Ben’s Big Gig: a recap on a web 2.0 focused concert

Ben Walker is a music 2.0 whiz. He has tried out and experimented with almost every social-media, web 2.0 tool he could find. He has got a website, a wiki, a couple of blogs, a twitter song and account. He’s signed up to countless music social networks and video hubs. He’s done songwriting contests and crowdsourcing events, and I’m most likely missing out stuff. His latest buzz-worthy idea was his Big Gig that we have talked about and tweeted many times before. Ben’s idea was to take the media tools that made him famous online and use them in an offline environment.

His Big Gig went live in Friday (1rst of May) at the North Wall theatre in Oxford, and was streamable online on http://bensbiggig.rezpondr.com (that’s where you can go to see the video recording of the whole event). The gig was planned ina  very professional manner, and its outcome was clearly successful.

I wrote Ben an email on Saturday asking him to do a little recap on his Big Gig. Here’s the lowdown he sent me the day after:

What web 2.0 tools did you use at your Big Gig?

• Twitter, 12seconds, Flickr, Vimeo, Tumblr for promotion
• Bambuser for video streaming
• AudioBoo, 12seconds for interviews and audience reactions
• Twitter for displaying #bensbiggig tweets on the big screen
• Rezpondr for pulling it all together into the bensbiggig live page

How did you make fans online and offline interact?
We delivered a different experience to the online and offline audiences:

• The offline crowd got an evening of great entertainment and saw the Twitter messages etc. happening around them.
• The geeks used the Twitter screen for Heckling 2.0 and general backchannel chat.
• The audience in the venue also got to sing along. ;)
• The online crowd got to watch the video stream (which was generally ok, but a bit choppy in places), see the Flickr photos, 12seconds updates and Twitter stream, and interact using the chat room.

What was the turnout of the event?
I haven’t scoured the log files yet, but at our current estimate we had about 180 in the venue and over 250 watching online.

How did people react
The reactions I’ve seen have all been very positive. The audience in the venue had a great night, and were all smiling on the way out. The Twitter messages were all positive, and even when people had trouble watching the stream they were happy to be involved, Twittering about it and checking out all the secondary content.

Are you satisfied with the outcome of your first Ben’s Big Gig?
Absolutely. We built the idea up from scratch, and intentionally used user-level social media technology (where more pro technology would have delivered a more reliable result) so that Ben’s Big Gig can act as a proof for musicians who are worried that they will have to play smaller and smaller gigs that we can bypass labels, promoters and press and still pack out a theatre gig twice over!

Congratz to Ben on his Big Gig!

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The Art of Crowdsourcing Art

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand is as well a musical project as it could be considered a social experiment. The idea was to recreate the classic tune ‘Daisy Bell’  by employing more than 2000 people around the world to sing only one of the song’s syllables, and by putting every track back together. This was achieved by using Amazone’s Mechanical Turk, the micro-employment platform Amazone launched in 2005 to help people get a time-consuming task out of the way by paying other people to do it for them. Although Mturk has not proven to be a massively popular platform, it is still quite active. In ‘Bicycle Built for Two Thousand”s case, 2088 people from 71 countries were each paid 6 cents to record their voice, and the interesting part is that they didn’t have any idea of what they were contributing to.

The result is amusing (and a tad-like awkward), but its concept and the amount of work put into it are pretty amazing:

Go to www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com to hear the whole thing. The home page is very impressive: by hovering over the sound-waves with your mouse, you can select any audio section and individually listen to every sound recorded (the samples are very amusing to listen to).

The Brain Children of this project are no other than Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey.

Aaron is already a well acclaimed “artist, designer, and researcher who focuses on creating and visualizing human systems”. You maybe know his work through Radiohead’s stunning House of Cards video for which he worked as technical director.

This isn’t the first time Aaron uses crowdsourcing for his artistic projects. He has also experimented with Mturk on his Ten Thousand Cent Project – a digital artwork representing a $100 bill made by ten thousand workers who were paid 1 cent each to draw a tiny part of the painting. “The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase (to charity) are all $100″. Truly brilliant. His ‘Sheep Market‘ project goes along the same lines (Aaron employed thousands of people to draw sheep pointing in the same direction).

The art of crowd-sourcing for logistical reason is becoming increasingly popular of late: pharmaceutical companies and research facilities like Innocentive are crowdsourcing, design companies like 99designs.com are crowdsourcing, Wikipedia crowdsources (so does Youtube for that matter), the scientific communities crowdsource, international health organizations like Oxfam crowdsource. Even the music community has started crowdsourcing with  fan-management websites like FanCorps, and  music collaboration websites like IndabaMusic, WeMix etc. We even know of a musician, Ben Walker (the twitter song guy), who is crowdsourcing the logistical tasks to set up one of his  gigs (The Ben’s Big Gig).

But the art of crowdsourcing art is something I had never seen before, and the fact the the participants don’t even have a clue about what they are working on just makes the project seem even bolder. The element of ignorance adds something very spontaneous and life-like to the final result, and what’s more intriguing is that the people know they are part of a community, but they don’t know why, what purpose it serves, nor do they even care – they’re only in it for the money.

This whole idea really reminds me of one of Science Fiction’s greatest classic novels, Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. Foundation tells the story of a group of scientists who seek to preserve knowledge as the civilizations around them begin to regress. To do so they concoct a master plan based on social experimentations that span over a period of a thousand years, and where all human beings play a role following laws of mass action. Much like in Aaron Koblin’s experiments, entire populations in Foundation had no idea of what they were part of.

To some extent this can also be seen as ‘playing god’, where a creator of a defined plan creates and uses his proper subjects to reach a pre-determined goal.

To me this clearly indicates the birth of a new un-chartered art form that has immense potential, and to that I say mruff!

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“Ben’s Big Gig” and the art of crowdsourcing a gig’s logistics

Web based communication tools are becoming so powerful for bands that fans can now deeply get involved in their careers (fans’ is a superfluous term in the current web environment – ‘community’ is maybe more appropriate). This ‘penetration’ in the intricacies of a band’s work ethics can have many upsides for those willing to play the social game (the major downside being the time consuming social tasks themselves that can easily become overwhelming).

One singer/songwriter I have encountered embraces this social game with great ease. This highly skilled player is no other than Ben Walker who in a couple of short years has managed to gain a significant reputation on the web by impressively manipulating these social-tools (Ben is well known for the Twitter Song you might have already heard, for his ihatemornings.com website, and surely for a multitude of other things).

Ben is launching a new project for 2009 called Ben’s Big Gig, a gig who’s concept is to outsource (or like Ben calls it, crowdsource) as many logistical tasks as possible (on Twitter he’s currently asking the community if he should crowdsource the press release:). As of now, the gig is scheduled for Friday May 1rst in Oxford.

Cabaret 2.0 is the terrible name I’m using for a gig I’m playing in Oxford on May 1st. It’s going to have lots of live connections to and from the internet with video, Twitter, photos etc. It’s a gig for normal non-techy people that uses loads of bleeding edge social media stuff. But the most interesting part from my end is that I’m trying to crowdsource all the planning and promotion. We just got stuff set up this week, but follow @bensbiggig (the gig’s twitter profile> or bensbiggig.tumblr.com to see how it goes.

Ben says he plans on organizing the gig in a theater:

There are many benefits of presenting this gig at a theater (rather than a rock venue or a bar). We can lay the place out how we like (probably cabaret-style tables and chairs at the front and seats around the back and balcony). We get access to the venue’s promotion and ticketing systems (the gig will appear in all the local listings without our help, and we can pre-sell tickets through the existing theater booking system). We can also do something crazy, like add another night, quite easily if it sells out. So if we know loads of people are going to come and make it a great night, we’ll expand to fit that space.

Here is the pitch he sent to venues announcing the event:

I wrote a lot of songs in 2008, and involved myself deeply in the exciting world of Social Media technologies (the descendants of Facebook and Myspace). I now have hundreds of ‘followers’ and ‘fans’ and ‘friends’ all over the internet and I’m exploring new ways for musicians to interact with such a disparate community.

There is already a growing House Concert movement which shifts the responsibility for organisation gigs to the fans and lets bands and musicians tour without all the usual expenses. That’s a lot of fun, and I’ve been playing quite a few house concerts over the past couple of years. But I’m thinking of something a little grander, which I’m calling Cabaret 2.0 (for want of a better term ;o).

I’m going to put on a concert in March/April that uses all the latest internet technologies to add an extra level of magic to a classic cabaret-style performance.

I’ll play 15 or so of my songs with my band, some of which will have video, crowd interaction, improvisation and guest musicians. The evening will be compèred by somebody great (probably a poet friend of mine), and there will be other non-musical acts (poetry, comedy and maybe some acrobatics). The whole thing will be streamed live on the internet using two or three cameras and recorded for release as an online album. We will also have screens in the venue which will allow people from elsewhere on the internet to write messages, post videos, and otherwise take part. The audience will also have the chance to record short video clips for instant upload and write messages live onto the website.

It sounds complicated but is quite easy to achieve using current web technologies (Twitter, UStream, 12seconds, etc.). People have done this sort of thing with technology conferences and events, but this would be the first musical event to be so connected and integrated with the internet. I’m sure you can imagine why I’m excited…

So, in the spirit of social frenziness this seems like a great idea, and I’m pretty curious to know how it’s all going to play out. 2009 is going to be a year filled with crowdsourcing experiences and projects like Ben’s Big Gig are of the first breed. If you want to be a part of it and help out, follow-up on the gig’s progress via:

@bensbiggig (Big Gig’s twitter profile)

@ihatemornings (Ben’s twitter profile)

bensbiggig.tumblr.com (the Big Gig’s website)

Bark.

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