And the band played on

Siguiendo con los temas discutidos en la nota del Suplemento No sobre Twitter y música, vale la pena darse una vuelta por esta entrevista del blog de Midem al bajista Steve Lawson. El músico plantea una apuesta contundente a la piedra filosofal de una época moldeada por las redes sociales: La capacidad de contar una buena historia.

How were interacting with your audiences early in your career?

Steve Lawson: When I started doing the Howard Jones tour which was 1999, that’s when I first started a blog. It wasn’t called a blog then because blogging didn’t exist. But I started to do a daily diary update on my website. And it was me saying, “Hi. We played in Berlin today. And we did this and this and this and I went sightseeing.” And so my news-- what had previously been the news page on my site became this kind of ongoing diary of what I was up to. And I found that -- yeah, it’s blatantly obvious to us now -- that was far more engaging than a list of upcoming gigs. And so I was getting people coming back to the site time-and-time again. I think early on, someone said to me, they would tell me the statistic that said if someone comes back to a website three times and it hasn’t changed they’ll never come back again.

And that was in the forefront of my mind. I want my site to be constantly evolving. And what’s what a blog allows you to do, obviously, but at the time it was the news page. And I was a journalist. I mean part of my skill set as well as playing-- making weird noises with a bass is that I’ve always been a writer. I’ve always been a communicator and a teacher. And so it’s the way that the web allowed me to blend all of that into this kind of evolving transmedia narrative, where I was writing about music, playing music without words and teaching people how to do both.

Con respecto a Facebook, Lawson plantea sus dudas como quien recela de la comodidad plástica, adormecedora, de los supermercados:

And then you’re on Facebook.

Lawson: I’m not sure about it. The jury is out on Facebook. Every now and, again, I think I’m going to can the whole thing and just leave it. Because I don’t like the social engineering of it as a platform. I don’t like the fact that the site itself isn’t honest about what it wants from us. There’s a kind of weird social libertarian aspect to what they’re trying to make us do with the site. And it’s kind of-- you must have more friends, you must have more connections, you must put more information about yourself so that we can harvest it and sell it. And it’s like, yeah, what if I don’t want to? I can’t switch off the constant nagging from them.