Items of interest, January 29 - February 05, 2024
February Album Writing Month has started on February 1. The website came out of hibernation on January 27 (it will go into hibernation again in March or April, so if you’re reading this later in the year, there won’t be anything informative behind the links. As in the last two years, I can be found through my FAWM profile.
Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media - Katja Rost, Lea Stahel, Bruno S. Frey, PLOS One. This is from 2016 but still worth bookmarking.
A reminder from Joan Westerberg: Elon Musk lies (because he’s an absolute tit).
Actors of public interest today have to fear the adverse impact that stems from social media platforms. Any controversial behavior may promptly trigger temporal, but potentially devastating storms of emotional and aggressive outrage, so called online firestorms. Popular targets of online firestorms are companies, politicians, celebrities, media, academics and many more. This article introduces social norm theory to understand online aggression in a social-political online setting, challenging the popular assumption that online anonymity is one of the principle factors that promotes aggression.
Also by Joan Westerberg: The creator economy can’t rely on Patreon.:
Put simply, the numbers don’t add up. Data from Patreon and Substack suggests the average conversion rate from follower to paying fan is about 5%. This means a creator would need a total fanbase of 20,000 followers to yield 1,000 paying supporters. And building a core fanbase of 20,000 engaged followers is extremely difficult in today’s crowded creative landscape.
And Baldur Bjarnason’s follow-up to that: Media needs more than subscriptions and streaming:
Audiences in general rarely reach a steady state. There’s a limit to the effort and work a single creator can do to build and maintain an audience. If you hit sustainability – true sustainability that you can build on without ruining yourself emotionally, physically, and psychologically – before you reach your limit, your audience will continue to grow, probably well past the 1000 true fan mark. You’ll probably end up with a true mass audience with time.
If you don’t, it’ll decline. Obviously.
Every streaming market – whether subscription- or ad-based – will consist of a few creators who have sustainable mass audiences while everybody else will have about two hundred paying fans, if that, who are themselves mostly creators subscribing to other creators.
There are times, at my advanced age, when I feel quite mild towards things that I used to loathe. So every once in a while I find myself saying things like “Yes, Oasis sucked and most people are sick of that intro to Wonderwall, but for those who aren’t sick of it, if it brings them joy, who am I to judge?” As an antidote for those moods, I will need to revisit the late Neil Kulkarni’s On Oasis & The Gallaghers, just so I can be fully mindful of just how rancid Oasis were, how much they fucking sucked and how much it sucked having to live through their heyday. If you have the same problem, you’re welcome.
And as our weekly palate-cleanser: a song by The Hooded Crow, almost in time for the next one to appear. It’s a little hard to imagine now, but in the Usenet days, before YouTube and Wikipedia, people really asked each other things like “Remember Tom Lehrer? I wonder what became of him.” The most obvious musical response to this question was to write a filk of “Whatever became of you Hubert”, and by the time the conversation reached me - and remember, I had to have heard of Lehrer first - people had already done that. So I did the next most obvious thing and wrote an original song asking the question. Today’s new old The Hooded Crow song is “Tom Lehrer”, written by yours truly in 1993 and recorded as part of our first demo a year later.
I liked this well enough at the time and the band agreed with me. One associate of the band whose voice you may hear on one of these tracks in a few weeks hated it passionately, but I’ve heard people say positive things about it over the years. As for me, eh, it was one of the first songs I ever wrote. I’m not super-keen on it but I can see the shape of a better song hidden inside it. The version on YouTube was demixed and remixed, but not radically changed. I had some sonic ideas at the time that I didn’t know how to do; perhaps I should ask my brother for the new stems. Tom Lehrer is alive and as well as anyone in their nineties can be expected to be. His songs are now in the public domain by his request and can be found here: https://tomlehrersongs.com
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