This entry was prompted by a press release on Topspin – a comprehensive CMS system geared to help artists (and/or their labels) establish sales, events promotion and insights/tracking processes within a single platform. They’ve just announced the launch of a new ancillary platform called ArtistLink, featuring “Promo Exchange”:
“With Promo Exchange, your promotions – your latest video, tour, album or merch offers – are cross-promoted to fans of similar artists. And you earn even more exposure when you allow other artists to be cross-promoted to your fans in the same way. We give you the tools to reach more fans than ever before. Best of all, it’s free for everyone!”
Does it make sense to leverage audiences in this way? To cross-sell music (and all the other frou-frou merch that comes with it) between closely-aligned audiences under the assumption these people will readily accept it? Yes. Is the technology available? Yes. But what about the ethics behind this kind of intangible gift economy?
As a music fan we say yes to one thing, and inadvertently say yes to a whole load of other stuff we have no control over. There’s a philosopher called Martin Heidegger who lived in an obscure part of the Black Forest, Germany. Besides chewing bark, in very simple terms he came up with the idea that we use technology to render all that is around us as a standing reserve: he takes the example of The Rhine in France, and comments on how it has become subjected to our control, providing hydroelectric energy.
It all began as an ordering of nature, but now we find ourselves likewise becoming resources; we’re collected up, packaged, and assigned a price. It’s all very innocent when branded as a means of helping up-and-coming artists reach out, and develop successful DIY careers. But on the other hand, the point of being a fan of an artist is to exercise some selectivity and control. Saying yes to something once implied a rejection of many other possibilities. Now it seams that with every yes, we’re giving away a part of ourselves.