal (rather than, as is more strictly true, an incomplete one), can I direct you to the post that followed it up?

It's about a tension that arises in moments of technological change: whether it's more important that existing creative businesses make money - or more important that culture expands, innovates and grows?

Some good discussion coming out of this one.

[Jason Hall]

This is great stuff, Andrew, and it would be a real shame if only those interested in music/the music industry engages with this debate. In fact, you've just given me the perfect subject for my (long overdue) next blog post on the Screen WM website. (Watch that space!). If anyone outside of musos should be looking at this then it's filmmakers and tv/video content producers.

[Stuart Cosgrove]

I think its one of the most compelling debates around in modren medi and so many different perspectives to argue. Must say that the open-source creativity of recent radiohead activity is a good example of freeing up content leading to greater innovation.

The greatest music innovation of last thirty years - hip-hop was predicated on a form of creative banditry if not copyright theft.