Grassroots 'taste makers' define opinions
The impact of blogs, fan networks and other online communities is morphing the way hits are made in movies, music and TV.
Grassroots 'taste makers' define opinions
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
November 14, 2005 4:00 AM PT
Late on a Sunday evening last month, a caravan of mildly intoxicated moviegoers wound their way down a dark gravel road to a shooting range at the outskirts of Austin, Texas.
Most of the cars were coming from an advance screening of the film "Domino," which included an appearance by its screenwriter. The studio had supplied drinks at the theater and was sponsoring a shotgun-toting after-party at the insistence of Harry Knowles, whose "Ain't It Cool News" site of rumors, reviews and industry gossip has a wide following from "fanboy" circles to studio offices.
Hardly a typical release event--but well worth the price of a few liability lawyers to put Knowles in a good mood. For he and others like him are, in effect, defining America's tastes.
"I'm sure we made studio lawyers go into hissy fits," said the flame-haired, larger-than-life Knowles, 33, who called the movie "one hell of a film" in a subsequent review posted on the Web site he founded a decade ago. "But still, we actually got them to loosen up and have fun with their own movie, which is something that rarely happens in this industry."
If Knowles' ways seem unconventional to the Hollywood establishment, they are entirely appropriate for the maverick sphere he represents: an expanding universe of opinionated blogs, fervent fan networks and other communities, where the power to confer popularity--or at least the fragile aura of "buzz"--can appear virtually overnight.
Like the Web itself, the impact of such grassroots opinions has grown geometrically to change the way hits are made in movies, music and television. Their significance goes far beyond the realm of entertainment, fundamentally recasting the way opinions are shaped in a society whose sensibilities have been saturated by mass-media campaigns for generations.
The undeniable influence of these organic taste makers has been made possible by the rise of blogs, tags, collaborative bookmarks and other so-called social technologies that are fulfilling some of the utopian objectives espoused in the early days of the Internet, when it was hoped that the Web would empower the individual and dismantle communication barriers across the globe. Many of those altruistic goals were vastly overshadowed by mass commercialization. But, in the years since the dot-com meltdown, they've been resurrected with a new generation of digerati who are developing and exploiting the social aspects of the medium.
"Media has traditionally been pushed down, from the companies at the top. But in the 21st century, it is increasingly pushed up from online communities," said Eric Garland, chief executive officer of Big Champagne, a company that taps peer-to-peer networks for data on what's most popular on the networks. "The file-sharing community is a good reflection of the marketplace precisely because there is no push mechanism."
For media and entertainment companies seeking tomorrow's fans, this can be a bewildering frontier. In the last decade, average marketing costs for a Hollywood film have more than doubled to almost $35 million, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, but box-office attendance has continued to decline.
It's not that Rolling Stone, corporate radio stations and big-city movie critics no longer help sell tickets and records. But they're increasingly sharing their influence with a more democratic landscape of MP3 blogs and MySpace friends lists, in which a rave review or free download can reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
Grassroots 'taste makers' define opinions
(continued from previous page)
"For us it's a lot of guesswork at this point, but it seems to be having a positive effect," said Andrew Sullivan, whose Sup Pop Records, a prominent independent label, has worked closely with many of the new blogs and social networks over the last year. "Our record sales are doing well."
Even the largest companies say they are reaching out as a matter of survival. "It seems to me that if you're not looking and working in that space, then you will miss a fair amount of the 14-year-old to 25-year-old generation," said Adam Klein, EMI Music's vice president of strategy. "That's where a huge amount of information and sharing is taking place."
To understand how this tectonic change came about, one should consider the phenomenon of the geeky "Star Trek" convention. Film marketers in particular say the influential new Internet communities are an evolution of earlier offline subcultures created by science-fiction fans, comic collectors or other movie buffs. The difference is that the legions of deeply opinionated geeks are now online, and their cranky or ecstatic reviews are now accessible to millions of others.
Longtime genre film publicist Jeff Walker says he has been bringing directors and stars of movies to science-fiction and comic book conventions for decades, and he says these appearances are as important as ever today. He helped market the recent "Batman Begins" film in much the same convention-hopping way as he did the original 1989 "Batman" film, but with an added online component.
"A lot of people from these Internet sites are at the conventions, and that's the source of what they're writing about," Walker said. "Niche genre marketing has been bubbling under the mainstream, and has certainly been part of marketing any film for a long time."
But if the kingmaking power is slipping off the broad shoulders of Rolling Stone, Spin Magazine or the big-city movie critics, who exactly is taking this responsibility?
At one extreme are widely read publications that have emerged wholly online and have simply grown to the point where their readership rivals any old-media giant. Independent record labels say a top review in the indie-music Web site Pitchfork Media, for example, has the ability to move records off shelves instantly.
Despite their popularity, Pitchfork and its ilk are little more than younger, hipper online versions of print music magazines. Somewhere in the middle of the new taste-making chain are bloggers, who publish their own reviews much as a magazine publisher would but often take a more active role as part of a like-minded community.
In the music world, a recent wave of MP3 bloggers have begun to serve as reliable and popular guides for sometimes hundreds of thousands of people at a time. These sites post full versions of songs, modifying the old review model a step further for the digital age.
True to the Internet's anonymous roots, many of the most influential bloggers had no intention of seeking a public voice at all--which is precisely why they have maintained credibility among their followers. One of the oldest and most prominent of these sites is the 18-month-old Music For Robots, which three friends started as an easy way to share music after moving away from each other.
Today, the site reaches more than 300,000 unique visitors a month, says co-founder Mark Willett. He and his friends are constantly barraged by record labels seeking to promote their bands, and they have brought on several other writers to help fill out the site. One of the bands they have championed, El Ten Eleven, has even credited the blog for helping it secure a record contract.
Even the publishing world, often the last to adopt any high-tech innovations, is beginning to respond to the blogging subcultures.
John Lawton, director of online sales and marketing for Penguin, cited the campaign for the recently released "My War," a book by an Iraq veteran turned blogger. The publishing house sent advance copies of the book to a handful of other prominent writers in "milblogging" circles (those with a military focus) and advertised on several of the blogs.
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
Grassroots 'taste makers' define opinions
(continued from previous page)
"We definitely do this on a case-by-case basis," Lawton said. "Some books lend themselves to it more than others, such as genre books or younger authors."
At the other end of the new taste-making spectrum are communities that can help anoint artists simply by the power of aggregated likes or dislikes.
A prime example is the MySpace social network site, recently purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which has become so important in the music business that it recently announced the
It's those connections that can spread likes and dislikes at the speed of gossip. Members can add people with similar likes into their personal networks, browse the favorite movies and bands of others and then add those groups as "friends."
Small labels have seen public awareness of bands rise sharply after reaching a critical mass on MySpace. Doghouse Records new media director Matt Rubin cites the case of one of his bands, The Honorary Title, which was one of the first groups featured on the front page of MySpace and now has had more than 35,000 people ask to be "friends."
"MySpace has gotten to a critical mass in terms of volume, and it is almost an instant market research unit."
"It's a more personal experience for people," Rubin said. "Younger fans love that. If they have the time, bands should do the whole participating thing."
Major label executives have said that it's nearly as important to have a presence on MySpace as it is to have a single on the radio.
"As I talk to our A&R (talent scout) guys, many of them spend a fair amount of time on MySpace," EMI's Klein said. "MySpace has gotten to a critical mass in terms of volume, and it is almost an instant market research unit."
Peer-to-peer networks have larger, faceless sample groups but can still provide valuable information about what people are listening to, as can "top download" lists from online music services such as Apple Computer's iTunes, Napster or RealNetworks' Rhapsody.
All this is good news for consumers, who are only a quick Google search away from finding a blog or a MySpace network that shares their tastes and can recommend something new. The challenge for companies and artists is finding the right communities, blogs and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to target--which can be particularly daunting for traditional media executives who are desperately trying to retain the level of influence they have had in the days of analog.
"There is a lot of noise out there," said Andrew Hawn, a media consultant for Iconoculture, a company that specializes in trend-spotting. "But there is wisdom in that noise somewhere." 
Tomorrow: Wikis make history
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
Grassroots 'taste makers' define opinions
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
November 14, 2005 4:00 AM PT
Late on a Sunday evening last month, a caravan of mildly intoxicated moviegoers wound their way down a dark gravel road to a shooting range at the outskirts of Austin, Texas.
Most of the cars were coming from an advance screening of the film "Domino," which included an appearance by its screenwriter. The studio had supplied drinks at the theater and was sponsoring a shotgun-toting after-party at the insistence of Harry Knowles, whose "Ain't It Cool News" site of rumors, reviews and industry gossip has a wide following from "fanboy" circles to studio offices.
Hardly a typical release event--but well worth the price of a few liability lawyers to put Knowles in a good mood. For he and others like him are, in effect, defining America's tastes.
"I'm sure we made studio lawyers go into hissy fits," said the flame-haired, larger-than-life Knowles, 33, who called the movie "one hell of a film" in a subsequent review posted on the Web site he founded a decade ago. "But still, we actually got them to loosen up and have fun with their own movie, which is something that rarely happens in this industry."
If Knowles' ways seem unconventional to the Hollywood establishment, they are entirely appropriate for the maverick sphere he represents: an expanding universe of opinionated blogs, fervent fan networks and other communities, where the power to confer popularity--or at least the fragile aura of "buzz"--can appear virtually overnight.
Like the Web itself, the impact of such grassroots opinions has grown geometrically to change the way hits are made in movies, music and television. Their significance goes far beyond the realm of entertainment, fundamentally recasting the way opinions are shaped in a society whose sensibilities have been saturated by mass-media campaigns for generations.
The undeniable influence of these organic taste makers has been made possible by the rise of blogs, tags, collaborative bookmarks and other so-called social technologies that are fulfilling some of the utopian objectives espoused in the early days of the Internet, when it was hoped that the Web would empower the individual and dismantle communication barriers across the globe. Many of those altruistic goals were vastly overshadowed by mass commercialization. But, in the years since the dot-com meltdown, they've been resurrected with a new generation of digerati who are developing and exploiting the social aspects of the medium.
"Media has traditionally been pushed down, from the companies at the top. But in the 21st century, it is increasingly pushed up from online communities," said Eric Garland, chief executive officer of Big Champagne, a company that taps peer-to-peer networks for data on what's most popular on the networks. "The file-sharing community is a good reflection of the marketplace precisely because there is no push mechanism."
For media and entertainment companies seeking tomorrow's fans, this can be a bewildering frontier. In the last decade, average marketing costs for a Hollywood film have more than doubled to almost $35 million, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, but box-office attendance has continued to decline.
It's not that Rolling Stone, corporate radio stations and big-city movie critics no longer help sell tickets and records. But they're increasingly sharing their influence with a more democratic landscape of MP3 blogs and MySpace friends lists, in which a rave review or free download can reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
Grassroots 'taste makers' define opinions
(continued from previous page)
"For us it's a lot of guesswork at this point, but it seems to be having a positive effect," said Andrew Sullivan, whose Sup Pop Records, a prominent independent label, has worked closely with many of the new blogs and social networks over the last year. "Our record sales are doing well."
Even the largest companies say they are reaching out as a matter of survival. "It seems to me that if you're not looking and working in that space, then you will miss a fair amount of the 14-year-old to 25-year-old generation," said Adam Klein, EMI Music's vice president of strategy. "That's where a huge amount of information and sharing is taking place."
To understand how this tectonic change came about, one should consider the phenomenon of the geeky "Star Trek" convention. Film marketers in particular say the influential new Internet communities are an evolution of earlier offline subcultures created by science-fiction fans, comic collectors or other movie buffs. The difference is that the legions of deeply opinionated geeks are now online, and their cranky or ecstatic reviews are now accessible to millions of others.
Longtime genre film publicist Jeff Walker says he has been bringing directors and stars of movies to science-fiction and comic book conventions for decades, and he says these appearances are as important as ever today. He helped market the recent "Batman Begins" film in much the same convention-hopping way as he did the original 1989 "Batman" film, but with an added online component.
"A lot of people from these Internet sites are at the conventions, and that's the source of what they're writing about," Walker said. "Niche genre marketing has been bubbling under the mainstream, and has certainly been part of marketing any film for a long time."
But if the kingmaking power is slipping off the broad shoulders of Rolling Stone, Spin Magazine or the big-city movie critics, who exactly is taking this responsibility?
At one extreme are widely read publications that have emerged wholly online and have simply grown to the point where their readership rivals any old-media giant. Independent record labels say a top review in the indie-music Web site Pitchfork Media, for example, has the ability to move records off shelves instantly.
Despite their popularity, Pitchfork and its ilk are little more than younger, hipper online versions of print music magazines. Somewhere in the middle of the new taste-making chain are bloggers, who publish their own reviews much as a magazine publisher would but often take a more active role as part of a like-minded community.
In the music world, a recent wave of MP3 bloggers have begun to serve as reliable and popular guides for sometimes hundreds of thousands of people at a time. These sites post full versions of songs, modifying the old review model a step further for the digital age.
True to the Internet's anonymous roots, many of the most influential bloggers had no intention of seeking a public voice at all--which is precisely why they have maintained credibility among their followers. One of the oldest and most prominent of these sites is the 18-month-old Music For Robots, which three friends started as an easy way to share music after moving away from each other.
Today, the site reaches more than 300,000 unique visitors a month, says co-founder Mark Willett. He and his friends are constantly barraged by record labels seeking to promote their bands, and they have brought on several other writers to help fill out the site. One of the bands they have championed, El Ten Eleven, has even credited the blog for helping it secure a record contract.
Even the publishing world, often the last to adopt any high-tech innovations, is beginning to respond to the blogging subcultures.
John Lawton, director of online sales and marketing for Penguin, cited the campaign for the recently released "My War," a book by an Iraq veteran turned blogger. The publishing house sent advance copies of the book to a handful of other prominent writers in "milblogging" circles (those with a military focus) and advertised on several of the blogs.
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
Grassroots 'taste makers' define opinions
(continued from previous page)
"We definitely do this on a case-by-case basis," Lawton said. "Some books lend themselves to it more than others, such as genre books or younger authors."
At the other end of the new taste-making spectrum are communities that can help anoint artists simply by the power of aggregated likes or dislikes.
A prime example is the MySpace social network site, recently purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which has become so important in the music business that it recently announced the
It's those connections that can spread likes and dislikes at the speed of gossip. Members can add people with similar likes into their personal networks, browse the favorite movies and bands of others and then add those groups as "friends."
Small labels have seen public awareness of bands rise sharply after reaching a critical mass on MySpace. Doghouse Records new media director Matt Rubin cites the case of one of his bands, The Honorary Title, which was one of the first groups featured on the front page of MySpace and now has had more than 35,000 people ask to be "friends."
"MySpace has gotten to a critical mass in terms of volume, and it is almost an instant market research unit."
"It's a more personal experience for people," Rubin said. "Younger fans love that. If they have the time, bands should do the whole participating thing."
Major label executives have said that it's nearly as important to have a presence on MySpace as it is to have a single on the radio.
"As I talk to our A&R (talent scout) guys, many of them spend a fair amount of time on MySpace," EMI's Klein said. "MySpace has gotten to a critical mass in terms of volume, and it is almost an instant market research unit."
Peer-to-peer networks have larger, faceless sample groups but can still provide valuable information about what people are listening to, as can "top download" lists from online music services such as Apple Computer's iTunes, Napster or RealNetworks' Rhapsody.
All this is good news for consumers, who are only a quick Google search away from finding a blog or a MySpace network that shares their tastes and can recommend something new. The challenge for companies and artists is finding the right communities, blogs and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to target--which can be particularly daunting for traditional media executives who are desperately trying to retain the level of influence they have had in the days of analog.
"There is a lot of noise out there," said Andrew Hawn, a media consultant for Iconoculture, a company that specializes in trend-spotting. "But there is wisdom in that noise somewhere."
Tomorrow: Wikis make history
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann