poptimists | Seemingly Intractable Questions In Pop, No.1 in a Series

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How do you make pop work on TV?

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From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

I should point out that I have completely stopped watching TV*. My viewing now consists of:

- YouTube and equivalent videos
- Downloaded TV shows of my choosing
- An occasional burst of Joost channel hopping
- DVDs

If I see something in the schedules that I would be interested in watching, more often than not I'm too busy to watch it at the time that it's on. But I can download it and watch at my leisure.

*

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

One thing is that TV is fully aware that it'll get broken up and YouTubed - this isn't really anything they can do anything about, but it means that the old Top Of The Pops model, with lots of discrete bits, doesn't work. The qn is how can it get round this by making the various elements in the show actually interplay. X-Factor, as Mark says below, does this in a very crude way - even if you have a favourite you're going to watch the whole thing anyway. Same with Eurovision.

Turning it into a game seems to work, but how to do this in a way which allows a blend of music styles, formats etc?

One obvious thing is to turn the Top 40 into a game format - the charts already is a kind of weekly listener-participation contest anyway. Take the top new entries and highest climbers each week, put in last week's winner, they perform (or show videos as schedules permit), there's interview and chat too, the "winner" each week gets prime spot on the Radio 1 or 2 playlist (making it worthwhile for acts to join in!).

From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

Hmmm. Doesn't this depend on the presumption that the charts are still relevant? I know Rihanna is currently making history, but I honestly feel the charts are totally meaningless, because they don't take into account illegal downloads. And I know that the charts never used to include the number of times people had copied a song onto a cassette for their friends, but the difference is the scale. The charts are a statistical measure, and statistics are only as reliable as the sample size. And in the case of pop music, the sample size has become too small to be meaningful.

I honestly feel that TV is on its deathbed, and no amount of innovation in reality TV and gameshows will fix that. Sky+ and its peers are leading the way, and I foresee that within the next 5 to 10 years, there will be no such thing as daily TV listings, merely a list of "new shows added to the available program list" on your tellybox. This list will be fully searchable and of course, you will be able to set alerts to notify you when the next episode of your favourite show appears. News channels are probably exempt from the death of TV, but other than that, I can't see how the TV economic model works any more. If everyone is skipping through adverts, why would anyone pay to advertise?

The integration of the YouTube model with your home TV is the next step. I fully expect Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to be providing rival set top boxes within the next year or two.

Don't worry, ORGAFUN will still exist. It's just that the viewer will have a far greater say in how it works.

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

I think we're at slightly cross purposes - what you describe as the "death of TV" still sounds like TV to me! Death of a SCHEDULE maybe but not "of TV" - shows are still getting made and watched, the qn is - is there a viable way for music shows to be among them.

(I think as with most "deaths of" you exaggerate somewhat but this is a different conversation)

I think my idea DEPENDS on the charts not being taken particularly seriously any more, though I don't think I explained it too well - I don't see "new entries" and "highest climbers" as being purely sales determined, for instance.

Anyway, for the charts to not work as a representative sample you'd need to argue that the tastes of illegal downloaders are significantly different to the tastes of legal downloaders (whose purchases make up something like 70% of the Top 40). Of course his COULD be the case but I don't see why it would be.

As for sample size, let's err on the side of caution and say that a No.1 is 20,000 sales in a week, and that 5% of total buyers buy the No.1 single in that week (I would guess these figures are slightly low and very high, respectively), That gets you a sample size of 400,000, which any panel or poll in the world would kill for!

From:

bengraham.livejournal.com

Bad choice of words, I accept - when I refer to the death of TV, I really meant the death of the traditional TV format of scheduled shows with ad breaks in the middle and at the end of shows.

Is there a viable way for music shows to continue to be made in the "new world"? Yes, there probably is, but I don't feel that anyone has come up with it yet. As has been said elsewhere on this post, the most successful recent examples (Pop Idol and X-Factor) are really shows about the production of music rather than the music itself.

Audience participation is clearly essential to any successful future shows. As I've said elsewhere, why would I watch a music show of which 90% of the content may not be interesting to me, when instead, I can watch clips (of music shows) of my choosing, that are interesting to me? I think that this is the key problem facing programme makers (and this is no different to the existing model) - how do I make the show that has the widest possible appeal without alienating too big a portion of my potential viewers?