Screw lawn tickets at a discount.  That’s like listening to music on your neighbor’s stereo.  How about getting a ticket for a developing artists show when you buy the ticket for a star.  We’ve got to get people sampling, we’ve got to get people coming to the show on a regular basis.  Now we’ve got a business of extravaganzas.  We’re like North Korea, trying to blast rockets into the stratosphere, but usually failing.  To the point we’re a joke.

Here’s who I checked out:

Rocktapussy – I think this is the first time I’ve seen a pair of female DJs.  They’re playing at Lollapalooza (however their set conflicts with Delta Spirit on Saturday), I’m going to try to check them out again.  Lots of hipsters with backpacks – kids were getting down, high energy, fast paced bubblegum pop mixes.  Shook my shit hard to “Toxic”, they mash up of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and the Ting Tings’ “That’s Not My Name”.

Rockapussy / Moneypenny - Wicker Park Fest

Future Rock – Very sensory overload even with the setting being the storefronts of Milwaukee Avenue.  These guys created a electronic driving jam street party.  People were dancing on the roofs of lining buildings.  It was pretty packed by the time I got there, so didn’t get very close.

Future Rock - Wicker Park Fest

The New Deal – I missed the New Deal’s show at the Park West late May this year because I was in Boston for Phish.  Future Rock was a great energy lead up to the New Deal.  The crows dispersed and we were able to cop a fairly close spot looking straight on.  My gentleman friend said I made moves.  The New Deal is the epitome of jam driven dance party.   We were given Jamie Lidell tickets for a late night show at the Congress.  I wasn’t familiar with his music and I was sore from move making.   I raged and then biked home.  I felt like a true hipster.

The New Deal - Wicker Park Fest

The New Deal - Wicker Park Fes

What Twitter and Facebook Can Learn From Phish
Josh Sternberg, 07.29.09, via Mashable.com

Josh Sternberg is the founder of Sternberg Strategic Communications and authors The Sternberg Effect. You can follow him on Twitter ().

Every time I watch Rick Sanchez on CNN or every time I get a new follow update from someone I know in real life, who 12 months ago made fun of me for being on Twitter, I question its value over time: are Twitter and other social networks destined to niche status or are they so embedded in our lives that they are now an indispensable part of our society?

To answer, we can take a look at some other community-based cultural phenomena as a way to shine a light on whether or not social networks will survive to the next iteration of the web.

Unlike most Internet people, when I think of Phish, I think of music, of road trips, of community, and not the scams that have co-opted the name. Phish the band has been around since 1983, just a bit before the idea of a phishing scam. Yet, there is a kernel of history set aside for Phish as pioneers in both music distribution and in creating a web community. When we look at bands and artists that foster community (and sometimes endless jams), we can see parallels to the rise of social networks.

The Soundtrack (and Memoirs) to Our Lives

If music plays the soundtrack to our lives, these days, for many of us, social networks act as our memoirs. But our embrace of sites like Twitter and Facebook () is more about how we use the site, as experiencing a Grateful Dead or Phish concert is more about how we interpret the music.

Music, because of its seemingly infinite ways of being interpreted, is an emotional product. Music makes us laugh, it makes us cry, it makes us feel; but most importantly, music connects people. Think of your closest friends and odds are they share similar musical tastes as you. Maybe you’ve even met some of your friends as a result of your love of the same type of music. In other words, music creates community.

Fan Communities are About the Fans

The parallel goes farther than music to the cultural phenomenon created by all dedicated fan communities. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight to name a few, all have fans that are devoted to these products. While these examples are part of the popular culture and have received tremendous amounts of, for lack of a better word, fanfare, the communities that have popped up around them are still niche. Let’s look at Harry Potter more closely.

The Harry Potter series – both book and film – is a once-in-a-generation kind of occurrence. The books caused people to read – amazing but true – and spawned a community of wizard and muggle lovers who would congregate to read the story or act out the plot. This community also used the online forum to help solidify their presence. Sites like Mugglenet.com and The Leaky Cauldron are centered on the fans as much as they are on the Potter story. These sites built a community for Potter-lovers to visit and share information. In fact, the creators of each site have been able to publish best-selling books of their own about their experiences in and with the greater Harry Potter fan community.

The Grateful Dead and Phish have similar sites. Dead.net and Phantasy Tour (a site that started out as a play on another niche community, fantasy sports) enabled ‘heads’ to meet and talk with one another before, during and after shows. They were (and continue to be) places where like minds could congregate to discuss their favorite music, favorite films, favorite books and how the influence of the Dead or Phish led them to where they are. These sites were the precursors to social networks; people created meet-ups at rest stops along the band’s touring schedule; people traded music and ideas. In fact, Phantasy Tour, which initially sprang up for Phish, now has communities for several bands, such as the Disco Biscuits, Umphrey’s McGee and solo efforts of Phish’s front man.

Both Harry Potter and social networks are wildly popular at the moment, but the Potter series is at once finite and immortal. Finite in that there is no new content coming and immortal because books and film live on forever, especially when there’s a cult audience. The same can be said of music — Rick Astley may not be putting out any new singles, but we’re still being Rickrolled all these years later. Twitter and Facebook aren’t finite or immortal, they are evolutionary; they will shape-shift in how they are used by different (read: larger) communities, but will be where we get our information.

Adapting with the Community

The Grateful Dead has always been known as a band that wanted the free flow of their music to pass from fan to fan. But once technology dictated that they could make money off better quality sounds, they took a step back and wanted to charge fans for music they had previously obtained for free over the decades. Obviously, this didn’t go over too well with the fan base, and the Dead compromised by allowing the site Archive.org to stream high-quality (soundboard) shows and let fans download audience recordings (“the taper” is an entirely separate community within the jam-band scene) for free, which are usually of a poorer quality.

Phish, too, has been at the forefront of “community-based” technology and the fans are able to influence how the band uses technology. The band created LivePhish.com earlier this decade, where fans can purchase high-quality audio of that night’s concert for a low price, because the community (especially those who weren’t able to attend a specific concert) was clamoring for the band to use the Web.

This past tour, UStream () was flooded with Phish fans because someone figured out how to stream content via his iPhone, potentially ushering in a huge moneymaker for the music industry. Imagine, for example, that Phish and their record company strategically placed high-def cameras around the stage and broadcast it over the Internet for $10 per show. How many fans would pay for the right to watch live, high-definition streaming concerts, instead of poor-quality, handheld, fan cams? My guess is that especially for deeply community-oriented bands like Phish, where each show is something to dissect and discuss with others, many fans around the world would purchase.

Thousands of people watched this tour (the first in 5 years) and it’s easy to think that because the fans (and thus, the band) believe sharing content (through tapes, then CDs, then MP3s and now Ustream) is how to keep the community strong that this same philosophy can be attributed to social networks.

These major developments – and yes, they are major, as a band needs to view themselves not solely as artists, but as a business, and these actions help propel the business – of forcing the band to adapt to both technology and its fans came from the community. We see time and again on Twitter and Facebook how the community pushes the brand. We now have tweets instead of updates on Twitter because the community called postings tweets and rejected Twitter’s original terminology. The company eventually caught up and adapted.

By paying attention to how their users are actually utilizing the service, sites like Facebook and Twitter may be able to find those elusive business models. Just this week, for example, Twitter redesigned their homepage to put a focus on news, trends, and cross-cultural sharing. None of these were likely envisioned as uses of Twitter originally, but sharing news and non-trivial information is how many people have begun to use the service. In continually adapting to their community, Twitter might be paving the way to future potential profitability.

Will Social Networking Remain Niche?

Before we discuss the position in our culture of social networks, let’s quickly look at how Phish and the Dead fit into our culture. While many will argue that Phish and the Dead are the ultimate niche bands, the bands (and subsequently their followers) are actually cultural indicators. Synonymous with the “hippy” lifestyle and Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the Grateful Dead helped spark the counter-revolution of the late 1960s. Members of the community that emerged around the Dead fill every walk of life in America and can be seen from the NBA to the most trusted anchor man of his time.

Phish, on the other hand, has become a long-running joke of sorts within the pop culture crowd. They have their own Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream flavor (as does the late lead man of The Grateful Dead) and have even appeared on The Simpsons. Yet even though their mugs have graced the cover of Rolling Stone, they have appeared on Letterman, and feature-length articles have been written about them (and their fans) in Entertainment Weekly, they still are not considered part of the mainstream.

Think about this: the Grateful Dead never had multiple number one hits yet sold out 70,000 seat venues like Giants Stadium. Phish never had heavy rotation on MTV or the radio yet they are able to hold festivals for 80,000+ fans in the swamps of Florida or the mountains of Vermont.

But all of the above would not have happened without the fans.

General society can learn about culture as a whole from the bands’ followers – from how group think works, to how messages spread and how economies will arise within groups. In our society, we’ve seen time and again how the minority drives the majority until the majority embraces the minority. It comes incrementally, like women’s suffrage or civil rights for blacks or the current gay rights movement. Social networks are now straddling the line between minority and majority. There just needs to be some push, and it’s happening.

Recent studies suggest that 10% of Twitters account for 90% of the activity. Clearly, these evangelical users cannot sustain the Twitter brand, but we’re now starting to see pop culture take the baton. We’re starting to see the early adopter minority influence the mainstream majority.

Twitter has entered our cultural consciousness. Athletes tweet, rock stars tweet, actors tweet, reporters tweet, teachers tweet, doctors tweet, lawyers tweet. Kids, teens, college kids, graduate students, parents, grandparents all tweet. Even politicians tweet! If all these groups tweet, how is it not embedded in our culture? The technology and the service are both affected by and adapt to the communities that use Twitter. Hell, there’s a whole economy surrounding Twitter.

Facebook has also crossed the proverbial chasm and affected the mainstream consciousness. The site has expanded from the college student community to the college students’ parents and Facebook has changed the way we view and understand content sharing. According to AddtoAny, more people use Facebook to share links than any other service. Indeed, 24% use Facebook compared to 10% for Twitter and 11% for email.

But as the mainstream audience catches on to these niche/sub-cultural groups, there are lessons to be learned. Most abundantly (and perhaps, lucratively, too) is how brands (both large and small, personal or corporate) should be using these sites.

Conclusion

Which brings us back to the original question: are Twitter and other social networks destined to niche status or are they so embedded in our lives that they are now an indispensable part of our society?

Social networks are still new, but they are much more than fads. They will continue to evolve as we become more dependent on them for information – from where we get our news to sending pictures from your honeymoon. User generated content, whether through blogs or microblogs or status updates or whatever, is what shapes a community, and which in turn, shape society. Social networks played a large part in our political game this past cycle in the US and elsewhere, and will also continue to play its role in shaping how companies participate in the conversation and how they can use social networking as a great customer service tool. In short, social networking, like rock and roll, is here to stay.

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions.

Pick your Artist:
Phish

Are you a male or female:
Suzy Greenberg

Describe Yourself:
Moma Dance

How do you feel:
Sparkle
Rift

Describe where you currently live:
Cities

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
2001
Wading in the Velvet Sea

Your favorite form of transportation:
Train Song
Cars Trucks Buses

Your best friend is:
Sleep

You and your best friends are:
My friend, My friend

What’s the weather like:
Fuck Your Face

Favorite time of day:
Silent in the Morning

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
When the Circus Comes to Town

What is life to you:
Joy
Destiny Unbound

Your last/current relationship:
Birds of a Feather

Your fear:
Buried Alive
Big Black Furry Creature from Mars

What is the best advice you have to give:
Run Like An Antelope

Thought for the Day:
Bounce Around the Room

How I would like to die:
Split Open and Melt

My motto:
You Enjoy Myself

On a Friday in June, torrential rain showers and a crowd of 15,000 Phish fans (many without ponchos or shoes) descended on New York’s Jones Beach amphitheater, one of the band’s first stops on its summer tour. Despite the hurricane, hundreds of ticketless fans braved the rain, roaming the parking lot for extra passes to the sold out show.

While nearly everyone is feeling the economic pinch, hard times are nothing new to the music industry. Album sales are no longer paying the bills, but concert revenues are. That’s why industry giants like Warner Music Group require new artists to sign “multiple rights” contracts and “360 deals,” in which the company helps pay for and promote the tour in exchange for a significant percentage of profits from ticket sales, merchandise and endorsements. Often these deals are made in conjunction with ticket vendors like Live Nation and Ticketmaster–companies known to aggrieved music fans for adding on fees of up to $15 per ticket.

In this environment, the success of a few niche touring bands like Phish, Widespread Panic (WSP) and the Disco Biscuits, which reject such studio deals, is all the more remarkable. They keep their wallets thick with imaginative grassroots marketing and free distribution of their recordings, and by cultivating a symbiotic relationship with their devoted fan base.

In 2004, Phish held their “last” concert in Coventry, Vt., drawing 65,000 people, despite a storm that left hundreds of cars stranded on a one-lane highway and thousands of fans walking 15 miles to the stage. Four years later, in September 2008, the band members announced that they would reunite to play three nights at Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Va., in March 2009. Days after Phish announced the reunion shows, and months before tickets went on sale, every hotel within 20 miles was booked solid.

In the months leading up to the Hampton concerts, Phish announced it would also go on tour in the summer of 2009 and play 25 shows (not including two nights at the Bonnaroo Music Festival, for which tickets are sold separately). Tickets were first available through Phish’s Web site, which reserved up to 50% of tickets for each show for the band to sell itself before making tickets available through Live Nation and Ticketmaster. For those band-sold tickets, which cost $50 a piece before processing fees, Phish debuted a lottery system in which fans were able to request tickets to whatever shows they wanted. Winners were notified a few months later, and the losers got their money back.

After the lottery, in mid-March, the first weekend tickets for the summer tour went on public sale via the ticketing companies. Ten million requests overwhelmed Live Nation’s Web site. Phish’s entire summer tour–over 400,000 tickets–sold out in a matter of hours. That’s over $200 million in ticket revenue–for just three months of touring. And it’s not so far behind mainstream pop’s biggest star, Britney Spears, who sold 614,949 concert tickets in the first half of 2009, according to the concert industry publication Pollstar.

Unlike Spears, Madonna and other stars who put on highly produced shows, Phish and WSP are known for their musical improvisation, which makes each night a new experience. When promoter Ron Delzin approached WSP’s manager Buck Williams to have the band play one night at Madison Square Garden, Williams says that he told Delzin, “No, I’m not sure I can sell out one night, I have to have two nights. With one day, we play just to New York City. With two, we play to the whole region, because people come in to see both shows, and it’s worth it for them to travel.” Delzin gave Williams what he wanted and WSP sold out two dates, Williams says.

And to whom should these moneymaking hirsute bands be grateful? The Grateful Dead, of course. They were the epitome of the touring band, gaining fans by word of mouth in the ’70s and ’80s. The band rarely had a hit song on the charts but became one of the highest-grossing live musical acts of its time.

Like the Grateful Dead, Phish and WSP are notorious for their open recording policies, encouraging fans to record their shows for free. “Music once spread through word of mouth. Now it happens on the Internet–very quickly,” says John Bell, the lead singer of WSP. While Internet downloads bite into record sales, it’s plausible that if these bands had enforced their copyright, they never would have achieved such popularity. Bell says, “It’s like being out in the Wild West, as new technology comes into play, new rules have to be crafted. And when I was younger, before the band even started, I’d run around and tape bands.” By allowing people to share shows and music for free over the Internet, Phish and WSP build exposure to their brands.

Bands with live acts worth paying for are able to avoid signing away rights to major music labels. Aron Magner of the Disco Biscuits, a trance jam band from Pennsylvania, says, “We’ve never signed with a label and never will. We’ve never had a problem drawing thousands of fans to our own summer festival, Camp Bisco.” The British band Radiohead, following great commercial success, turned the industry upside down with a “pay what you want” model for the release of their latest album, In Rainbows. Mash-up artist Girl Talk and small indie bands have followed suit. Last summer, both Girl Talk and Radiohead sold out entire tours.

Most niche bands market through their own Web sites. Widespreadpanic.com typically gets 750,000 hits a day while the band is on tour. These bands not only encourage others to record and share their music but also give it away themselves. Hours after Phish’s Hampton reunion show ended the entire three-day set could be downloaded–for free–on its site. A slew of other artists have disrupted the market with free giveaways as well, including Pretty Lights, a deejay who played at Camp Bisco in July 2009.

Amid an economic downturn, fans across the country are willing to make financial sacrifices to reunite with Phish. What’s even more charming about this two-decades-old band is that it gains new concert-goers all the time. As one non-fan who recently attended his first Phish concert (the rainy June show at Jones beach) says, “I think it’s all about the cultural intrigue. [As someone] not coming from that niche in society, it has a sort of hippie-mystique draw … I’d equate seeing a rare performance with getting a Wii before your friends get one.” Niche bands like Phish and WSP succeed by giving music fans what they want–free downloads, and inimitable live experiences.

Courtney Boyd Myers works for the opinions team at Forbes.

I decided to get a Sunday one-day pass to this year’s Pitchfork Festival when it was announced that the Flaming Lips would be closing the three day festival in Union Park on the west side.  The ticket was $35 plus some minor ticketing fees – a cost I would have paid had the Lips been doing one night at a venue that was within my reach.

Due to an unfortunate evening with tequila and cherry vodka, I started the day off a little later than anticipated.  In route I realized that the frustrations caused by owning a car in Chicago is easily solved by owning a Smart Car:

Solution to Parking in Chicago

Red line south to Lake, Green line to Ashland – I found myself in Union Park amongst a copious amount of local hipsters.  Freaked me the fuck out.  I was with my gentleman friend, so we were able to get in via the VIP entrance and benefit from a mild security search which helped me since I had packed my hangover kit of Toosie pops, water bottles, some mauw and a few little liquor bottles.  The park was laid out as such:

Map of Pitchfork 2009

The walking wasn’t awful since the park was so small.  The park was laid out in a manner that the landscape and greenery created the barrier between the two sides.  I hate to say this, but they shouldn’t have released the extra 300 tickets each day the Thursday before the festival.  I’m pretty sure that Saturday and Sunday were sold out and tickets were only available for Friday prior to release of the extra tickets.  There was no place to sit, there was no place to groove, and I’ll argue that mass amounts of hipsters aimlessly walking around is much worse than hippies.  Actually, the difference between Pitchfork and festivals like Bonnaroo or Summer Camp, is at the later you CAN actually move.  One thing you have to say about hippies is they are down with personal space.  I didn’t bring a blanket to Pitchfork, which was a huge mistake on my part.  Pitchfork is more like the nightly concerts at Grant Park than your typical outdoor music festival.  People bring lawn chairs, set up blankets and others obey the boundaries of the blanket.  Every time I sat down anywhere, the space in front of me automatically became a walking path – and this happened where ever I tried to sit.  Imagine the annoyance of trying to smoke with judging hipsters all up in your shit.

The crowded park took away from my desire to walk around.  They had mad eats there, but the lines for food were sorta lame.  You basically had to choose one vendor because you had at least a 10 minute wait to get your order in.  Beer lines were equally annoying, however, I didn’t get my 21 wristband.  We hit the few bottles we brought in and I was in no condition to be drinking again, so it didn’t really effect my day.  Threadless was there – giving away gift certificates and merchandise if you stood in line to spin a wheel.  That line was probably the worst line in the park.  Worse than bathrooms, beer lines, and food vendors – the fucking Threadless promotional tent had the longest line.  I judge you hipsters, this is bizarre.

The coolest part of Pitchfork was Flatstock 21.  The row of screen print artists that create concert posters.  There were 44 artists featured.  The only one I had heard of before was Daniel Danger – he’s raw.  I got this postcard.  It was free.

Viewing posters via a festival,  rows and rows of various posters took away from the specialness of the poster hunt.  I know I was a huge pain in the ass at the Phish show at Alpine in June about getting the Pollock prints.  I wanted the posters and it became obsessive, but whenever I get a poster, it comes with some sort of story – buying it from the show, hunting it down on e-bay or espresso beans.  The ease of the purchase, turned me off.  I liked being able to see what was out there and I liked picking up business cards here and there so I had new sites to check out, but nothing turned me on enough to purchase anything that day.

The sets started at 1:00pm.  Due to the previous night’s activities, I got there around 4pm.  I regret not being able to see Frightened Rabbits or Blizten Trapper.  Here’s the full schedule:

Sunday Pitchfork Schedule 2009

Who I saw:

Pharoahe Monarch

Pharoahe Monarch - Pitchfork 09

DJ/Rupture

DJ/Rupture Pitchfork 09

The Walkmen - didn’t get a pic, I never got very close

M83

M83 - Pitchfork 09

Mew

Mew - Pitchfork 09

The Flaming Lips closed the day perfectly; from what I read from others, they closed the entire festival perfectly.  The Lips stage had served as the background to all the bands on the A-Stage throughout the day.  It was obvious as the Flaming Lips did a few minute pre-show tease that the show was going to be a great spectacle.  They are so weirdly wonderful.  Wayne Coyne walked on stage via a digital vagina before climbing into his balloon ball – his signature move.  He gets the crowd revved up by screaming “COME ON, MOTHER FUCKERS!” to the audience – I love that, I’m trying to use the phrase more in my own life.  I thought the mocking of the “Write the Night” list got a little preachy, but I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing.  The Flaming Lips are not the band you need to dictate a set list to.  They played everything you wanted to hear as well as introduced two new songs.  The spectacle was cool despite being at festival – which usually allows for limited production.  Great show and made the day for me.

Flaming Lips - Pitchfork 09

Flaming Lips - Pitchfork 09

Flaming Lips - Pitchfork 09

Ugh.  People these days – so rude.

Here’s the taped message from Yauch featured on the home page of Beastieboys.com:

Time for the folks over at C3 Productions to start putting their heads together.  Beastie Boys were a large crowd favorite for the upcoming festival and with their cancellation there is an obvious hole in Saturday evening’s acts.  Rage Against the Machine is not on the Lolla schedule this year, but is touring with Rise Against who is on the Lolla bill – leaving last year’s closer in the Chicago area and with a night off.

*Correction: RATM is not on tour this summer.

Tool as the only closer  and RATM on opposite sides of the park would leave me chilling with Bassnectar at Perry’s stage hiding from all the scary music listeners.  If you haven’t caught on by know, I hate screaming music with an edge.

As per the usual, @lollapalooza is tweeting about crap while the rest of the music world gushes over this crushing news.  Oh wait, at least amongst all the Beastie Boy updates, we know what’s going on the Kidz stage:

@lollapalooza Never 2 young 2 rock. Quinn Sullivan, 10yr old prodigy will be @ #Lolla –> http://bit.ly/30bHeQ He’ll be on the Kidz stage on Sat @ 1:30. 9 minutes ago from twhirl

It would be nice if the festival made some sort of statement.

Thanks to all that voted. While the post got an overwhelming response of views, we need to step up the voting next week.

Without further adieu, I give you your Douchebag(s) of the Week:

DBOTW - Week One

Standings:

Justin/Julia Too Much Lovin’ – 33%

Justin/Julia Matching Shirts – 19%

Julia as a Bucket Boy – 19%

Ali Fruity Drank Drinking Soto Pot Shirt Wearing – 13%

Justin Non-Cubs Wearing Ali Hater – 13%

Costa Wearing Cubs Fishing Hat with Dog – 6%

Jerry as a Baseball Card – 0%

What’s going on this weekend that will offer potential douchbaggery?

Glad you asked!  Sounds like the crew will be getting together for the triple Bs: Booze, Bags, and BBQ on Saturday night.  Get your cameras out and ready.