Just in case you are thinking that all my ranting on about gifts, currency and flow is just another cultural researcher with bucket load of theory, here is a plug for someone who had the courage to listen and turn a theory into something real –
www.mflow.com. It launches on 15/4/10 but is available in beta to invites and codes via Facebook and lot of other funky social media stuff.
The underlying product benefit of mflow is simple. It rewards users who pass on recommendations of music they have bought to their friends which they in turn buy for themselves – with 20% of the purchase price as a credit to buy more music.
The rational response to this would be to talk about the value this represents – 5 recommendations taken up = 1 free song, 5 recommendations of an album take up by your followers = 1 free album, you get the picture. However, this ‘equation’ has a problem which is that it fails to address the reason why we already share and recommend music in the first place, an insight which has become mflow’s strapline; "music’s better shared".
The next response might be to talk about this as a revolution in buying music. Again, this draws from the idea of consumerism as somehow progressing towards a better life, throwing out the old and in with the new. Again this is the opposite of what why we buy music legally rather than download it. We buy it because we want to keep it and value it as a thing – music is a form of memory and to some people their whole story. We want the content of our music to create new ideas but we don’t need a revolution in music to do something we are already doing. The research identified that illegal downloading of music was much more a function of feeling disconnected and fluid in society – i.e. a problem of liquid modernity not necessarily the rampant criminality of ‘youf’. Freeloading happens because the music no longer represented something of value, rather than because of a desire to somehow get valuable music for ‘free’. Music is only as valuable in economic terms as the social and cultural capital it creates. When the airwaves and TV channels are saturated with new music – new music itself loses its currency and becomes vulnerable to being ‘used’ for free because it is perceived to be being given away without obligation to ‘buy’ it.
So like my favourite scene from Mad Men, mflow is not about the future of music, or some evolution or progression from the past, but is something which taps into the contingent reality of the way we use and value music in everyday life. Brands sometimes unconsciously play with different philosophies – presenting the world from an Hegelian, Nietzschean, Marxist, etc perspective without necessarily grasping the implications of those positions and how they inform or motivate the consumer practice which ultimately they seek to promote. This prompted an old colleague of mine from the dim and distant past to write a tongue in cheek book about how different philosophers would approach marketing (playing on the vogue for brands to have a ‘philosophy’ which more often than not generated some gnomic phrase which only the marketing director understood and made the sales guys reach for their blackberry).
Mflow’s relationship with culture is there one of trying to understand the genealogy of music, and accommodating the accidents, ambiguities and discontinuities in what music ‘is’ in everyday cultural praxis – which you might call a Foucaultian brand strategy if I didn’t know that would get me posted to Pseuds corner by one or two of my more cynical readers.... : )
As such they ‘get’ music and their chief marketer is a true example of what Grant McCraken would call a Chief Culture Officer. Although he would hate me for saying it!
