Will beat me to it the other day with his excellent post on the Lonelygirl15 phenomena and the changing landscape this brings to ideas of creating content. Short shows online. Wiki - TV, and new places and new spaces for people to release their ideas and have them picked up by others.
Opportunities are exploding and abound for anyone who is creative, inventive, and wanting to get their ideas onto the stage. As I've said before, with these technologies available to almost everyone, the geography of creative studios and creative spaces is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Content creation and innovation can occur anywhere.
Wired magazine this month has an article about one of Canada's favourite bands, the Barenaked Ladies (is that going to get this post banned, hidden behind school firewalls?). BNL are in the midst of releasing a new album that is more then an album. Instead of concentrating on releasing a CD with a set of 10 - 12 tracks on it, they are offering their tracks on their MySpace (11 for $2.49) and asking people to remix them and then post them back online for the band itself to comment on. A different take on copyright and a different take on the relationship that can exist between a band and its fans, blurring the line between content creator and content consumer.
In another article this month, Wired also talks to Beck about his latest project. Once again, instead of releasing a single CD, he is creating what he calls "music assets," for fans to buy and work with. These assets may be ringtones, album covers that come with stickers for you to customize, several versions of the CD, videos, and different re - mixes of the songs. In fact, instead of the 10 -12 songs you might find on a regular CD, Beck has created over 200 "assets" for this release.
As with Lonelygirl, the opportunities for DIY content mixing, creation, and customization are in the hands of the consumers of this information. This brings us back to idea of markets being conversations from the cluetrain manifesto. When consumers are asked to choose the tracks they want, combine them with a ringtone, choose several videos, and make their own album cover, the market is changing and is focusing on the conversations that can occur.
How do the kids in our classrooms react to this? How will they view and participate in conversations such as these? What can they teach us about these interactive spaces? I heard several years ago about a teacher who brought video footage into the classroom and allowed kids to re - mix this video and combine it with their choice of music to make something new. The kids then looked at what one another had made. Music mash ups have made the press in the last year and now opportunities for video mash ups are growing. Content creation is changing and the concept of classrooms as studios where kids have time to experiment and to learn is valuable and needs to be watched.
technorati tags:BNL, studios, Beck, Wired, classrooms, MySpace
the first album i heard of being released online for remix was david byrne's "my life in the bush of ghost". the site lets you listen to the top uploaded remixes.
http://bush-of-ghosts.com/remix/bush_of_ghosts.htm
Posted by: tystl | Thursday, September 14, 2006 at 09:39 PM