It set me thinking – a proposal, an engagement, they’re all promises of more to come. They are events in their own right, but they aren’t the end goal. The end goal in this case is marriage, which is in itself a process leading to a better relationship… and so on it goes.

This, to my mind, is where we’re at here in the Coffeeloop Cave. We’re exploring the process rather than expecting an end result. When we prototype concerts, we strip elements back, test them and objectively see what works: we throw things to the wall and see if they stick. When you take nothing for granted, you discover things – things you wouldn’t have found out otherwise. This might seem obvious, but that’s sort of the point.

Right now, I’m getting requests to talk about audience engagement and interaction with a number of arts organizations. I’m delighted about this; not only is it fabulously interesting, but it’s also terrifically flattering. But, in these situations, I find myself saying something over and over again that surprises people: getting the audience to engage is not, in fact, your aim.

I believe all you need to achieve is this: interest them in what you’re doing enough to give a damn. That’s it. I said it sounded obvious.

Now is not the time for a bait and switch. People smell rats far quicker than we’d like to think.

You don’t sell steak to a vegetarian hoping they’ll change after the purchase. You have to help them understand that they’re missing the best food available on the planet and then be happy to talk shop with them.

If any summary of the effects of the internet is possible, it is this: good products get the attention they deserve, and excellent experiences will flourish. Let me be clear: any mindset other than “build it and they will come” will fail. People can now find exactly what they love, and where, when and how to experience it. We only need to provide the opportunity.

I know of a famous venue that is planning to entice this ‘youf’ audience in through their hallowed doors: they’re going to host pop/alternative concerts on their second stage, showing they aren’t that stuffy and rigid, then sell them on their “real” content.

They know who they are. If someone from the venue is reading this, please get in touch. I would love to talk with you about how deeply patronising and fundamentally wrong this is…

I would suggest that if they don’t care, they’re not going to be your ambassador; they won’t tell their friends. I think that the ‘engagement’ has to follow like a marriage proposal. You need to get to know each other first, you need to understand the mindset of the other person; of course, not everything is going to work immediately, but you work through it. You talk about it and work it out. The only benefit with this kind of relationship is that, unusually, neither party is right or wrong!

Let’s follow the relationship analogy through. You don’t buy marriage (normally), rather, you find love first and go from there, right?

Your potential audience already exists, in the same way that your potential wife/fiance/husband already exists. You have accept that the lucrative ‘youf’ market isn’t in play. You appreciate that your marriage won’t be the same as The Waltons – and you won’t be as mass-marketable as Miley Cyrus.

Does that devalue your marriage?

Absolutely not. I’m getting tired of people comparing the ‘classical’ market to the pop market and despairing that there’s more money in the pop lands. This is absolutely true. And not in the slightest bit relevant. At no point should the two fuse neatly in the middle, as someone recently asked me to do for them. Money spent on “music consumption” is not earmarked as such in our budgets, but a willingness to spend on things we love is. Most of us don’t earmark a “budget for music consumption”, after all, but rather have a general willingness to spend on the things we love.

If we focus on widening access to the point that there’s no discernible content distinction or authenticty, who are we really benefiting? You might buy some bums-on-seats from curious one-off buyers, but more likely than not, you’ll end up at the same point you started, but you’ll have hemorrhaged money and audience members.

If you go through life aiming for the fix, you’ll miss the best bits. Don’t aim for the buoys in the water; go for an exciting journey.

This has a clear impact on content, and importantly, content production.

There is a lot of nay-saying about the state of the music industry at the moment, and how it’s in the worst shape it’s been in since records began. But I think this misses the point. In politics, dictatorships have been proven time and time again to fail;  a monopoly in any context exists to benefit the minority. What we’re seeing now in the music industry is the great democratic movement; anyone can record an album, anyone can make a film and you can send it anywhere. The best stuff will still exist and the worst stuff will still exist; there’s just more of both.

I don’t see the problem.

So, what’s up?

Well, as you probably know, the Twitter concert was a great success and is currently leading to a few very exciting things. More soon. The video can be found at our vimeo page here: Twitter Concert

We’ll  be posting much more here in the coming months, but if you’d like to get in touch about anything (ideas, comments, recipes etc), then drop me a line to pg @ coffeeloop.com

Cheers!

Head on over there. You can read our twitter updates, and talk back using Twitter. Peter is currently tweeting from his Virgin flight to SF!

Or if you’re the adrenaline junkie type, sit tight on this page and wait for the countdown timer to hit zero to be taken straight there.

Watch this space.

Wait. First, some background.

We’ve consistently pushed the boundaries with our events. Presenting new & pioneering classical music, from Benjamin Britten’s Corpus Christi Carol (as brilliantly covered by Jeff Buckley) to Milton Mermikides’s Barack Obama Megamix, is at the centre of that. But an array of technical innovations – web streaming, interactivity, Twitter, SMS and email integration – have made it happen.

Now, it’s time to take everything we’re learning on the road. That’s Microconcerts in a nutshell: bringing short, sweet concerts to never-before-seen venues worldwide. Concerts you can enjoy in your coffee break. They’re our newest product, and the most important yet. We think there’s a revolution waiting to happen, and it’s about to begin. Live. From…

TWITTER.

Yes, in exactly 36 hours we will be kicking off, streaming our very first microconcert from San Francisco. The venue? Twitter HQ.

This isn’t just a chance to see inside the mythical Twitter nerve centre; there’s going to be some great music, both new and old. You might like to have a look at the programme. There’ll be something for everyone, we promise.

As you can tell, we’re incredibly excited about this, and we’ll be live-blogging in the run-up to it, both here and on our streaming page.

We’ll see you in a day or so.

Stand by.

Absolutely *not* what I was expecting yet, curiously, this was precisely what I suppose I should have expected.

Delighted that just this evening I wrote “Coffeeloop is the tidal wave to blow away the ripples” and there you are writing about your seaweed… and sea urchins and… Music Television.

I forget what Music Television had to do with that early version. Here is the final one.

* * *

I’m Ben, and to the left I can be seen some years ago expressing my enthusiasm for the fauna of shallow seas.

I was always drawn to the intertidal zone. Throughout my childhood I wasted no opportunity to trawl underwater crevices, draw aside veils of seaweed and capture unwitting creatures for pleasure. For there in the rock pools and beneath the seaweed lie strange animals that are swept in from the alien sea world, sit awhile, and are swept out again. Briefly, in this zone, they can be isolated, tamed, and safely played with by human infants.

It is a child’s paradise, for a certain sort of child. Safe, but psychologically powerful. The allure, of course, the thrill, is the possibility of coming across something strange or exotic, many-legged, or betentacled. Momentarily we are brought out of our world and into contact with something else; something beyond our grasp but which, here, can be gingerly touched; something huge, and exciting.

* * *

Coffeeloop is something huge and exciting.

In Spring of 2008, I was delighted to join Peter and Milton for our first joint project, SPEM. In music tech terms, this event was exceptional. Preparation for the multi-tracking epic at the programme’s core had stretched to many months. Some frankly breathtaking speaker technology was employed, courtesy of our friends at Fujitsu Ten. I was brought on board relatively late in the day, tasked mainly with broadcasting the concert over the net.

For each of us, and this came I think as a genuine surprise to all, this event became an absolute wellspring of inspiration. Much discussion and coffee was had in the days following the concert, and our perspectives mingled in the slanted Edinburgh sunlight. SPEM, a strangely successful blend of musical coherence and technical sorcery, began to look like just the first stage of something, a set of possibilities, that might lead far into the distance.

Of all this, Coffeeloop is the natural progression. SPEM was merely one event, and in some ways relatively conservative. It was our intertidal zone. But, for us, in some important way it blew the doors off the concept of the musical experience. It gave form to the ideas – for publicity, format, venue, presentation and more – that will fuel Coffeeloop. It is in fact the reason I am involved. To virtually any other music outfit, that one third of the founding team might be programmers would be unthinkable. For Coffeeloop, it could not be otherwise.

Technology is right there at the heart of Coffeeloop alongside music. Our vision is as much about the ways music is brought to people as about music itself, because each is nothing without the other. Technology has brought previously unimaginable possibilities to enterprises of all kinds; it’s time to start weaving that magic into the fabric of classical music.

That is Coffeeloop’s grand aim in a nutshell. I’m here to make the technology go. We have some exciting things planned. To establishmentarians, some of it may seem strange, heretical; even downright outrageous. We say there’s a tide of change coming, and it’s time to hire a boat.

Coffeeloop – we’ve been playing along the shoreline.

Let’s get wet.

It’s a redesign from the ground up, and in-keeping with our thoughts about interactivity we’ve made the whole thing into one big blog. Obviously we’ll be putting our events here — even hosting some from this very site — but as time goes on we want to use it more and more to interact, with critics and performers, and with you. We like you.

And as far as announcements go, we have something crazy exciting up our sleeves. Check back on Tuesday for the details, and make sure you’re sitting comfortably.

That’s all for now, but in the meantime, we’d like to leave you thinking about Apple’s 1997 campaign, “Think Different“.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Boom.