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I’m at the Bandwidth Conference. The next panel is called High Speed Fan, “a discussion on future trends in the fan experience, and what it will mean to be a music lover a zillion years from now, or maybe even next year.” The moderator is Brian Zisk, and the panelists are Matthew Adell, Matthew Dunn, Naveen Jain, and Srivats Sampath. (I’m just taking notes on the particularly relevant bits.)

Q: How will fandom change?

Adell: All we can do is maintain our business and be well-positioned for what’s to come. Truisms have arisen. One is that those under 24 steal music and are a lost cause. People are willing to pay for relationship and convenience; if you are stoned in your dorm room with six hours to kill, you’re going to use P2P. Bands need to be honest with themselves about who their fans are. Those who won’t transact with you aren’t fans, they’re freeloaders. Make sure you’re targeting the people who actuallhave credit cards.

Dunn: Music will become more fragmented; distribution will be faster. The hit of tomorrow lasts two weeks, not two months.

Q: How will people get their music?

Jain: It will be a combination. Consumers still get attached to an artist.
Sampath: There’s a core group who spent time discovering, and they influence their friends.

Adell: Now that many services have 2 or 10 million tracks analyzed, it’s not the end of hit-based culture, but the waning years of the superstar act. you’d have to have a movie, a record, and a TV show at the same time. You’ll see the fat middle instead of the long tail. [That’s what Anderson is saying, actually, isn’t it?]

Q: The fat middle comment doesn’t make any sense, because the long tail is a logarithmic function — there are long tails within the long tails. There are a whole bunch of fat middles in the long tail. They are smaller than the “big head” but there are these markets inside. We should use a better term than “fat middle”.

Zisk: By aggregating the tiny niches, you can make a larger market.

Q: “Fan club” sounds awfully dorky. How do we fix this? “Fan”?

Sampath: Call them community. Linkin Park calls them “LP Underground”. For Madonna, fans are “icons”. They’re all fans, but you don’t have to call them by dorky names and make them feel inferior. We’ll call them whatever they want to be called. If Clay Aiken fans want to be called “Claymates”, that’s their own problem.

Adell: Cool people are rarely good customers. If you’re concerned with coolness, you’ll be bankrupt next week.

Q (Rob Kaye): How can we make the 18-24 year olds part of your PR team?

Sampath: People do that anyway. The problem with street teams is that the kids will take advantage of you. There’s going to be a group of kids who do a lot of work, but some who just want free shit. People will do whatever they do.

Adell: Some of this will shift with the penetration of3G mobiel phones. Then, the kids will have their parents’ credit cards in their hands all day.

Q: I completely disagree. Kids are gonna spend money on SMS, not $3 tracks.

Adell: It drives me nuts that the kids who will spend $3 on a MIDI ringtone of a 50 cent song will download it for free on P2P.

Sampath: Nobody sees that the kid owns the record.

Adell: That’s a real problem. Looking at a record collection was a social activity. MySpace is replaceing some of that, but the loss of a shelf has hurt all of our business.

Dunn: There’s a lack of opportunities for conspicuous consumption in the digital music market.

Q (Thomas Dolby): There’s been an interesting evolution on the relationship between the industry and fans. It’s not crystal clear yet. Music fans and musicians belong to each other. The role and the obligation of the intermediary is to empower that relationship to happen more easily and more effectively without the wastage that’s sent the industry down the toilet in the last few years. Labels want to push their own brand, but the fans don’t care about that. Kids want to feel they’re beingbrought closer to the music and the musicians that they admire. All you, as intermediaries, should be doing is facilitating that relationship. You’ve got to put the fans and the musicians first. Secondarily, if you’re a SV entrepreneur, you shouldn’t base your assumptions on your 15 year old son in private school in Menlo Park.

Adell: The labels have been really good filters. 99% of everything is crap. Anyone who can help fans discover music is valuable. Nobody wakes up in the morning and wants the new Warner Brothers release, but some people have that relationship with Six Degrees.

Zisk: Could you talk about how you as a musician connected with fans?

Dolby: My position is unusual — I have to be thankful for what the industry did back then. It’s a joy to an artist to be able to know who your fans are, first, and how they find out about you. My first album went gold, my second album didn’t. Nobody knew who the fans were — they were just units sold. Now, I can see reviews on blogs when I get back to the hotel after a show. I can blog. I can get comments immediately. There’s a closeness with the fans that never existed before, on radio playlists or royalty statements. I’m a tech guy as well as an artist, so I can do this all myself, but a lot of artists need help with that, and you need to help them.

Q: What about High School Musical, which was the #2 album, and sold mostly digitally? 10-15 year old girls spent a huge amoutn of money.

Adell: The kids weren’t spending the money, their parents were.

Sampath: It sold to the parents, not the kids.

Q: I respectfully disagree. It was a mastery of a demographic.

Sampath: I’m not saying kids didn’t like it. I’m saying the parents approved and bought it.