Back to Latest Entries
I first mentioned SocialBuxx™ as part of the 'Free Music - Does It Work?" conversation over at Gavern's place. Here's a quote from TheCapitalClinic that quickly followed as a comment on that forum, and other places throughout the Fuzz site.
quote: TheCapitalClinic
Clif's use of the term, SocialBuxx (tm), at Gavern's blog discussing the efficacy of "free music", says it all and fills me with writer's remorse for not coming up with such a succinct and powerful "one-word-says-all" summary of many of my essays here about "social capital" becoming in time "tangible capital".
I note that, increasingly, many discussions here are beginning to "triangulate" and, thereby, help us to get closer to the essence of where we, as a collective group, may be headed in developing new solutions for artists to survive in the modern era. To that end [triangulation], the following blogs should be tagged and linked: Free Music? [Gavern];... Music Not For Sale [Clif];... Quo Vadis Music [thecapitalclinic]; and many others. [I am sure that the fuzz folks will make the process of tagging and linking easier in due course [but in the meantime, it does take a bit of BB coding by computer-cludges like moi.]
To sum up the foregoing tags and the essence of one of my key premises [using Clif's now trade-marked term which I truly hope gains some currency for him :=) (I am pasting this comment in a few places): let's all work together to create some SocialBuxx (tm) for artists!
Most recently, the topic came up again in my post "Why You Need for Me to Succeed."
quote: TheCapitalClinic
I think that Clif's notion of SocialBuxx [tm] may be a powerful tool to help us overcome some of the problems we are dealing with here.
In essence what we are all searching for is a better way of "accounting" for social capital according to a score-keeping matrix that has, on the one side, "intangible value" and, on the other, "tangible capital".
In the final analysis/calculus, as I mentioned elsewhere time is the only universal currency that we all share and have in equal measure.
What we need is an algorithm [to be developed by fuzz that the members of the fuzz community come to accept because of their intimate participation in the value-added process] that in essence establishes a de facto standard of value. A thoughtful application of what I have called elsewhere the "discipline of equivalences" will inevitably lead IMHO to the following formulation [broadly speaking]: social capital = intanglble value = time X SocialBuxx[tm]. The key is, as DifferentStars suggests, to just MAKE IT HAPPEN as an agreed measure of value so that eventually the quantity of SocialBuxx[tm] one accumulates can be created, stored, and most importantly, EXCHANGED. This is a way out of the box we have created for ourselves in the old music ecosystem.
I will blog about this in more detail or write about it at my next Nightschool column, but I think you can get a gist of where I am going with this and the possibilities if, indeed, or I should state more optimistically, when Artists accumulate SocialBuxx[tm] [read: truth-values based on a time factor [TBD] that can be monetized]. [Clif, Others, help me out here.]
quote: Clif
As tibii pointed out, the role of the musical artist in relation to the business of the internet is that of content creator. When I consider the concept of SocialBuxx[tm], I have to do so in the context of being a multi-faceted artist-creator-being in order to maintain some sense of sanity. As many writers, bloggers and internet businesses have already discovered, it's not the content itself, but the stuff surrounding the content that enables revenue generation.
Steve Pavlina's recent article about Blogging for Money offers a lot of insight into the business of content creation that I believe can be useful for creators of "musical content." It is the activity around the content creation, be it the promotion of the content or the pursuit of complimentary revenue sources that allows the creator to make a living.
As Falcon pointed out, for most artists, live performance is where they make their money. So in SocialBuxx[tm] terms, moving from the web to the venue, they are exchanging social capital garnered from sharing their music online for real cash in the form of ticket sales. For some, the transaction will appear in the more direct form of selling plastic discs, but it's still an exchange.
For stay-at-home artist / content creators like myself, I think the value exchanges will generally be even more indirect. It is more likely perhaps that sharing my music (and in my case, lots of editorial content as well) will result in selling books, prints of my visual art, or sync/publishing rights for my music/songs for use in commercial/tv/film production. Or maybe it will result in more downloads of shareware software I create. Or maybe someday someone will pay me for writing this crap. :)
quote: TheCapitalClinic
Clif, I agree with everything you said except the crap part. hehe. Seriously, let's see if SocialBuxx[tm] in the context of a new music ecosystem [or economic/social paradigm] becomes something like [but better in the sense that the value-added is more substantive] the "Linden Bucks [tm]" in the context of Second Life which has evolved to be a score-keeping mechanism of perceived (and therefore de facto real) value-added that can be monetized. Let's talk more about this privately or publicly.
So let the debate/discussion commence!
Let's consider two novel approaches to internet currency, the Linden Bucks™ system of SecondLife and the "Influence Points" system pioneered by thesixtyone.
From the SecondLife site:
"The Second Life world has its own unit of trade, the Linden™ Dollar. Residents use their Linden dollars to pay for goods and services provided by other Residents. The Linden dollar can also be exchanged for U.S. Dollars and other foreign currencies on a number of different websites, including right here via the LindeX exchange."
"Residents" of second life create and sell items for Linden Dollars which in turn can be used to purchase real estate or items created by other users. Members receive an allotment of Linden Dollars for being a paid subscriber and may also exchange real money for Linden money via the SecondLife site or other various game currency exchange sites. This economy of "real money for play money" exchange is facilitated by users' "need" for things that can't be bought directly with real world currency.
Now to thesixtyone's Influence Point system.
For listeners:
"Points are short for 'Influence Points' on thesixtyone. Your level will automatically rise as you earn and amass points. Points record your progress and reflect your community status, but, most importantly, can be spent to bump more songs. If you have an abundance of points, you can even use them to multi-bump songs and really flex your influence in the community.
How Do I Earn Points?
Besides bumping good music, here's a few ways you can earn points on thesixtyone: * Listening to music on The Rack (+1-20 points per song, reward based on dice roll) * Logging in daily (+20 points) * Inviting a friend (+5 points and +20 points for each level they achieve or +100 points per level if your friend is an artist)
We're also looking into allowing you to earn points when people listen to your personal radio. Stay tuned!"
For artists:
"Is there a song upload limit?
The quantity of songs you can upload is dependent on your artist level (see 'Points and Levels'). New artists begin at Level 1 and may upload up to three of their best songs.
What do points do?
Points help determine the artist's level on thesixtyone.
How do I earn points?
Artists earn points each time a listener bumps one of their songs.
What do I unlock for leveling up?
Leveling up improves the artist's standing on thesixtyone leaderboards and unlocks bonus features along the way. Although this initiative is currently in development, we can announce one unlock for now: as artists level up, they become eligible to upload additional songs to thesixtyone."
So, here is another system where there are things that users need that can't be directly bought using real world currency.
My question/proposal then is whether these two ideas can be combined and expanded upon to form a new system of currency at the artist/fan level and/or at the general social network level. Could a system be developed using SocialBuxx™ as a point reward system for active users and content creators, where this new social currency could be bartered for services or products on a site or across multiple sites? Could an exchange be developed where users with less time or inclination to develop a cache of social currency through direct social interaction could trade in real dollars for SocialBuxx™, and where users could cash out their SocialBuxx™ for real money?
Thanks for listening :)
The extension into other domains of a community developed and accepted currency is obvious [look at, for example, MilegePlus[tm], Topps Baseball Cards, BlueChip Stamps, etc.]; but let's not let this powerful concept of SocialBuxx [tm] fail because we try to do too much and, thus, fail by trying to "boil the ocean" - a tendency typical of start-up ventures or start-up ideas.
Let's stick with the music domain and the broadly framed notion of "social capital" in that more limited context - this is something I have been blogging about with limited but growing traction over the past few years. I have defined elsewhere Putnam's notion of "social capital" [see some of my earliers blogs and profile] as being, for now, a default "bucket" of everything of value that is not tangible capital.
Putnam was/is a political scientist; but we need to go back to basic economics if we are to make SocialBuxx [tm] more than a nice game. We need to find a way to develop something at the [for now] artist-centric fuzz community [with a small but growing number of really passionate folks who love music] that really gets to the heart of the artists' dilemma of an industry that is moving into the era of "music for free". The time is ripe and the need for an alternative CURRENCY, such as SocialBuxx[tm] is clear.
I have some thoughts about how to advance this flowing from my blog about The Rule of Three By Three [By Three], but let's take this in baby steps.
Your turn.
I'll give your response some deeper thought and get back to you soon.
Clif [cc: Artists mentioned below and/or other readers of this thread], this blog about NIN 's crowdsourcing Ghosts to become a combined aural/video/whatever(i.e.,multi-media) series is right in line with a discussion we started at Silver Bone Tone's More pics blog.
Some quick additional thoughts:
1. NIN is already globally recognized and has tremendous crowd pull. Other artists less well-known could also benefit from the collaborative process to combine aural and visual art to enhance the aesthetic experience for their works as well. The open and distributed Web is/should be the great equalizer to showcase creative work.
2. TR and NIN become the arbiter of crowdsourcing by virtue of the fact that he/they are in effect the controller of the platform being established for the experiment. I don't know whether this is good or bad [I would like to think about this more]. Since NIN is the original creator of the Ghost tracks, I suppose they should stand in the center of the ring being ring-master of all that flows from the original work of art even as it is enhanced by the "crowd".
3. I notice that the crowd commentary at the YouTube site for the experiement is pretty raucous - reminiscent of much of the "trash-talk" you get when the mass of humanity discover "a cool place to be" - IT NO LONGER IS COOL. This is a real problem with "crowd-sourcing" - sorting out the signal from the noise [more about this later.]
4. Other artists like your goodself, Silver Bone Tone, WebOfDistress, Dredg, Flitch, The Opposite Of Faith [to name a few] are also doing some pretty cool stuff here to integrate our aural and visual sensibilities. As this gains further traction [and I see it happening in the artist music and multi-media tabs, fans playlists, mixtapes, etc.], we should try to develop collaborative momentum on this kind of multi-media creativity that pushes out the envelope of the possible in cyber-space.
5. A basic problem with the NIN/YouTube initiative on Ghosts and the crowdsourcing [great link] initiatve that they are undertaking (as I see it evolving at the YouTube site) is that it is replicating everything that is both good and bad about the web generally - it is a big tent and more than a three-ring circus. There is no agreed upon score-keeping/house-keeping to develop some order [other than as directed by a centralized ring-master - in this case Trent and/or NIN].
6. We have all been struggling with the vexing questions of how to deal with Identity of Voice on the Web, Web Chaos, Digital For Free, Web Spam, Web Trolls - the list goes on. I think a more developed notion of SocialBuxx™ as The New Social Currency may be what we need to provide a neutral score-keeping and house-keeping function to create social cohesion and order on the Web - at least as it relates to Indie Artists and a digital platform without the de facto censorship [good or bad] implicit in centralized control].
[I will repost this comment at Silver Bone Tone's "More Pics" Blog referenced above [because it was his blog and your blog here that got me started] and also at the Artists' pages that I mentioned above as a "poke" to stimulate some further thinking about what is possible on this platform through collective action and development of SocialBuxx™ which, again, I think is a powerful concept if we can start to frame the parameters of how it will work.]
Food for thought.
Once again, TCC, you've managed to consolidate a collection of interrelated ideas in an eloquent and thought-provoking manner.
One thing I'll mention in the interest of propagating another of my pet memes is that this is a brilliant example of the Wiki-Album concept I blogged about earlier. Mr. Reznor has created a sub-community of his fans around this album with the purpose of iteratively expanding the scope of the work itself. Maybe I'm correct that the time of the Wiki-Album is at hand.
I think you're right on in SBT's blog and here regarding the value of visual embellishment to enhance the overall experience of "listening" to one's aural art. Crowdsourcing, in the spirit of Noel Ramos' DII/DIT* vs DIY meme, provides potential for content expansion beyond the individual artist's experience/abilities.
Regarding platform control, this is something Trent has done for some time via his NIN Remix community. This explicit open call for content to be housed in a central artist-controlled virtual-location in contrast to the implicit call-to-action of releasing this album under a Creative Commons license (resulting in less direct control and wider distribution of resulting content) may also bear further study.
Regarding point #5 and the 4-ring circus, it might be an interesting experiment to "crowdsource" the judging of the submitted materials as well, allowing the sub-community to rate and choose their favorite films in order to create order from the chaos. The necessity for such an experiment is really dependent on the number of submissions, of course, and assuming the quantity of submissions is manageable by Mr. Reznor and his assignees, the idea that Trent himself will be viewing the fan art adds motivational value to the exercise.
On SocialBuxx™, we've already seen some success via tools like Technorati and social bookmarking technology like del.icio.us of defining relative value at the thought-level via wide distribution, and individual site rankings (like the blog ranking on Fuzz) providing the same for narrower distribution channels. Notice that the NIN YouTube page is ranked on the left hand side as #67 most subscribed, and #17 most viewed, which begins to describe an assignment of relative value at the contributor level (the NIN channel, comprising many "thoughts"). SocialBuxx™ must facilitate the next step in this evolution of social capital by becoming a specific "store of value" approaching the true definition of currency as something that can be created, exchanged and stored.
* "DII (Do It Independently) - Indie Does Not Mean Alone" - Noel Ramos on MusicThoughts (list subscription required)
I think that many of the Indie Artists who had found their way here have the following qualities: They are smart, incredibly energetic, willing to think out of the box, frustrated with the current system, and are willing to share ideas and collaborate [to some extent] to come up with new solutions. The problems that arise, if any, are the usual vexing ones typical of entrepreneurs in nascent stage of development – how do you share the spoils of success not yet achieved?
Indie Artists should find a way to work together without getting in one another's way. You are by nature inner-directed rather than team-driven (and fagedabou being "corporate"). I can appreciate the concern about traditional “artists collectives” is that too many cooks ruin the broth.
Also, most folks here [being smart - see above] know that the basic economics of "music for sale" no longer works [unless you win the lottery like the Spitzer working girl who also happened to be an "artist in the making"]. Isn’t it wonderful how the world turns..
So the questions remain [and there are a whole string of similar ones]: How can you "work together" to gain from the additional network energy created without formalizing relationships? How can "Artists" [to be honest, we don't even know what that descriptive term even means anymore in the new web-era] "Capitalize" on their "Art" [according to a new definition of what Art may be – a point I will get to below]?
The reason I have focused on "Social Capital" as an useful intellectual framing exercise [as participants in our collective Nightschool For Entrepreneurs will have noted] is that, while it is a "default bucket" for now [everything of value that is not "financial capital"], it focuses the mind on how to make it into something more than a default notion – the opposite of X [financial capital]. Truth to tell, I made a living during most of my professional career out of thinking “opposite of X” without precisely knowing what the contra-item was and the only thing that I knew was that X was not working. However, the objective should be to advance the notion of “Social Capital” into something easier to grasp and apply in one’s career as an Artist.
I was immediately drawn to Clif's articulation of SocialBuxx™ because it encapsulated in one word the intuitive notion that "Social Capital" could be quantified into something more than just the “opposite of X”- although, to be sure, we still don’t know that “Social Capital” has a solid conceptual grounding in economic [read: measurable] terms. It would be a huge win for the default notion of “Social Capital” [a topic I have been struggling with for years to challenge the broken system of corporate governance that gives a false primacy to “Financial Capital”], if “Social Capital” qua “SocialBuxx™” could gain "currency” to be earned by selling “around the music” as much as “selling the music” [which I think was one of the core ideas behind the creation of the fuzz platform].
Maybe we should start to rethink not only how to “Capitalize” on our Art by taking a hard look at what “Capital” means [which has been the major focus of thecapitalclinic – in fact that is why the clinic was set up] but verily to question what “Art” itself really means in the new “music” ecosystem. If we are selling “around the music”, what indeed is the nature of the value-added aesthetic we are really dealing with?
I hate to sound like a broken record about this, but the way forward is help this informal "small group/collective/whatever" gain some further "social capital."
The traction/buzz developed around a great idea [now implemented in a concrete piece of work - rather than just idle "wanna-doo" talk] could be enhanced if it were manifested in some "score-keeping" framework like SocialBuxx™[something only in the early stages of fruition itself that could well be still-born].
Let's all watch to see whether and how both Strange Trax™ and SocialBuxx™ evolve. They are both concepts with great promise; but, as is often the case in the unknown frontier of the Web, they might just disappear. All these things are "hard work", aren't they?
On the notion of helping artists gain social capital, I ran across a new site called Surrge.com that proposes an affiliate model where they will compensate music fans who spread the word about their favorite bands if doing so results in digital music sales. Of course, they will face the same issue as the rest of us, being that indie downloads don't really sell all that well. But I think this is an important point to consider as we think about SocialBuxx™ and the benefit it can have to not only the artists, but the fans that support them as well.
One question that must be answered through this process is whether a true measurement of social value can be determined directly via "score-keeping" based upon what we can already determine as relative value within the network. Via various Fuzz charts and common sense experience, it is easy to determine the relative "net worth" of various members. Highly active users who make conscious effort to improve the "quality of life" for other members of the Fuzz community could be considered "rich" in SocialBuxx™ terms, having created an extensive value network for themselves through their positive action. The occasional user might have less relative SB, and the non-active user having little or no SB. Users who undertake negative action such as flaming or spamming might even incur an SB deficit.
If that is true, then it would seem an arbitrary representative value unit could be assigned to represent one user's net worth using the existing activity rating systems already in place, allowing all other members' SB net worth to be derived. The existing rating systems would tend to take into account two important aspects of social capital theory, being that the use of social capital creates more social capital and that unused social capital is destroyed over time.
Accepting the definition of currency as something that can be created, exchanged and stored, we can see how to create SB through positive community action, and given arbitrary value we might consider this currency to be stored indirectly via the Fuzz ranking mechanisms. The final variable, which is the exchange of currency is the valuable part of this exercise, as I see it.
If we derive a definition of SocialBuxx™ from social capital as the social relationships between people that enable productive outcomes, then we can say that the value (and in fact, purpose) of SB is to enable productive outcomes. This makes sense in theory, as positive activity seems to generally build stronger norms of reciprocation, resulting in more activity and increased value creation (i.e. more SocialBuxx™).
So let's consider two core concepts: outcomes and transactions (i.e. exchanges).
An outcome starts with a goal, and the quality of an outcome is determined by the degree to which that goal is achieved. If your goal is to have someone listen to one of your songs, their act of listening to the song is considered a positive outcome. If they listen and leave a great comment, it's a very positive outcome. If they ignore your request, it might be considered a neutral outcome (no outcome) or a slightly negative one, in that their failure to respond slightly reduces the value of the relationship. Not listening and sending you a nasty PM saying "don't ever contact me again" would be considered a very negative outcome.
When we interact with another person to achieve our goal, we are initiating a transaction of sorts. The question at hand here is how to measure the value of those transactions. So let's bring SocialBuxx™ into play with our current scenario of an Fuzz artist asking another Fuzz user to "check them out."
The artist offers the listener 1 SB to listen to the song. In a fixed currency system, the listener would now have 1 more SB than they had before and the artist would have 1 less. But since the use of SB creates more SB, we can consider a negative "transaction tax" in which both parties actually receive a fraction of an SB by having made a successful transaction. The current Fuzz activity tracking already provides this SB "interest" by rewarding action.
The user who is gathering SB through successful transactions can store that SB within the system for a timespan relative to their activity levels. In another words, a high level of site activity allows the stored SB to retain their value while gathering even more SB. On the other hand, taking a six month vacation from the community not only results in no further collection of SB, but also causes a reduction in the value of stored SB.
So we can begin to see that a user who takes an active interest in gathering and exchanging SocialBuxx™ stands a greater chance at producing positive outcomes. This becomes even more powerful when we consider the potential of a group of users (this is a social network after all) to collectively gather (or pool) SocialBuxx™ for the purpose of achieving a very specific goal. A good example of this recently has been the collective action of "creating buzz" around the Strange Trax project. Think of how much more successful this effort could be if we were all consciously gathering and pooling our SocialBuxx™, and then spending them (calling in the markers so to speak) to elicit action (i.e. reciprocation based on past exchange/transactions) towards a specific outcome - creating buzz and elevating Strange Trax to the top of the charts, creating more SB for all of us.
If we did assign an arbitrary unit of value to represent relative positive social activity, I think we might see an increase in positive activity and a solidification of reciprocity norms as users below the "top 10" are able to measure their "net worth" with an eye towards increasing it. We would see SocialBuxx™ approach a state of true currency as it is created, stored and exchanged.
And here's the cool part (well, one of them). Through the ability to buy and sell songs on Fuzz, we have the makings of a community-defined currency exchange. As SocialBuxx™ begin to gain real tangible value as a mechanism of achieving measurable productive outcomes, it becomes desirable to accumulate. At that point, a transaction/exchange of "hey, I'll give you 10 SB if you'll buy my newest track for 99¢" begins to create a potential variable exchange rate between SB and $$ (i.e. ramen noodles and guitar strings).
TCC, let me know if I'm way off base here. :)
Clif