David Courtier-Dutton (041-1)
Part 2 of Slice the Pie founder David Courtier-Dutton's Us Now interview.
Transcript:
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A. In terms of the wisdom of crowds, that really hits the nail on the head. That is the counter intuitive sort of question one gets. That is what one would assume. If you had a hundred people run a hundred metre race and you averaged the score, you would end up with the average runner in the middle. That is racing. That is a straight line correlation. But if you get a hundred people to guess how many jelly beans there are in a jar or the weight of a object or the likelihood that it is going to rain tomorrow or whatever, the result is excellence -- you end up with being better than the best person most of the time and therefore, with the system we have created on Slice of the Pie, what we end up with is excellence in decision-making. Not the average band, it is the best bands that come through -- not the most Britney Spears. If we look at the range of bands that come through we have punk, ska, we have electronic, we have singersongwriters, male and female, we have Indie, Rock and all of these will come through generic arenas and every -- if you put a thousand mixed bands and artist in, the twenty top ones will always be -- the best singersongwriter will be in there. They will not all be a bland similar music, which is what one would expect using the wisdom of crowds. You would not expect for the average Britney Spears.
Q. Why do you you say the internet is the key to this happening, what other factors are increasing these decisions that are going on, why are more than more people turning to a more open participate active model now?
A. (1.58) That is a big question. I think at the end of the day the consumer normally leads people. There are very, very few people who launch an entirely new methodology on a consumer based business hoping it will work. At the end of the day where are your consumers? They are not watching Top Of The Pops, apart from the fact it is not on, but also because they don't watch the most television. They are on YouTube. They are on MySpace they are on Facebook. They are used to getting involved and they are used to a two way relationship with the screen. It is not a sit back, it is a lean forward relationship and, therefore, if as a business you want to sell people like that, that is how you need to interact with them. That is why brands are getting so involved in festivals and things like that. There is that level and, if you actually want to empower them to do things, that is even more powerful. So they are not actually entertaining themselves, they are actually making a difference. And go to your average music consumer and say 'You can be involved in' -- actually it is not an X factor, it is about genuinely using your wisdom and your experience to influence who ends up making an album and who ends up succeeding in the industry and that is quite intoxicating to a large slice of the population.
Q. Is there an extent to which you think companies are having to behave like better companies, like you can say you are a brand that is calling you and you are sort of interested in you know loads of people like hip hop or whatever do you think brands are having to now instead of just saying they like that and forcing people to believe that by employing people are they having to behave in a deeper way?
A. (3.55) Yes, absolutely. Yes. They have to walk the walk now -- they can not just talk the talk. If you are sitting watching television and a brand advertises to you and sends you a message, you might accept it, you might not, but a large slice of the population will accept it. If you actually put that on to an on line internet environment everyone can talk about it. There was the classic example last year and it was very clumsy but MySpace basically sold their home page to Snickers for the day and MySpace had been fairly cool until that moment and I remember, in the office we had got a lot of younger people in the office with funny coloured hair and, if I had to point to a day when MySpace became uncool, it was the day that Snickers advertised on the home page and took over the home page. It was seen as a complete sell out of everything, and MySpace will continue to do brilliantly and it is fine but MySpace were not walking the walk there. They were talking the talk but by doing that they exposed themselves as commercial -- it was a commercial sell out as far as a large number of cooler members of the community were concerned.
Q. What about ethics? What can it mean? Will this result in companies being better companies to some extent?
A. (5.29) Well, hugely ethical. We are, but we are a specific example. We are automating the record industry process and allowing the fans and investors to make it work. I think unethical companies will find it a lot harder and therefore they will become more ethical. On a cynical basis I do not think it will make business more ethical overall. I think the enlightened businesses will make better decisions and therefore make more money but I do not think ethics are necessarily a large driver here.
Q. You said whatever but people have been forced to do that, you cannot like BP did change its logo to green and flowers through PR?
A. Perfect or something I cannot remember, yes.
Q. .......
A. (6.46) I think that is just marketing at the end of the day, trying to plug into the common consensus. I think far more interesting and perhaps in line with the wisdom of crowds is if you could actually create an environment, and it is quite easy to do something like we have done on Slice the Pie, where you could ask the crowd on an independent basis what level of vehicle tax would make you drive or better still what level of fuel duty do you think would be necessary to halt global warming. What level of, you know, what level of payment per dustbin emptied would cause the problem of landfill sites filling up too quickly, to diminish rather than saying to them, how much would you pay, you ask them a policy decision and you will end up with a right answer and that would be very interesting, that is a whole area that has not even been touched on. It is way beyond marketing or focus groups or anything. It is actually the collective wisdom of the crowd helping to decide policy and I think that would be very interesting.
Q. ..... government is always trying to do focus groups and they spend millions of pounds just getting people into a room together?
A. And it is very artificial.
Q. Why...?
A. Because it has to be a smart crowd. You have to have intelligence and you have to have diversity, so there is no point in getting a load of people into a room in an artificial environment and asking them questions and then, when you have the answers to the questions, how do you know that the measurement of them -- that you are measuring it in a correct way -- and then, when you get the answer, nine times out of ten people ignore it and it becomes part of the input to the solution or to the answer. But, as I say, if you structure the question correctly, you turn it into a percentage game in terms of whether it is a kind of stock market or it is what is the potential likelihood of this happening or that happening and then, if you structure it correctly and ask the questions in the right way, you will end up with fantastic decision-making time and time again, and that is what happened in the states with this project called Future Map back in 2003 which was then killed by congress because they thought it was deeply distasteful, running a trading market based on the likelihood of terrorist attacks because, after it went from government, they opened it up to the public and it was killed before it ever got a chance to see if it would work, which is a deep pity because it probably would have worked.
Q. But are you saying that it is too difficult for a government to use this or...we?
A. (9.33) It is a little known technique, the wisdom of crowds. Although I would say google is fairly well known, the internet is too young, or it is not too young now but it has been too young, and the wisdom of crowds is counter-intuitive -- you can not believe how good it is until you see it proved again and again and again and, when you see how well it is proved, it is a revelation. It is astonishing. When our first data started coming through on the site of artist and scores the day when we had done our first 50,000 reviews and we had our first 600 artists or so coming through, it was complete heart-in-mouth to see if the top two per cent were any good or not or whether the whole system was a load of rubbish and it was a fantastic relief when they all turned out to be really great artists in that first showcase and then, since then obviously, we have had the same artists getting through every single time. I think the current showcase, 50 per cent of the artists in there have been in at least one before, so it is repeatable and I suppose underlines how effective the system is because it is totally different scouts who have got them there.
Q. Are we going to see much more of this across all types of organisation?
A. I think we will I think it is inevitable. I think if we end up making an impact in the music industry and we start -- I suppose we might get consumers within the industry consumed within the industry or we might help the industry and we will end up with better decision-making and better music and more exciting music and audience participation. I think that will cause a lot of people to sit up and say 'this is a great system' and furthermore this is a very simple system. You just need to tick the right boxes to make sure the wisdom of the crowd is not polluted by external factors.
Q. More broadly than that MySpace .... is a similar market not exactly the same but still allowing people to review each other's work and show those kinds of things like Last FM?
A. (11.49) I think Last FM, yes, I like Pandora, all those music recommendation engines are somehow tapping into the wisdom of crowds by essentially saying other people like this track. It is like the Amazon recommendation engines, where you buy a book -- they say, well, why don't you, you might like this book too -- iTunes you might like this music too and that is tapping into the not so much the wisdom, because the wisdom is more about decision-making but that is about preferences, tapping into the preferences of other people like you who like a similar sort of music. So yes, I mean that is a very good example.
Q. What would you say are the traits or the characteristics of a great manager or leader of a organisation someone trying to run a business embrace these things, what are they like these people?
A. (12.44) I think they are just smart, really. They can not be egotistical. I would say they have to be the first ones to put their hand up and say I am wrong when they are wrong and, obviously, be a good leader as well, and that is actually an attribute of a good leader in my book anyway, but not frightened to experiment and, when they find something great, accept that perhaps they were not doing it as well as they could have been the week before, rather than plough on making big bold decisions just for the sake of bold decisions. It is about being smart not being strong or, you know, an amazing leader it is about harnessing the tools you have.
Q. Do you see the way that what you are advertising in the way you are working all the music fans is mirrored in the way that your business works in terms of you finding yourself?
A. I would like to think that is the way we work. It is probably not. I am probably far to autocratic but there are only 11 of us, which is not much of a crowd so, but I think, if it got bigger, I would be the first to actually put a level of decision making that -- well, the thing about our business is that actually we stand out and say we have no views on our artists, we have no influence on them at all and it is all about a crowd. So it would not alter that, but it might alter the way we designed the site or what we did next or whatever but then, if we just used people in a small organisation you don't get much diversity. You need big organisations or big governments to actually have enough people to have enough diversity to make a really smart crowd.
Q. Yes, I mean do you feel that now there is something going on with people thinking about what an organisation is?
A. (14.47) I think we are right at the very beginning of the social networking revolution if you like and I think it has gone far too far in some areas in terms of sharing personal data and it has not got anywhere near how fantastic it is going to be in three years, five year. I mean, if you roll the wisdom of crowds into Facebook that you then roll into some market research tool, the opportunities are absolutely boundless and indeed, if you look at the Facebook example, if you could actually harness a large chunk of people there to actually regularly participate in wisdom of crowds situations, whether it be policy and business-making decision-making or whether it be product evaluation of products that are about to come on the market, then that I think would start to make a very big impact on organisations. Are we there yet? No, not at all because no one is doing it yet because, in a way, we built a filtering system on Slice the Pie that we thought would work, or we hoped would work, but the only reason we built it was for the main event which was financing the band. That was sort of an afterthought in a way -- well it was not an afterthought but definitely secondary. It has become almost part of the central reason for the site and what people love because it is so phenomenally successful and effective.
Q. The fantasticness you are talking about that is going to happen in 3 to 10 years whatever it is what sort of quality are you talking about there?
A. Decision making -- it is about getting it right, you know. In the music industry, it is about maybe getting two bands out of ten to be successful rather than one out of ten, one out of twenty, which is where they are at the moment. In product design maybe it is about companies not creating so many products that end up failing, you know. What is the best shaped car? What is the best -- there are all sorts -- there are a million and one different questions that you could ask diverse consumers in the right environment that would end up with a company making far better decisions, rather than two or three people, experts, in a room guessing with experience what the consumers want. Consumers are very difficult to target nowadays.
Q. Would you say you are better at decision making than government?
A. (17.15) I suppose at its most granular it is about every decision needs to be correct in the context of what the electorate would want. Now, you cannot say the electorate would all like free beer and so now it should be free. It has to be within the wider context of the economy and global events and whatever, but people in my experience, and yours I am sure down the pub or whatever, is that people do have views on stuff. If they are asked their opinion, they do have an opinion and the great thing is that it is millions of different diverse opinions from people with different perspectives which is exactly what you need to get a very bright crowd, a very smart crowd and, if you could actually combine that smartness, that innate intelligence, in a system to ask people to write questions, you would end up with fantastic policies.
Q. Just another thing could you give a really brief description of what Slice the Pie is?
A. (18.27) Okay, Slice the Pie is a financing engine for the music industry. So our core function is to conduct music fans and investors and incredible bands and allow the bands to finance the professional production of an album and then share the proceeds and financial success of that album with the people who have actually put up the finance. But we are also a wonderful filtering resource to actually identify the best new music out there before people commit money to actually invest in those bands. So we find the best artist, we get them financed and we allow the people that finance them to profit from their investment, if the band go on and do well.
Q. Could I also ask you to say a little bit about Last FM we are also doing a bit about them?
A. They are just over there are they not? I do not know them that well.
Q. What are your impressions of them what do you think of what they are up to?
A. They, I mean they are fantastic. They are the world's most popular radio station. They have an number of competitors. I really don't know that much about them. I mean.
Q. Good for music?
A. Yes, I mean it is great for music. It enables people to actually connect with a lot of new music that otherwise they would not come across. They can discover new artists. It just -- it is a great filtering system, a personal recommendation filtering system effectively, so there is nothing wrong with it but I would not put this on tely because I have not even got -- I mean I have tried to get a Last FM account......... ask me about Pandora, Pandora is the best business in the world. If you want internet radio, they are fantastic but Last FM do not have an account.
Q. My flatmate, I am always arguing with him about all this but he says all this stuff .............music and no one listens to music properly anymore you get all these crap bands, he only plays records from before 1960 what do you think, ...... but what do you think about what this is doing to the music world?
A. I think we are -- the music world is going through an evolution and we have not got to the end yet. At the moment we have got to the point where the old model is widely considered to be dead in terms of the labels have not got an economic model, people are not buying the music they are putting out anymore. All we have is this complete pool of millions of artist and how the hell can we find one that is any good. What we are seeing with Last FM, I like Pandora, the Pie is systems being put in place to actually enable the crowd, enable users, consumers, to filter the best stuff to the top. So we have been through the 'you only buy what the labels give you.' We are now coming -- we are about in the middle of 'my god there is music everywhere but most of it is rubbish,' and we are now beginning to see the layers being put on top that filter that enormous pool of music, down to the stuff that people really like and not just what people really like but what you really like. So a very personal filtering system and, roll forward two or three years, it is going to be fantastic. Day in day out, you will be able to listen to brand new music, fresh new music, experimental new music that you will like -- just like when you put a search into google, you will get the right page up. You put something into a music player in 2 or 3 years time, you will have endless fantastic music and it is going to be the best period music has ever seen.
Q. Thank you very much.
