Sharing is Caring. Start Caring Who’s Sharing

#airing Joni Mitchell – Both Sides Now (Live, 1970) srndp.me/q1GxxZe

Everybody’s gone FB gaga this week, and if they were not counting the new Facebook millionaires (or should I say billionaires), they were counting the Facebook cons and pros.

One interesting discussion was taking place at Midem on Monday. Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of Partnerships was there and he was discussing changes in the music industry:

“I think there’s a new currency that’s emerging… which is how many people have shared a given song or a given artist on Facebook.
This currency is going to become the new way that people talk… and we’re just at the beginning of that now”.

And while no one can argue in 2012 about the power of social networks, Facebook as well as Twitter, in boosting music sharing online, the old equation – “lots of shareing = big success” – has always seemed to me a bit naïve.

Fortunately enough just a day later, my favorite VC, Fred Wilson, discussed just that on his great blog. Fred quoted a research done by Yale professor Dina Mayzlin that found that volume was not a good predictor of popularity. In fact dispersion was a much more reliable leading indicator.

Dina and her colleagues done their research on TV shows, but I have to say I feel the same about artists and their music. To paraphrase on Dina – the wider and broader the song is shared within online social media, the more likely it is to become popular.

And while Fred was mainly discussing different platforms as different social engagements, I was also thinking about different populations with different music tastes. It’s true that you can be popular within a certain “niche” group, and it’s very true that you can be popular with the mainstream, but what is interesting to me – and should be interesting for the music industry – is not just the number of views a song got on YouTube, but who’s watching.

Dan Rose told the Midem crowd that “when we looked at the top hundred songs shared on Facebook at the end of the last year, what we found is a lot of those same songs that you’d find at a billboard chart”.  That is quite obvious when you look at aggregated data and the most popular songs. But what’s interesting is looking at both sides now, as Joni Mitchell sings:

• On one hand, break the most popular songs and understand who shares them and who discovers them via this sharing process. This can teach the industry a lot about what contributes to an artist’s online success, and what are the influential groups that support this artist.

• On the other hand, analyze what various “taste groups” are listening to at the moment, and whether some artists/songs are popular in a micro level – in a certain country, age group, genre – even though they are not showing up on the aggregated charts.

This may sound like something taken out of the advertisement world, with everyone trying to target their audience. Well, guess what – your music video (or streaming audio) is your ad, if you’re an artist, and people streaming it are your audience. And you should know not only who your audience is, but who is your potential audience, even those who never heard of you. And in 2012 there are no excuses.

If you’re music video is only watched by your existing fans, you won’t be able to grow your fan base. If your fans don’t come back to your fan page (96% never do, says Mari Smith), you should be able to target them directly, or through their friends and “taste group”. This way or the other, just volume won’t get you far. Even the greatest and most successful must maintain their fan base and grow it. And the only way to do it is to truly understand the dispersion of your audience.

So while I totally agree with Dan Rose, that sharing is the new currency, and that “piracy” is the new “radio”, as Neil Young wisely noted this week, it’s not enough. You have to understand how it works in order to make it work. Just ask Rovio’s CEO.