Google Wave: What Is It And What Will It Mean To Music Marketing?
Whether text messaging or Twitter, its important to keep up to date with the latest tools for maintaining the all important artist – fan relationship. The newest tool for communication – so new it won't even be in beta for months – is Google's Wave. The open source app combines email, IM, chat, Twitter and more in a single stream or wave. Here's how Google describes Wave:
- A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
- A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
- A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Wave sounds a bit confusing. But since Google created it; it's certainly worth paying attention to. There's an hour long video of a Google developer explaining Wave after the jump below and here are links to shorter Lifehacker and TechCrunch explanations.
How Wave Could Change Artist To Fan Communications
Increasingly artist and fan communication is less about make announcements (i.e.OUR NEW CD!) and more about having a conversation or ongoing…
dialog (i.e. Which mix do you prefer?). Wave appears to be able to handle and even encourage those kind of communications with ease. Think of it as chat on steroids with various band members and fans jumping into or out of the wave. Or imagine a group wave of fans sharing concert photos,videos and experiences.
The possibilities seem endless and confusing. But as Twitter has shown us, early, active and creative adopters can gain traction using new methods of communication; and its important to do it before the mainstream world of advertising and media gets there. So, while there's no reason to jump into the surf yet; its important that you see the wave coming.
We at http://withwaves.com, believe google wave will serve as a platform for people to share and collaborate around music.
We have developed a music related gadget and robot that allows users to play and purchase mp3 songs and albums from the Amazon.com mp3 store.
Not only that but the Robot can detect conversation keywords and turned them into links when you’re talking about artisst, song and albums.
For those of you interested you can check it out at http://amazonmp3.withwaves.com , even if you don’t have google wave yet you can see videos of the robot and gadget in action
I’m rarely an early adopter of technology. I gave up trying to be cutting edge with Internet technology in 1995. I decided I’d rather focus on marketing trends and adopt technology when I needed it.
So I probably won’t embrace Google Wave until I see a personal need for it. But I have been saying for awhile now that the future of music is likely to be more community-focused (and collaborative) than artist-to-fan focused. So the overall concept of Google Wave and similar tools seems to support this idea.
While there are predictions that we’ll have this vast collection of middle-class musicians running their own small businesses, it may become even more diffuse than that, with everyone becoming a music creator/participant at some level.