Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World

19 Customer Relationship Management Automating Fandom in Music Communities

19 Customer Relationship Management Automating Fandom in Music Communities Tom McCourt and Patrick Burkart Fan cultures receive much attention in contemporary media studies, and for good reason. As social and cultural phenomena, they offer researchers a chance to observe seemingly pure play—authentic and often charming self-disclosures and shared identities among enthusiastic participants. However, cultural industries increasingly are seeking to rationalize and routinize these expressions of identity and solidarity in online contexts in the hopes of reducing uncertain demand (Burkart & McCourt 2006). Since consumers face an ongoing avalanche of products in the form of recordings, videos, and texts, it is imperative that marketers steer the right items to the right consumers at the right time. Discovering affinity groups, and tapping into their searching and sharing operations, has become a lucrative business. “Word-of-mouth is an incredibly powerful discovery tool for music fans,” according to eMusic’s COO, David Pakman. “Our new ‘neighbors’ and ‘top fans’ features deliver the virtual equivalent of that. For the first time, a music service will introduce you to your musical ‘neighbors’ and kickoff a more personal way to discover new music” (Choicestream 2004). The major record labels are tethering online spaces to their newest digital distribution channels (Burkart & McCourt 2006). The “automation of fandom” denotes their management of virtual communities through sponsored online “hosts” and automated content software that defines and controls each fan’s online “experience.” As they attempt to displace informal fan sites, their legal strategies have also hampered open file sharing and threaten the “relative anonymity and diversity of public criticism” 261 (Bielby, Harrington, & Bielby 1999: 1) characteristic of online fanzines. The automation of fandom reduces prospects for music fans’ autonomy as it also pulls the rug out from under their self-organized communities. The music industry anticipates that online music distribution will grow in the double digits for many years to come. Recent sales figures from iTunes and other online music service providers validate digital distribution as a preferred mode of delivery over physical CD shipments. However , the need to effectively market music becomes more acute in cyberspace as recordings shed their physicality and, in many ways, their corresponding value (McCourt 2005: 249). Customer Relations Management (CRM), based on personalization systems, seeks to build brand loyalty by creating online “experiences” tailored to customer preferences and sending personalized content to consumers. In addition to its purported ability to identify customers who have affinities for particular products, CRM is useful for cross-promoting the product lines of partner companies or subsidiaries. But CRM’s greatest strength may be its ability to identify an individual customer’s value to the company or firm. Through CRM, one bank discovered that 20 percent of its customers created all of its revenues, while the other 80 percent were “destroying value” through the labor costs required to process their transactions (London 2001: 10). As the music industry makes the transition from hard goods to digital files, the value of customer profiles traded among online portals, affiliates, and advertisers rises accordingly. Types of CRM Online music buyers typically access such systems through a “portal” or “My Service” interface, which allows them to customize the information they receive, including news, messages, recommendations, and billing notices. These systems recognize and track returning customers; the more the customer uses the service, the more accurate its suggestions become. Such systems assemble marketing dossiers in the process; this information , about both individual and general consumer behavior, can be used to hone in-house marketing efforts and also can be traded between corporate divisions or sold to outside interests. Direct mail firms and the U.S. Postal Service have used similar software for decades to sort information into databases that can be rented and sold. In the online music industry, personalization systems fall into three categories: collaborative filtering, 262 s h i f t i n g c o n t e x t s , c h a n g i n g f a n c u lt u r e s which suggests content based on the user’s purchasing history and volunteered comments from the user and others; human-based genre/mood matching, in which experts classify and categorize individual music tracks into logical groupings; and “listening machines,” which analyze the actual wave forms of recordings to compare their melody, tempo, harmony, timber , and density. Collaborative filtering is intended to...