Techdirt. Stories filed under "experiments"

It's Important To Learn From Business Model Failures As Well

Mike Masnick — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:59:23 PST

When we held our artists & entrepreneurs working group meeting in October, one of things that was discussed was how little discussion there is about what doesn't work. And that's kind of important, since so much is bound to fail. Some of the entrepreneurs noted that it's not unheard of (though still not exactly common) for failed entrepreneurs to write up a postmortem about their experience. However, with artists, it was almost entirely unheard of for an artist to delve into a failed experiment to say what happened (and what didn't happen!). This isn't a huge surprise. It's tough to talk about the failures -- but with entrepreneurs, they can wipe their hands clean of the startup and move on to the next thing. For a musician, they can't just walk away from themselves. So I can completely understand why artists would be hesitant to talk too much about what didn't work, because they fear it will reflect poorly on themselves.

So it's great to see that Kyle Clements has decided to post the details (over at Step2) of an experiment he helped set up with a musician that failed and to discuss where he thinks it went wrong. You should check out the full story, but, the short version is that he helped set up a plan for a musician to record a quick "improv" song each week and a more "full" song once a month, and release them all on YouTube. There was one part of the plan that immediately struck me when I was reading it. A plan to not promote this:

The first 3 months are Operation: Stay quiet. Produce and publish content, but don't advertise it. leave it for people to randomly stumble across. You don't want to advertise, have people love it, want to see more, and realize there is no backlog of content. No one wants to be the first to arrive at a party. Let the backlog build up while no one is watching.

My first reaction was that I wasn't sure the assumptions here necessarily held. While I do think that there's an "empty" room problem, where people don't necessarily want to be the first on the dance floor, I'm not sure that applies to not promoting videos for 3 months. Especially when it comes to music, there are a number of taste-makers who absolutely do want to get there first and think they found something early. So there were a number of ways I could see this part of the plan backfiring. In fact, it seemed to me like the "first to arrive" part actually is made worse after three months, because when people come in at that point, they see that no one else has watched the 3 months of videos and might assume that they're likely worthless. It seems like those three months could be used more wisely trying to bring the artist's audience to the videos and building connections around them.

And, in fact, it seems that this "don't tell anyone" aspect to the project really did hurt:

First month: Everything went as planned. 4 improved songs, 1 developed song, a few odd hits, nothing unusual.

Second Month: artist grows impatient. Is discouraged that no one is watching. Writes more songs. No developed, proper song is released this month. slightly more hits than last month, but nothing unusual.

Third Month: Artist grows impatient, begins posting new songs to facebook. A much lower than expected number of friends follow through and watch the videos (they will drive an hour and pay $10 to watch him play live, but they wont click a button in facebook?!?!) Artist is discouraged. No proper, developed song this month.

Fourth Month: only 2 improvised songs see the light of day this month. viewership drops. Artist gets discouraged.

It only goes on for a bit more before the artist gives up entirely -- and eventually blocks the videos. There are definitely lessons here -- and even though the plan was not to promote the songs, that alone led to frustration, which is reasonable. That said, almost any artistic endeavor tends to take much longer than people expect. The overnight sensations rarely are overnight sensations at all. Kyle wonders if there was just too much competition and they didn't do enough to stand out. That's entirely possible too, though I'd be curious what other people think as well.

Either way, kudos to Kyle for sharing the story, and hopefully it's something that others can learn from. Personally, my takeaway would be that you should never wait to connect with fans. That should be built in from the beginning.

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When Your Pay What You Want Experiment Is Too Successful In Ways You Didn't Expect

Mike Masnick — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:06:39 PDT

One of the interesting things to come out of the recent brainstorming session we had with artists and entrepreneurs had to do with the lack of really open discussions about experiments that fail. On the entrepreneur side, every so often you see someone write up a "post mortem" of a failed startup. But it's rare to see artists post a "what went wrong" discussion. This is completely understandable. Most people don't want to focus on what went wrong, and greatly prefer to focus on what went right. Admitting failure in any sense often has a stigma attached to it -- and while entrepreneurs can "walk away" from a failed startup, giving them some distance, for artists, a failed experiment in their artistic career (which is often "their life") isn't so easy to walk away from. And many of the artists in the discussion agreed that they could probably learn a lot from the failures of others, such as how to approach things differently and what not to do themselves. This is a topic I'm hoping to explore more in the future, as any reports of "what went wrong" really do seem worth looking into.

This one isn't completely a "what went wrong" story -- it's more of a "what went too right and we weren't prepared for it" story. The folks at Good Old Games, who we've written about a few times before, recently put up a pay what you want bundle for Larian Studios' Divinity anthology of games. The setup is very clearly influenced by Humble Bundle. You can pay what you want, and if you beat certain levels you can get more things. There's also a leaderboard, and hitting certain checkpoints opens up new content for everyone.

Sven Vincke, of Larian Studios, recently wrote a really interesting post about how the "pay what you want" results were quite different than they expected. Despite having the examples of Humble Bundle and others for what happens when you do this kind of thing, Vincke still expected that people would pay very little for the game -- but that they'd get wider distribution. And they planned accordingly -- with the various "unlockings" based on the number of supporters, rather than the amount raised. But things didn't work out that way.

When the PWYW was conceived, we thought that we’d have a lot of sales at the absolute minimum, which basically is 1 cent, and this assumption was actually never challenged. The idea of the PWYW campaign was to on the one hand celebrate 10 years of Divinity and offer Divinity virtually for free (1 cent really is low), thus increasing the installed base of Divinity fans, but on the other hand also to put the Developer’s Cut in the spotlight.

The Developer’s Cut (and Beyond Divinity) were made part of the campaign as a kind of bonus and to not completely ruin ourselves, we introduced the rule that to access the Developer’s Cut, you needed to be in the top 10% of customers. Whether or not that was a sound strategy is a different matter and open for debate, but that was the idea.

What happened however is that for some reason, people started looking at this like some sort of Kickstarter (this was the very first time something like this was done on GOG), and in the very first hours of the campaign, we saw the average pricing go to heights we never expected. Somebody even paid a 1000US$ for one of the games!!!

Yes, that seems like a reason to celebrate, but it also meant that the key plan -- to get the games more widely known and distributed -- wasn't working as intended, and the plan to unlock certain content at key supporter levels was looking unattainable. However, adjusting midstream might make people think that the whole thing was a flop -- when that wasn't the case at all. Clearly they were getting more support dollarwise than they expected, but the number of supporters was much lower. So they finally decided that the best way to handle this was just to be incredibly transparent about it, and explain why they were changing the levels to unlock stuff:

Because in reality, it is doing well – it’s just doing the opposite thing of what we expected. From a revenue point of view, we’re seeing the best results we’ve ever seen on GOG in such a short time span for our games. But that wasn’t the initial idea

So in the end we realized that there wasn’t a way of fixing this without admitting that we just predicted everything wrongly. And if we’d want to still offer those videos (and tech demo of LMK) as a reward for people keeping on participating in the PWYW campaign, then we’d have to lower the different tiers.

Which more or less is what we’re doing this evening. We’re going to lower the tiers to numbers that we think fit the current trend more or less, except for the last one, which we’re putting high on purpose. Well actually, I’m putting it high, because all the others in the team wanted to put it lower. But I decided to be stubborn

One of the things that I think is important to remember about all of these different business model experiments is that they are experiments. We still don't know what fully works, and lots of stuff goes wrong. Sometimes it's a complete failure, and sometimes (as in this case) it's just different than expected, so pieces of it don't work the way they planned. But, the main reason many of these programs work in any way is that there are fans who really like to support the content creator, and when the content creator opens up and explains the situation honestly, that only increases the loyalty and the connection. That's what likely happened here as well. While this one really is a success story, it's still great to see an examination of "what went wrong" in the midst of success -- and it would be awesome to see more of this kind of analysis.

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Valve Tries To Charge People Based On How Likable They Are: Trolls Pay Full Price

Mike Masnick — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:29:00 PDT

We've talked plenty of times about unique business models and experiments by Valve Software. it's latest experiment sounds particularly interesting, if perhaps difficult to pull off well. It appears that the company wants to try to charge jerks more -- but let likable people play free (story found via Slashdot). The specifics are a bit vague, but the plan is for the game DOTA 2. Valve's Gabe Newell has hinted at this:

"The issue that we're struggling with quite a bit is something I've kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people's contributions to a community?” he said, reflecting on a discussion he had with Develop last year.

Last year Newell told Develop that “the games industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone. That’s actually a bug, and it’s something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create entertainment products".

[....]

“An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with.

“So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get Dota 2 for free, because of past behaviour in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice.”

And the latest news is that they are going beyond this crazy idea into seeing what's actually possible:

“We're trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated. We all know people where if they're playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they're playing we would [rather] be on the other side of the planet.

"It's just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people."

I'm curious as to how exactly this would work. I think there are lots of community-based properties would love to be able to charge trolls more. However, this could be really, really difficult to work in practice, and create some problems, depending on what the overall goals are. It would be nice, of course, if you could come up with a perfect system to get rid of trolls, but distinguishing true trolls can often be much more difficult in practice than in theory.

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DailyDirt: Measurements That Make You Go Hmmmm...

Michael Ho — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:00:00 PST

Replicating experiments is an important part of science. If you can't repeat an experiment, then whatever you observed could just be a fluke. But even if measurements can be repeated reliably, it doesn't mean that they can be explained easily. Here are just a few examples of some weird measurements that physicists are still trying to explain.

Neutrinos have been observed to travel faster than the speed of light -- twice, in two different experiments. But the two experiments were done by the same group of physicists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, so independent verification is still pending and these weird measurements could just be an error of some kind. [url]
There are many unsolved mysteries in the field of physics. Here's a list of just ten. Nice job security in waiting for a proton to decay in a billion trillion trillion years.... [url]
The Large Hadron Collider could get a glimpse of the 'God Particle' after searching through the remnants of hundreds of particle collisions. Physicists expect to find the Higgs boson at around 120 to 125 GeV.... [url]
To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Any Suggestions For Those Just Starting To Experiment With 'Free'?

Mike Masnick — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:01:59 PST

Over at our Step2 discussion site, musician Drew Stephenson shares the story of how he's about to start experimenting with a "pay what you want" model for his music. Through a series of events, he has a professionally produced album, where he owns all the rights (the label he was with shut down and let him do what he wants with the music). However, he's asking for some ideas/suggestions on things to do as he kicks off this experiment. Head on over and share your thoughts.

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Band Lets Fans Create Customized Album... And Help Sell It (Allowing The Fans To Make Money Too)

Mike Masnick — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 01:09:00 PDT

We're always interested in unique ideas by artists and content creators to both connect with fans and give those fans a reason to buy, and Lefsetz has the latest on how the Kaiser Chiefs, a quite successful UK-based band, is releasing its latest album. You can read the details, from the band's lead singer, at Lefsetz' site, but there are two key things that the band is doing with this digital (and it's only digital) release:

Let fans create a "custom" album with custom artwork. The band is effectively releasing 20 songs, and users get to pick which 10 they want, and put them in any order they want -- and then they get a custom piece of album artwork, based on the choices. The website is fun to play around with as well.
Then, once you've bought the album, you also get a "fan page" for the unique album that you created, and if you drive others to that page and they buy the copy of the album that you created, you get £1 (the full album costs £7.50).

There are some other little features as well, but those are the two big ones. It's definitely an interesting idea, and I'll be curious to see how it goes. I have mixed feelings on the 10 tracks out of 20 idea. In an era where fans are often much more interested in a few tracks, I could see that making sense, but for super fans, who want to be completists, now it feels like they have to buy 2 albums. Maybe that's okay for the super fans, but I could see some getting annoyed.

As for the money idea, it's definitely a cool idea to test out, but it'll be interesting to see if they provide any data down the road on how well it goes. It reminds me a bit of the similar pyramid scheme that some were discussing a few months back as a way of fighting off infringement. I do wonder, honestly, how much use this really gets. First of all, fans are fans because they like the music, and it almost seems to shift the relationship a bit if you tell them they can earn money promoting you. Still, I'm sure some will, and hopefully they'll make plenty of money in their role as a fan curator.

I know that I mentioned a few things about this experiment that sounds negative, but on the whole I'm all for experimentation and seeing what works and doesn't work. Emotionally, I like both parts of the plan as it seems like a fun experiment. I really do hope it does well, and hopefully the band agrees to share some of the results.

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Connecting With Fans And Giving Them A Reason To Buy Requires A Lot Of Experimenting

Mike Masnick — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:09:01 PST

With my big post explaining the whole CwF+RtB concept in a lot more detail, complete with examples of many artists, small to big, who are using it, we've been hearing about more and more artists. It's really great, and it's often difficult to choose which ones are worth writing up. But sometimes an example comes along that really highlights a point that hasn't necessarily been driven home before, and that helps make the decision easy. ChurchHatesTucker points us to a recent blog post by singer Marian Call in which she talks about her various experiments in connecting with fans and the surprise result of giving them a reason to buy. I can't emphasize enough that the whole post is worth reading, but I'll share a few highlights.

First, she talks about how much value there is in really connecting with your fans over social networks, and that doesn't mean just putting out blast messages about what you're doing, but also reading about what they're doing -- and, at times, going beyond that, including visiting "their websites, blogs, photo albums once in a while." Obviously, you can't do this all the time or with every fan, but it certainly does help connect with many fans in a very genuine way. It's not marketing, it's about making a connection and building a real relationship.

But the bigger point that she makes is that all of this -- both sides of the CwF + RtB equation -- require an awful lot of experimenting:

About twice a week I think, "Why don't I try this crazy idea and see if it works?" about some element of my career. With no label, no manager, and no inner voice of reason slow me down, I get to experiment all I want. 90% of my crazy ideas have to do with social networking -- which I spend half a lifetime doing, despite the crap I take from my family and Real Life friends. (Hey, some of us actually do bond over web comics, starship replicas, the fail whale, and photos of stuff on cats.) Mostly my nutty ideas work just a little bit. Some are epic failures. But my experimental flopping and floundering inches me closer to the day when I'll be totally financially independent as a full-time musician. Plus it's more fun than having a real job.

But every now and then a crazy idea works really really really good. Bam!

The really good idea in this case? She was performing a live gig at Whole Wheat Radio that was to be streamed online, and in a quick & dirty way, decided to offer up a special limited edition "bootleg" CD of live tracks. She said that her Twitter and Facebook friends had been complaining that she hadn't released any new music in a while, and she's still working on her next "studio" album -- but in just two hours she was able to assemble everything she needed for the Marian Call Bootleg Album, which she decided to make available for one night only. How did it work out?

I planned to sell 20-40 of my little bootleg CD's. Silly me. I sold well over 200. My little stack of jewel cases looked so pathetic.

WholeWheatRadio.org broke every record for online listenership, CD sales, tips -- everything. The more listeners tuned in, the more tuned in, and the more money they gave, the more money they gave. The crowd online was thrilled to be breaking WWR records. I drove away from Talkeetna having earned about $4,000 in one night, with a new CD to produce in just a couple of days and an avalanche of e-mail and publicity requests to deal with. Seldom have I been so happy and so panicked.

Again, this isn't the solution for everyone. But it shows how really connecting with fans, and trying different stuff out continuously, helps. Eventually, one or more of those ideas takes off with great results. While she may not be a full-time musician yet, it certainly seems like Marian has all the right pieces in place (and, yes, that includes great music).

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Nettwerk Testing Its 'Pay On The Way Out' Concerts

Mike Masnick — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:52:00 PDT

Terry McBride, of Nettwerk, an interesting label based in Canada, has been running a whole series of interesting experiments that show how a modern record label can still be useful. When I saw McBride speak at Midem earlier this year, he mentioned an experiment he was running, which I never really wrote about. However, Nancy Baym points out that it's starting to get some press. The idea is a free concert to attend... where you're asked to pay what you think it was worth on the way out. Nettwerk artist k-os is doing this, setting up a "Karma table" where you can also get a free copy of k-os' "fan-mixed" album. This was the other experiment Nettwerk is running: rather than letting fans remix the album, they released all the stems so that fans could mix the album itself -- and then they're releasing both the best fan-mixed versions and the professionally mixed versions.

It's an interesting experiment, and it will be worth watching (especially if McBride is willing share any of the actual results). It does seem like a risky move, because you're taking on the whole upfront cost of putting on the event -- giving away a scarcity, rather than an infinite good. However, depending on how the rest of it is structured they could end up making some decent money out of it. I'm just not sure it's really the best model, since giving away the scarcity for free gets much costlier much faster.

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Groove Armada's Business Model Experiments; Halfway There

Mike Masnick — Wed, 4 Feb 2009 13:48:45 PST

A bunch of folks have been sending in various stories about Groove Armada's experiment for distributing its latest music. The program, which was actually launched at Midem a couple weeks back, is explained (somewhat) in the following video at that event: There are a few elements here that are interesting and make sense... and a few that seem a bit questionable. First up, the musical group left Sony BMG last year and rather than signing a deal with a new record label, instead partnered with drink brand Bacardi, which has a long history of sponsoring music and live music events. This was interesting and followed on similar experiments by brands like Tag body spray, which launched its own record label recently, as well. It also followed on the massive success some musicians have seen in China by focusing on "sponsored" music.

That happened last year. What was new that was announced at Midem was the ability for people to download and share songs from an upcoming EP. I'll let reader SteveD summarize the good and bad:

The good:

DRM-free music promotions though corporate sponsorship
Opt-in mailing Bacardi list rather then Opt-out
Very polished; quick sign-up, hassle-free download, links for inviting friends and facebook app supplied.
The bad:

Treats access to music as a value-adding service in itself
Restricts further access to content until you've invited x number of friends
'Rewards' system is really just a way of getting you to abuse you address book for them (access to all 4 tracks requires you spam 2000 friends, according to site Q&A).

To the "bad" list, I'd add the fact that the program is only going on for a month or so, and then the special "sharing widget" goes away. Again, there's plenty to applaud here in experimenting with new models, especially involving sponsored content and giving away music for free. However, the execution involving spamming of friends leaves plenty to be desired. That's not so much about connecting with fans as forcing yourself on people who aren't interested.

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