The app, quite simply, connects up an array of iphones and synchronises the screens to flick between different colours to the beats. Cleverly, it doesn’t rely on wifi networks or phone signal, but on sound cues within the music itself, a new type of tech that can also be found in new sound-based data tranfer app Chirp. Watch the video below to see it in actions, it’s pretty amazing to see just how responsive and synced up (most of) the phones are, though the effect is ruined slightly when the guy behind the lighting desk decides that he still wants to do his job.

Dan Deacon is currently in the middle of  tour of North America. So if you’re state-side and want to see it in action for yourself you can, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for when/if a UK tour is ever announced.

Thanks to Songkick for featuring this post on their blog.

1) Instagram is the best tool for sharing images

Despite mixed personal responses to the relevance or use of instagram, the general feeling seemed to be that instagram was the best way of getting attendees at events to share pictures; and sharing pictures is the best way to drive engagement and increase promotion after your events have finished. Young and Foodish argued that the importance of photo-sharing was because taking, sharing and publishing pictures of other people enjoying your event was one of the best ways of convincing even more people to come along next time.

2) Email is still king

Twitter is useful, Facebook like can equate to some ticket sales, but it seemed that the bottom line in selling attendance still comes through emails to inboxes. Sam Michel, founder of Chinwag, repeatedly stressed that it was his email strategies that produced the best results when it came to actually increasing attendances.

3) Pop-ups don’t have walls, neither should your social media strategy

The idea of the pop-up events has always been to produce events in temporary and unexpected ways, likewise the social media strategies surrounding these events should be restrained to the mainstream channels. At the panel, organisers of pop-up events talked about using new or smaller social media sites likes Path, thisismyjam and (admittedly larger) Pinterest to promote their events in all sorts of ways. The idea is to experiment and try new things as you make a pop-up.

4) Foursquare is on the way out

Despite the relevance that location plays in the life of a pop-up, foursquare was only mentioned in passing, mostly as something tried out by the people at Box Park. It seems that when it comes to pop-up events the idea of checking in and sharing your location just doesn’t hold as much relevance as tweeting about your experience of sharing photos of it.

5) Planning the event is the key to success

Despite all of the social media surrounding the nature of pop-up events, the conversation always came back to the fact that, if the event itself is great, people will talk about it, and if people talk about it, online or off, you’ll generate hype, and tickets sales. The key to a organising a great event is harder to pin down, though Sam Michel suggested that if you find yourself waking up at 4am obsessing over some minor detail, this is probably a good sign that you’re thinking things through thoroughly enough…!

Social Media Week continues through london this week, (24-28th September 2012) and I’ll be posting more updates about session on this blog, and on my twitter feed @michaeldanton.

Having just finished my PhD, I’m also on the lookout for a job within social media. So if you have anyone you think I should talk to, send an email my way. You can reach me on michael.david.anton@gmail.com

Showscoop promises to be the Yelp, TripAdvisor, or, er, Last.fm for live music – giving gig-goers an online space to share their experiences of bands and check up on whether an artist they like the sound of has what it takes to entertain a live crowd. As with any fledgling digital community you’ll have to cut it a fairly large amount of slack as it takes off – right now there are only around 400 reviews online.

The predictable San Francisco bias also means you’re currently unlikely to find reviews of bands that aren’t touring the west coast of America, and even those that are only have a scattering of reviews attached to them. These existing reviews vary from useful, though spoiler-filled descriptions accounts of the gigs, to the utterly inane.

Of course this could all change, and it’s promising to see that Showscoop already has a vested interested in encouraging prolific and conscientious posters via its RoadCrew program. But the real issue is the definition of the problem that it’s trying to solve….

Before Songkick appeared, my inbox was filled with dozens of emails from various ticketing sites, which I would plough through to find the gigs I wanted to attend (problem), after I signed up to Songkick I now only get personalised telling me when bands I listen to will play (solution).

Before I signed up to Showscoop I would only go to gigs by bands I liked, or that were recommended to me by a close friends, after signing to Showscoop…well nothing’s changed because there was nothing to get fixed.

If you’re incredibly fussy about who you see live, you’ll only go see bands you like, if you love to head to gigs all the time, you’ll see whoever’s on. The middle ground of users, those who would be swayed by anonymous unskilled reviewers, may not even exist. Of course what does exist is music fans wanting to express their adoration of band’s gig, or the abhorrence at a poor performance or technical glitches – and for an academic with a genuine interest in the reception of performances this is fascinating stuff.

But as a punter, you have to take these reviews (and of course all reviews) with large pinches of salt, they’re going to be a skewed selection of opinions from a minority of those who attended, and even the averaged scores out of five aren’t going illuminate too much, as recently summed up by the ever wonderful XKCD.com.

So that leaves ShowScoop in a bit of a pickle, the main thing going for it is that  people like telling people about bands they like (or hate) seeing live – and so far there aren’t even really that many people doing that on ShowScoop.  Even after getting people on board with their roadcrew, and making sure there are  reviews flowing in, quite how they’re going to get readers is another question entirely…

Just look at the Rover’s first tweet from the red dusty plains of a planet some 34 million miles away:

I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 6, 2012

Obviously these tweets aren’t coming from Curiosity itself, but the people in charge of interpreting the vast and complicated data streams being beamed across space are doing an amazing job at compacting down the information whilst injecting some real personality into their communications…

The rover’s first tweet might not have the poetics of the (in)famous first words on the moon, but it does tell me where the rover is, the condition it is in and, more than anything else, it makes laugh, gasp and want to read more. After seeing this tweet I wanted find out about this character’s very real, genuinely exciting and wonderfully told adventures. And the fact that I even thought of this robot and this government funded space mission as a ‘character’ is very telling indeed.

The crew behind the Rover’s twitter account know their audience, and they talk to the internet enabled public in a colloquial, meme-acknowledging way, which situates a huge hulking mass of wires, motors, equipment and government bodies as just another online peer talking about what they’re up to:

No photo or it didn’t happen? Well lookee here, I’m casting a shadow on the ground in Mars’ Gale crater #MSL twitter.com/MarsCuriosity/…

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 6, 2012

Yes, that’s NASA talking to you right there, pretending to be a robot in space, riffing on a popular internet trope that won’t seem out of place on a Reddit comments thread somewhere. If that doesn’t confirm that we are, in fact, living in the future, I don’t know what will…

@MarsCuriosity might be a little bit busy nowadays to respond socially to every single @mention that it gets, but it  can still take the time out to plough through what must be a vast list of mentions and reply to the public in order to clear up some big issues; like @mediadeo’s question about why there wasn’t any sound to the recently released descent footage:

@mediadeo No microphone. None was called for in the science payload. See what I *am* carrying here: msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/ #MSL

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 6, 2012

It’s not just on twitter that NASA has shown that it’s not fallen behind when it comes to social technologies; the latest high-res shot taken from Curiosity’s descent has the usual sharing buttons underneath it, but, it’s also got a ‘Pin it!’ link. This wouldn’t seem out of place on any other blog, but the realisation that America’s government funded space program is cool with people sticking pictures of Mars next to their perfect home interiors and re-pinned info-graphics is a startling one.

You’re probably already following the rover as it journies around the red planet, but if you’re not you can do so by clicking this button.

Follow @MarsCuriosity

Turns out that, whilst I was having these thoughts, some of the ex-members of last.fm and their friends were holed up in an office in East London also having the same ideas. Late last year www.thisismyjam.com launched, and, since I’ve been a member, it has in a number of small but significant ways, changed the way in which I listen to and share music…

The premise is ridiculously simple, the interface is minimal and friendly, and the user-base, whilst still small, is devoted and passionate about music. TIMJ asks you to name song you love, it could be the ear worm that’s been knocking around your head for days, or the guilty pleasure sitting on top of your most played smartlist, or just whatever’s playing on the radio at the time. Name it and TIMJ searches for it. Nine times out of ten it finds the song somewhere online, then it sorts out the links for you, asks you to tinker with the cover art, and lets you share your ‘jam’ to facebook and twitter.

Your selected jam then sits there, proudly collecting listens and likes from other users, until seven days pass, or you find your next jam… rinse and repeat and all of a sudden you’ll be a TIMJ user.

Nice right, but the real gem on the site is the unassuming ‘playlist from people you follow button’. Once you start amassing some friends, either from twitter, facebook or by adding some of TIMJ’s suggested ‘people to follow’, you can hit one button and get treated to a potentially limitless playlist of hand-picked carefully curated tracks by friends, strangers, radio stations or even minor celebrities. The playlist is often eclectic, sometimes awful, but it is exactly what you make of it, if you like a song keep following that person, if someone links to something dire, then ditch them and find someone else to add as a friend.

The rhythm of the site is a thing of beauty too, unlike twitter, people aren’t constantly updating their jams. You can only have one song active at a time, and if you want it to get played you’ll need to leave it up for at least a few hours, and probably a few days, for everyone to get round to hearing it. After a week passes your jam expires and you’re suddenly tasked with finding something else for your listeners to wrap their ears around.

The result is a slow, human-scaled and entirely pleasurable experience that you can dip into and out of as you see fit. Most importantly of all, it works. Well, almost all of the time. Tracks stream without pauses, the search tool almost always finds the song you’re thinking of without any hassle, and sharing with other networks like twitter and facebook is easy.

I don’t head to TIMJ all the time, but, when I do, I almost always exit the site with a new song I like, or band to follow, or friend to talk to tunes about.

You can sign yourself up here, and if you want to listen to my jam you can find my profile here.

Our preoccupation with tweeting, posting, texting and filming destroys the intimacy of what the best live performances should be, which is a captivating and all-encompassing experience.

Danny Wright @theguardian

The sentiment is really a small part of the wrestling of control away from centralised bodies that the ‘general public’ has experienced as they’ve gained access to forms of social media. In this case the tension is a small localised one, rather than a global issue – do they audiences let the artists captivate them, or do they try and capture some of the experience for their own (and others) supposed gain? Within an audience we’re all performers forming part of the live musical experience, but the question is do we let it wash over us, or do we try to capture the flow…

Most of the comments that followed Danny Wright’s article expressed anger at those audience members who were missing out on the ‘real experience’ by hiding behind screens.

Bloody mobiles should be turned in on the door at gigs. It baffles me why people spend money on a ticket then spend most of the night on their phone.

A few more animated responses indicated frustration at being distracted from the events by the screens of other people, or anger at being reprimanded from disturbing someone else’s recordings.

it’s actually incredibly infuriating to those members of the audience standing behind them, who would rather watch what’s happening onstage

A couple of times I’ve even had dirty looks or comments because my enjoyment of the music was affecting someones attempted recording. It’s a joke,

Very few commentators stepped in to fight the opposite side of the argument. Either most people really are infuriated by the profusion of mobile screens at gigs, or, those who whip out our iPhones to record a song aren’t the sort to wade into an argument via an article directly attacking them. The general tone of the comments seems to suggest that personal technological mediation of the event through portable devices was a distraction that should be quashed.

But it’s not twitter, or Facebook or video-recording that’s really being attacked here, it’s the appropriateness with which these tools get used during live music events. As these devices become more and more useful, with apps like Vyclone allowing users to shoot footage of gigs and edit together multi-camera synchronised footage crow-sourced from other Vcloners, the general swing seems to be towards using devices more often – and for longer.

The tension is also one of space, those people tweeting and recording feel like they are opening up bounded spaces. They’re sharing the experience of music with those unable to attend, they’re giving back something to a wider musical community, rather than just soaking up the atmosphere, hoarding it up for themselves. They do it for their friends who couldn’t make it, and they do it for people like this:

I cherish the opportunity, afforded to me by the generosity of others, to see clips of gigs by artists that I love on YouTube, when I wasn’t able to attend the gig myself for various reasons – sometimes financial, but more often because I like a wide variety of music and can’t see all the gigs by all the artists I like.

The problem is though that gigs are purposefully bounded spaces, which we choose, and normally pay, to enter a restricted space. The person stood behind the guy recording the gig on his iPhone paid to experience live music, not to experience it via someone else’s iPhone – and it’s this which frustrates and angers.

The answers to how, where and how much to use these tools has to come from either the music venue and/or the artist. Without Jack White telling people to ditch their iPhones, or the venue erecting signs, those of us who ‘do social media’ are going to do it when they want – that’s the point, it’s a personal sharable activity. They’re probably not even going to notice how distracting it is to others because they’re still ‘in a moment’ and ‘having a ‘real experience’ when they’re looking at these screens – it’s just a different experience to those surrounding them.

Without guidance or a reason not to use personal portable tech at gigs the tension between screens and experience is going to keep on simmering. Audiences may get annoyed by artists telling them to put their phones away – or they may be equally irked by other artists encouraging their fanbases to shoot and upload footage with a specific hashtag. Without first understanding the audience itself the problem isn’t going to get solved.

Artists, and venues help define the rules of what audiences can and can’t do within the space of a venue, and it’s up to them to realise what should be encouraged or discouraged depending on who’s attending an event, And it’s up to us, the audience,  to pay attention what these rules may be.

Coming up with these rules is not going to be an easy task, but, by talking about and debating the ideas of capturing and being captivated we can begin to take steps towards some sort of resolution.