Distributing Information: The Answer?
Sites like ArtistData are beginning to mushroom across the internet. They claim to allow you to manage all your data in one place, and take the pain out of maintaining a personal brand online, as well as much more. But in reality how good can they actually be?
However great the internet is at making everyone’s life easier, it is also a fact that, in the way increased competition causes splintering, it can make things a lot harder. Take the music industry for example. Who knows how many sites you have to be registered on, to ensure all your content is heard by the widest possible audience. Moreover, signing deals with content aggregators might ensure coverage of content, but this doesn’t take care of other details such as bio, news, events, media and more.
In this sense, a service like ArtistData’s sounds like a great idea, but then again, if you really think about it, what are they doing, but yet further monopolising the data you yourself as an artist should be in full control of. Some would argue that the tools should be built for artists to maintain their own profile on their own site, and that the data should then be disseminated across the internet from there as the singular authoritative source. In a perfect world, this “selfish web” sounds great but in practice it’s an impractical and less than perfect model.
Data drives the new internet economy, but the harsh fact is that the entry, sharing, and update of information, especially when it relies on quality, is a difficult task and one that faces many pitfalls. Lots of new style tricks are being employed to cut down on human error, but when, for example, venue details for event data can vary so wildly, this makes life very difficult when trying to marry new data with old from multiple sources, be they authoritative or not, and be they computer or human generated.
Anyhow, despite the marketing spiel that ArtistData and such services are the answer to everything, I think there is still a long way to go, and that the industry and artists as a whole should be looking at more open systems and formats than using and supporting closed, proprietary systems and services.
