At the core of social media today is relatively new consumer behavior in terms of not just a willingness to share content, personal information, and so on- but a downright passion for doing so. The nature of the Web begets sharing, for sure- but the first widespread activity requiring sharing of information not usually publicly exposed may very well have been peer-to-peer music filesharing.

A regret of mine is that we weren’t able to use the information Napster users exposed on their hard drives to create “tribes” or “collectives”, or to connect our users in other ways. Our “Someone Like Me” feature allowed users to search for others with similar music in their collections. This enabled better trading and music discovery, of course, but we always thought it was the beginning of a social network as well. (Not to mention a GREAT dating service….) “Someone Like Me” was disabled through most of Napster’s existence for legal reasons.

We loved the sharing concept and it was at the core of the Napster tagline I created: “Thanks for sharing.”

More later on the technographics/psychographics/general behavior of people engaging in social behaviors on the Web. “Connectors” are a key group – you’ll see them everywhere on Twitter.

Twitterers are often Connectors. Connectors get their jollies from disseminating information, putting people together, and “knowing” folks 6:55 PM Apr 27th from TweetDeck

The Forrester social media technographics are: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. I’ve added Connectors.6:54 PM Apr 27th from TweetDeck

It’s accepted wisdom by now that newsprint as it has existed for centuries is headed towards extinction. The Web is more immediate; TV seems more personal. But stepping away from the newsroom towards the cultural beat, here’s a lifestyle example of why printed matter cannot compete with the Internet. .
This article, about the vast world of Dead recordings and the band’s living legacy, is a great story and we enjoyed reading it in our Sunday NYT. A few days later, our friend Channon brought up the article to us. A great story, yes, he said – but the best part? The best part to him was the hundreds of reader photos of Dead shows over the years that had since been submitted to the Times online.
This user-generated photo collection, which amounts to a very personal history of the Dead, gives context, community, and excitement to the original story. The Times has also made available online audio excerpts and a link to a Dead roundtable moderated by the NYT.
Really, this says it all. The online piece is interactive and multimedia. It is alive, evolves and grows via user interaction. The print piece can only live in its moment, and quickly becomes irrelevant.

It would be amazing to have collective input from a huge pool of musicians on how they would design THEIR dream version of the entity which must eventually evolve to replace the record label. What would it do (the things artists can’t, won’t, or don’t want to do themselves?)? What part of its functions would be functions labels now handle and what would be new?

My Napster colleague (our VP, Product Development) Don Dodge has become a startup guru, running the Microsoft Startup Zone and conducting some of the most clear-eyed assessments of newcos I’ve seen, and doing some very cool angel investing (Zink is one). I had a blast last September at Techcrunch 50 sitting with Don in the “blogger zone”. Here’s Don’s take on the newcos at DEMO this year:

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2009/03/best-of-demo-09.html

My friend Derek Sivers, someone I am very fortunate to know and occasionally break bread with (should be more often) wrote an ebook for musicians on how to get music noticed- how to rise above the noise. He should know- Derek founded CD Baby, possibly the most successful independent music aggregator/manufacturer/digital distributor ever, and indubitably the nicest and easiest to do biz with. One of the most beautiful things about Derek is his generosity of spirit, and he makes this ebook available for anyone, free, from sivers.org. You can also download it here:

http://derek.s3.amazonaws.com/DerekSivers.pdf

Derek wants you to spread it around- just please, credit Derek Sivers and link to sivers.org. That’s all.