Let's draw a graph

Or two graphs actually, everyone likes a good graph.
These ones were inspired by a Neil McCormick article in the Daily Telegraph discussing the domination of the pop charts by female acts. It's a fairly compelling piece.

"But," I thought, "if pop music is dominated by female acts at the moment, what about what Josh Ritter would call “the glorious bottom”?"

All the open mic nights and gigs I go to are, without fail, very heavily male dominated. Why the discrepancy?

I'll pause here and let you read the article.

Back? Good.

Well, applying my cynical hat I’d say that you have one over-riding reason for each phenomenon:

Looking at the amateur scene first (because it’s easier) I think there’s a very simple reason why there are more blokes in music – guys join bands to impress girls.

I did tell you it was simple, but think back to your days as a teenager / young adult, if you’re a bloke, be honest and tell me how much of your life was not driven by an urge from your loins?

Thought so.

Moving on to the charts, and still with my cynical hat on, it’s about marketing. Women’s magazines have women on the cover, men’s magazines have women on the cover; images of women sell. You know what the most common way for “youth” to listen to music is? YouTube. Guess what? Images also work well there.

But there are exceptions! I hear you cry. Not everyone is a goddess-like Beyonce or Nicole Scherzinger, what about Adele, for example?

Well, and this might not be particularly popular, this is where you have to ratchet up your cynicism another notch. Sure she can sing, sure she writes her own songs and sure, she’s caught the retro wave at just the right time. But loads of other people have as well, why didn’t they make it big, especially when a great many of them are equally tuneful and (there’s no nice way of saying this) easier on the eye?

Cynical hat firmly on? Brim tugged right down? Ok here goes:

Again it’s all about marketing. In the same way that you have the likes of Cosmopolitan and Marie-Claire at one end of the spectrum, with the beautiful models and the aspirational marketing, at the other end of the magazine marketing you have the TV guides and supermarket tabloids with the “real stories about real people”. The Jeremy Kyle / Jerry Springer market. It’s about marketing a figure that most people can relate to. Most of us can never really aspire to be a Rihanna, but Adele? She’s normal, honest, down to earth. That’s, we tell ourselves, who we could be if fate had blown its fickle winds a different way.

Ok, let’s take our cynical hats off for a moment before we sound like bitter and twisted old people.*

Neil McCormick presents a number of reasons why women are very much on the ascendancy in the charts, I’d like to add one more before we take another look at the bottom rung and what happens in the middle order.

The recorded music industry, by which I mean the 4 major labels and their subsidiaries, is struggling. Sure every now and then they’ll hit on something and sales will rally for a bit but any business that is actively suing its customers has got serious strategic issues.

And what happens when legacy companies get put under pressure by disruptive players? They retreat to type and known formula, so big promotional bucks go into the current best selling genre as they try and maximise their position. So what we’re seeing is an industry putting all its eggs in one basket and, stretching my metaphor, trying to get as many eggs out of the golden goose before it dies from exhaustion.

That’s my summary of the top of the market, what about the bottom?

Next time you go to a gig (and watch the supports) or an open mic night, count the number of women on stage over the evening to the number of men. I’m guessing you’ll be looking at a ratio of 1-4.

So, assuming that there is only a little truth in my testosterone fuelled theory at the top, and taking into account Mr McCormick’s comments regarding the inherent anger / violence in certain musical styles (hip hop and metal being the obvious examples) being a turn-off to women, why are there so few female acts at the bottom of the tree? And why are there so few female “bands” at any level (successful female acts mostly being “solo artists”).

Frankly I just don’t know.

It’s plainly not that women and girls aren’t interested in popular music, the sales demographics show that there’s plenty of desire to consume.

Is it that it’s easier for a bunch of young lads to get the kit and do the practice to emulate the rock / indie music that their idols play than for girls to produce the kind of output that the top female acts are putting out?

That doesn’t make sense to me. Sure you can get a guitar and amp nice and cheap but drumkits and bass amps are still expensive and practice rooms and time are difficult to arrange. Plus you have to actually find your band members. I’d say you had a bigger expense (time and money) there than you do producing an electronically-based RnB-type song.

Is it a side-effect of the whole women-aren't-into-technology thing? Although the kit and the software are more affordable than ever, you still have to be comfortable learning to set up and use your home studio (in whatever form it takes). Is this a barrier to adoption? My personal experience is that the women who I've worked with (musically) are just not interested in the technical side of things at all. They want to play/sing/drum and really couldn't give a monkeys about the kit beyond what's actually in their hands; but that's just my experience and, to quote Dr Goldacre, the plural of anecdote is not data.

So let's get some data.
Below are two graphs from the billboard top 100 singles and albums tracked (somewhat unscientifically) by the 5 categories shown in the legend. Apologies for the lack of a labelled x-axis, I am bolloxed if I can get this to work on the new version of excel.

Going from left to right takes you from the top 10 / 20 on the left to the bottom of the chart on the right. Sorry about that.

Singles:

Albums:

What this shows, I reckon, is that whilst female acts do have domination of the very top of the singles chart, as soon as you head further down the chart the male-domination that you see in the amateur scene comes back into play.

It's worth pointing out as well that a higher percentage of the female hits are by the same artist, Rihanna and Beyonce, for example, both having 4 singles in the top 100. There are very few male artists of groups with that kind of presence.

All of which reinforces my point that what we're seeing here is the effect of the industry backing a number of "bankers" in order to prop up their model without actually getting out and finding the new music that they purport to be supporting.

* For the record, yes, I am a bitter and twisted old person

What you don't have

Coincidence is a funny thing. I tend to read books and listen to music at the same time, and this frequently leads to some strange collaborations. Listening to REM's Life's Rich Pageant (particularly Begin the Begin) whilst reading Michael Scott Rohan's Winter of the World series leads to all kinds of re-inforced messages.
The most extreme example was several years ago, whilst listening to The Yearning by Things of Stone & Wood and reading a book by David Gemmell (I forget which), I read the words "the shadow of death" at exactly the same time as they came over the speakers. It took me a moment to work out exactly what had happened as my initial perception had been that these words had suddenly acquired more weight.
It'd be enough to make you nervous, if you were superstitious, easy led and very nearly dead.

Just this morning I was listening to the excellent Meursault album All Creatures Will Make Merry  whilst finishing off Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science.
I heartily recommend both of them.
But as I was reading the good doctor's final pages he produced a quote from The Economist along the lines of "the true cost of something is what you have to give up to get it".
At about the same time from the stereo came "It's not about what you don't have, it's how little you're given and how far you can run with it".

Coming, as they did, so close together they struck me as quite profound.

I'm not going anywhere with this blog by the way, it just occurred to me, that's all.

But I guess it does give you a bit of an idea why people are so precious about children, after all, what you've given up to get there is incredible.

On a completely unrelated note, I've fished the REM album out for a listen this afternoon and, in looking up the link above, have just lost about half an hour reading interesting stuff about the band.
The internet is still eating my life.

Dopamine rush (or How the web turned me from a creator into a consumer)

I've not been playing as much music over that last few months, nor have I been taking as much exercise.
Most of my sporting pleasures are outdoors and it's been cold and wet, I've been doing some long hours at work and some disappointing news on the music front has taken some of my initiative from there.
So I've told myself.
And it's horseshit.

Some people come home from work and put the TV on, it then stays on until they go to bed.
Not being a TV watcher for the most part* I've always been a little bit smug and superior about the stuff I did instead: read books, news websites, exercised, played music yadda yadda yadda.
Pride cometh before a fall.

The reason that my excuses for not creating more music or getting properly fit are horseshit is because I've been doing much the same as the TV couch potatoes but with my own personal drug of choice.
The web.

I was joking with a friend yesterday about not being able to go to bed because I hadn't finished reading the internet yet and it reminded me of a study a saw recently (can't remember where I'm afraid, you'll come to understand why) that said some people get a dopamine hit from learning new things or acquiring knowledge.
And this has been my drug of choice. I've not been sat in front of the TV because I've been sat in front of my PC.
For hours at at time.
You could argue (and I certainly did to myself) that it's not like I've been sat here watching prat-falls on youtube or vegging out playing farmville on facebook, I've been reading a fair number of web comics true, but mostly I've been reading news or current affairs comment sites. Getting my little hits of knowledge.
But am I really learning anything? Or am I just filtering articles and stories to provide data that supports my already-held views?

So today I did an experiment and chalked up a tally of websites I've visited this evening:
38 webcomics
68 news articles or fact-based blog entries
4 comment runs off those blogs
15 other sites (webmail, facebook, house-hunting stuff)
And am I any smarter than I was yesterday?
Nope.

So, it's time to cut down. It's tempting to cut off entirely (because I find it easier to stop doing something than to limit doing something) but I don't read a newspaper and I don't watch the TV and there's only so ignorant I'm willing to be.
So cutting down it is.
Maybe I'll get back to creating some content rather than just consuming it.**


* Ironically there's a tv series on at the moment called How TV Ruined Your Life which sounds really interesting.
** You'll note that the alternative title still puts me as a passive actor in this, I'm aware that the web has done nothing to me, it's how I've chosen to use the web, but I thought it read better as a title.

Russia Today, really? Apparently so.

I was surprised to find myself watching Russia Today this morning. The BBC was just looking at Conservative conference and we were scanning through the other news channels. Turns out Russia Today (presented in English by Americans) is available on freeview.
How odd.
I was even further surprised to find one of their interviewees talking about how stations like Al Jazeera and the like were climbing up the ratings channels compared to CBS / Fox etc.
His theory was that the previously established players had become so ingrained in the rest of the establishment that they were no longer producing news, they were dressing up opinion and marketing it. Increasingly people are trying to get away from this and find outlets that were focussed on the facts not the spin.
This is not a particularly new idea, I've been reading multiple news sources for a while now to try and get a balanced view, but today the media has helped me out by providing the perfect example, two headlines covering the same story:
From the Telegraph:

HSBC reveals plans to quit London for Hong Kong

From the BBC:

HSBC says talk of moving HQ to Hong Kong 'presumptuous'

The opening paragraphs of each article go even further in their disagreement.

It's getting increasingly difficult to find that balance.

Whether Russia Today and Al Jazeera are suitable examples of News-not-opinion media houses I will leave to your imagination but you can't help but wonder how many people would tune back into a news organisation that actually focussed on researched news and journalistic integrity rather than celebrities and ratings?

Stephenson's Responsibility Threshold

I have a theory, well, actually that’s an exaggeration; I have a hunch.

My hunch is that the standard salary model employed by most companies in the capitalist west is fundamentally broken.

The model is, theoretically, based on the idea that the greater responsibility and accountability you shoulder, the greater your salary in reward.

In the realm of a small business, where the owner is the principle benefactor of success as well as being the main loser in the event of failure this is a clear and effective mechanism.

In a pure capitalist model this probably works as well, if your company underperforms your shareholders oust you from the CEO seat.

But we in the UK (and the US as far as I can tell) are a long way from a pure capitalist model. Government-granted monopolies permeate our economy in the form of copyrights, patents and trademarks, monopoly and merger commissions rule against market-created monopolies, deals are done behind closed doors in clubs and meeting rooms that do not act in the best interests of the shareholders or customers, etc etc etc.

We all know this, but we put up with it because changing it is outside our sphere of influence.

Lobbyists and voting blocs have more say that we do, we resign ourselves to the inevitable.

One of the reasons that it ends up being outside our influence is that there are actually a very small number of people at the top of the pyramid who not only wield a disproportionate influence in their domains, they also, through their connections to other members of this elite, have a disproportionate influence in other domains.

This effect is amplified by the “revolving door” by which people enter and leave government having made or influenced changes in the area that they subsequently work*.

This is where Stephenson’s Responsibility Threshold comes in.

Basically my hypothesis states that at the bottom of the salary scale the risks incurred by the individual are far greater than the potential impact of their failures, whereas at the other end of the scale, the impacts of the failures are far greater than the risk incurred.

I’ve represented this on the graph below:

I hope this makes sense?

The bit where the business and personal impacts meet is Stephenson’s Responsibility Threshold and it represents two things:

Firstly, it is the point at which you can say someone is over-paid (to the right) or that you have a job that is unlikely to reward risk takers and innovation (to the left).

Secondly, and this is where I’m really straying into the realms of the completely unsupported hunch, it highlights the point at which true accountability stops.

To the left you have a state whereby the individual does not fully have the authority for the job they have been charged to do (they cannot be accountable because they have never truly been empowered).

To the right you have the situation of the exec who signs-off the work without understanding what they have improved. Effectively they cannot be accountable because they cannot be expected to understand everything that happens beneath them (see Andy Coulson and James Murdoch [claiming] not to know about the phone tapping at News International papers for example).

Fortunately the more cerebral media (and Private Eye especially) provides plenty of examples that I can use to back up my theory:

A recent study highlighted by the BBC found that Directors were more optimistic than their front line staff about the future in terms of the wider economy, their company in particular and their personal future if something were to go wrong. Sherlock Holmes was not required to figure out why this might be the case; not only are the rewards higher, the penalties are lower too.

A junior member of staff at NBC recently posted (on you tube) a video clip from the early 90s of a couple of journalists discussing (and failing to understand) what the internet is. 20 years later it’s very amusing and lots of people looked it up. The people in the clip subsequently showed it on their current morning chat show and had a good laugh about it. The employee who posted it was fired.

The Rotten Boroughs column of Private Eye*** is riddled with examples of people failing hugely in one exec job only to turn up in a similar one 6 months later having received both a pay-off and a pay in. The In the City column shows much the same in the corporate world and the tragicomic career of Geoff Hoon is a classic example for how it works in government.

So assuming that you’re in complete concordance with what I’ve written, the only question remains is, at what level does the threshold manifest itself? Obviously this will vary from company to company but I’m reckoning it’s in the region of £142,000 - $400,000.

*Google Richard Bowker for a prime example.

** Some nice examples of reward for failure here:

David Liddiment, oversaw the collapse of ITVs ratings to its lowest level in 47 years, now a BBC trustee advising on Radio 4.

Sally Morgan, former Blair aide exposed in the cash-for-influence sting by Channel 4, now chair of Ofsted.

Lord Lang, former tory MP, got lucky under Major, rejected by his constituents in '97, now chairman of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments.

You could make a list like this every fortnight that it comes out.

Result, now why doesn't the rest of it work like this?

I read a blog from Scott Adams (he of Dilbert fame) recently about how, if you were to start a democracy from scratch today, you probably wouldn't do it by party lines. In an internet connected world (and I fully accept that this doesn't apply in quite large areas of the planet) there are much more effective and accountable ways of doing things.
The government has backed off on the forestry sales plans, which is a good thing, but, and I shall quote directly from Geoffrey Lean in the Telegraph:
"It’s not just that over half a million people signed a petition against it; over 100,000 actually went to the trouble of contacting their MPs, and more than 30 local groups mushroomed around the country to protect their forests. It’s been a sharp reminder of something governments too often forget, that there is world beyond Whitehall."
There is indeed a world beyond Whitehall, and it's accelerating away from the petty tribalism that hinders our making real progress as a country.
We are communicating directly now, to each other, to corporations, to NGOs and increasingly to our government, but how often do they listen? This is a rare occasion, have no doubt.

There are two things to take from it though, which should give us some hope.
Firstly, the parties are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The tools for a direct democracy are all around us and we are using them in ever increasing amounts.
Secondly, the lobbyists are becoming irrelevant. Organisations are waking up to the fact that their customers are now connected and can, when the need arises, cut out the middleman and speak with one voice.
Lots of companies are picking up on this, they have to because they're bottom line can't handle the impact if they don't.
The governments will have to, or they will fail and fall.


In the meantime of course you can expect all kinds of panicky legislation and massive lobbying, but it's a step forward.


To bring this blog full circle I'll hand you over to Sue Holden of the woodland trust:

As I write, there is a proposal to water down protection for ancient woodland in the planning system. We need your help to defeat this proposal by 28th February.

We must not let public passion and support for our woods and forests die down and now that ownership is no longer an issue, we must not lose sight of the need to increase protection for ancient forests and restore those planted with conifers, a once in a lifetime opportunity for woodland conservation.

Our campaign will continue and we urge everyone to continue to sign our petition and transfer their passion about who owns England's public woods to ensuring that all of England?s woods survive in the future. 

Data Shift

I'm a big fan of the video Shift Happens. If you haven't seen it already, take a moment to absorb some staggering statistics.

Enjoy that? I love it.
Today I found another couple of interesting statistics courtesy of this article on the BBC website.
The whole "295 exabytes of information" is, to be frank, almost meaningless. The number is too large to comprehend for mere mortals.
But further down the article there's a much more interesting (well, interesting to me) statistic: "It shows that in 2000 75% of stored information was in an analogue format such as video cassettes, but that by 2007, 94% of it was digital."
Whoah!
In seven years we went from massive majority analogue information to even-more-massive majority digital information. It's no wonder that so many industries are struggling to understand the real impact that has on their businesses.
The internet is a digitial copy machine (hat tip: Confused of Calcutta), and a very price-efficient one at that. Trying to shift your business model from one where you were the gate-keeper of a finite resource to one where you become the introducer to an infinite one is a mighty task, and it's no wonder so many industries are resorting to ever-increasing attempts at protectionism (read the blogs from any day's output on techdirt) rather than waking up to the fact that the world has changed and their business model is no longer fit for purpose.