Wednesday’s fabulous first day of music at In The City took two casualties in the ANBAD camp – firstly by imparting a thumping booze ‘n’ loud noise-based headache on yours truly (thank you No Age for the noise element), and secondly by instantly eroding my sanity when ANBAD crashed and fell of the internet.
But now all is well, and I’m back in the Northern Quarter to see what’s happening at the conference before heading out tonight to see more great bands. And possibly D/R/U/G/S again.
Here’s what’s happened so far…
18.15 The roundtable is so much fun! Songs are average though…
17.35 Surely we’re close to the start of the Lamacq roundtable now. Everyone’s favourite uncle Guy Garvey is here; and John Robb, he of the cannibal eyes, has turned up too. We’re just waiting for Peter Hook now…
17.05 The chatter in here is totally, 100% music biz networking chit-chat. And boy, can these guys yap. Watching Lamacq doing his show is a true delight, though. What a pro!
16.35 Steve Lamacq hasn’t aged at all. And such a deep voice for a skinny guy.
16.25 So here we all are now, waiting in a lobby area for Radio 1’s Steve Lamacq to emerge from his little cobbled-together studio in the corner of the room and sit at a magisterial desk that is waiting for him, Guy Garvey, Peter Hook and John Robb to settle around and blather about the new releases. Exciting! My 16-year-old self would be wetting his pants.
16.00 The easy way for bands themselves to do this is to spend a couple of hours a day emailing your fans and getting into a conversation with them, and then see what they want.
15.45 Radio 1, is turns out, ‘predict’ the charts by scouring Facebook, Twitter, etc., and see who ‘the kids’ are talking about. So they guess the charts, play that music – which people then buy based on their push – and then report those charts. Hmmm.
15.30 But apparently, using analytics is nothing new in the music industry – it’s just that before, instead of poring over screens of metrics data, they’d call radio stations and ask them what they’ve played and what people have enjoyed.
15.15 And frankly, it feels like this ground has been covered before – the way to foster relationships with fans, apparently is – duh – to get in touch with them.
15.00 ANBAD’s interest was only really piqued mid-afternoon when there was a discussion about the analysis of fan’s behaviour – or as the marketing bigwigs call it, ‘Fanalysis’ and ‘Fanenomics’. Groan.